Black Mask 8: The Sound of the Shot: And Other Crime Fiction from the Legendary Magazine

by Otto Penzler (Editor), Richard Ferrone (Narrator), David LeDoux (Narrator)

From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and John D. MacDonald got their start in Black Mask . The urban crime stories that appeared in Black Mask helped to shape American culture. Modern computer games, films, and television are rooted in the fiction popularized by “the seminal and venerated mystery pulp magazine” ( Booklist ).

Otto Penzler selected and wrote introductions to the best of the best, the darkest of these dark, vintage stories for the collection The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories . Now that collection is available for the first time on audio.

420 pages, Audio CD

First published June 5, 2012

About the author

Otto Penzler is an editor of mystery fiction in the United States, and proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, where he lives.

Otto Penzler founded The Mysteriour Press in 1975 and was the publisher of The Armchair Detective, the Edgar-winning quarterly journal devoted to the study of mystery and suspense fiction, for seventeen years.

Penzler has won two Edgar Awards, for The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection in 1977, and The Lineup in 2010. The Mystery Writers of America awarded him the prestigious Ellery Queen Award in 1994, and the Raven--the group's highest non-writing award--in 2003.

Reviews

[David Macpherson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like the others in this series, some are great, and there a few clunkers. This one only had one bad story, but it was a really bad story, about a guy who killed his wife and now his daughter is acting like the dead wife. But the other tales were great and then the last story was awesome, the writer died after only getting started so I never heard of him, Robert Reeves. His character and his vision of LA was terrific, and the thing is, he wrote it while fighting WWII.

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listened to this. Good Pulp fiction