The Black Mask Murders: A Novel Featuring the Black Mask Boys, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner - Hardcover

Nolan, William F.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312109423 ISBN 13: 9780312109424

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 1994

Synopsis

Three famed private-eye authors team up as the Black Mask Boys to solve a 1930s Hollywood murder

About this title

From Booklist:

Dashiell Hammett was a real-life detective as well as the author of several classic detective novels, including The Maltese Falcon. Now he's also a fictional character, the narrator of this series debut that also features two of Hammett's fellow contributors to Black Mask magazine, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler. The real author, William Nolan, is a scholar of Black Mask-era fiction and the author of Hammett: Life at the Edge (1987). Set in Hollywood shortly before the appearance of the Falcon movie, the story finds Hammett asked to deliver a jewel-encrusted ruby to a local mobster. A shootout occurs, and the bad guy gets the icon and the girl for which it was to serve as ransom. Hammett, Gardner, and Chandler work to recover both the jewel and the girl. Nolan mixes as many biographical facts into the narrative as possible, serving up a healthy portion of literary history along with the action. There's gunplay, humor, and just enough realism to humanize Hammett and his cronies. The premise may ultimately wear thin, but for now, it's perfectly good fun for the hard-boiled crowd. Wes Lukowsky

From Publishers Weekly:

Veteran author Nolan ( Logan's Run ) launches a series to be narrated by those crime writers he calls "The Black Mask Boys"--Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Erle Stanley Gardner. Hammett leads off this 1935 plot, jam-packed with movie stars and moguls, gangsters, blackmailers, nasty pre-Miranda cops and even a gem-encrusted human skull dating from the Crusades. Readers will be reminded less of The Maltese Falcon than of Hammett's early pulp fiction. This tale, featuring some incredibly daring sleuthing by all three writers-made-characters, moves along like a crumpled cocktail napkin caught up in the windstorm and seems to have about the same weight in the end. Cameo appearances include those by Scott Fitzgerald and Heinie Faust, who wrote as Max Brand (and other names). Nolan dredges up some pretty portentous prose in this plumbing of the past (an encounter with Fitzgerald leaves Dash ruminating: "All that talent--and all that booze. A bad combination"). Of interest as a period piece and for its insider allusions, this is no hard-boiled tale.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0312109423
• ISBN 13: 9780312109424
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 214