This is elite crime fiction, the kind that's more likely to be found in the Literature section than the Ghettoes of Mystery and Crime. It also includes the masters who made serious lit from pulp fiction, in the golden age of short story anthologies like 'Black Mask'. As good as these motherfuckers were, I think very few of them hoped or guessed that these stories would be reprinted dozens of times, translated into dozens of languages, collected in deluxe hardbound editions, adapted into revered cinematic classics, or taught in college classrooms several decades later.

I doubt humility had anything to do with this presumed lack of foresight... just the same stone-faced, pragmatic realism that permeates their prose. A hardened, pessimistic world-view based on history... and an understanding of humanity stripped of romantic delusions. From where they were writing in the 30's and 40's, it would've been a fool's gamble to bank on humanity surviving the 20th Century. This is the hard shit...

Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, and James M. Cain are the four cornerstones of an American literary establishment, one built on bullets, broads, booze and bloodshed. Even the most revered contemporary writers step lightly in their hair-trigger prose proximity, paying homage with their own schemes and heists gone wrong. There are others, of course, like Richard Stark, pillars of bone and drop-guns and beaver-saps, bearing the dead-weight of mediocre hacks; but the original four-corner foundation is set.

Richard Price and James Ellroy are their modern successors, hard-boiled craftsman of criminal conspiracies with prose that is more scalpel than ink. And then there's the inimitable criminal undertakings of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Jonathan Lethem and Thomas Pynchon, masters of the English language with no discernible preference when it comes to place or period, who have built their own wings in this darkest and ugliest museum dedicated to the worst in humanity: the bad things we do, for the best and worst of reasons, and the small, sad, desperate ways in which we try to redeem ourselves.