In general, I enjoyed the stories in this anthology, some of
which I
knew - Ellroy's excellent and melancholic "Torch Number",
which also
appears in his collection Hollywood Nocturnes", Chandler's
"The Man Who
Liked Dogs", Hammett's "Arson Plus", and Ross Macdonald's
masterly "The
Singing Pigeon". Among the remaining stories, some are simply
extracts
from novels (Cain's "Serenade" and Leonard's "Freaky Deaky")
and
shouldn't have been included; others were unknown to me,
among which
Robert Leslie Bellem's "Dead Man's Head" and MacKinlay
Kantor's "The
Hunting of Hemingway" are terrific, Woolrich's "Dead on Her
Feet " is
very good, and "Nice Work" by Peter Cheyney is absolutely
indigestible,
even as a parody; by contrast, "Get a Load of This" by James
Hadley
Chase is only very bad. There are good but not remarkable
stories by
Goodis, Burnett, Spillane, Samuel Fuller (yes, the same
S.F.), Daly,
Thompson, King, Tarantino (yes, the same Q.T.), and Ed
McBain.
While the collection is enjoyable, the editor apparently
found it
necessary to change American spelling into British, and even
changed
terms; for examplo, gas becomes "petrol" in Ed McBain's
"Accident
Report". This type of surgery was applied throughout the
book, and is
quite annoying.
Do British publishers consider it their obligation to
"correct" American
spelling? To my knowledge, their American counterparts do not
change the
spelling of works by British authors. From the credits, I
gather that
this is a reprint of some sort, although it is by no means
clear when or
where the collection was first published.
All in all, a reasonably good collection that could have been
better.
Regards,
Mario Taboada
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