A thousand page's worth of hard-boiled detectives and garish dames with names like Ruby Rose ("She was mean. She was bad medicine") from cheap popular magazines of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s are gathered in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (Vintage), edited by Otto Penzler. Prolific masters (Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler) and inspired hacks gave us toughs with bulletproof consciences in a refreshingly angst-free world.