Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine

I'm told by those in the know that next to BLACK MASK the best of the mystery and crime pulps was DIME DETECTIVE.  For years I've had on my shelves a collection of stories from that magazine.  It's HARD-BOILED DETECTIVES, edited by Stefan R. Dziemanianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg.

The collection doesn't have a theme, but it has a plan.  The editors reprint one story from each year of the magazine's existence, from 1931 to 1953.  There are plenty of big names present, including some (C. M. Kornbluth, William Tenn, and Murray Leinster) likely to be more familiar to SF fans than to mystery readers.

I should have looked into this collection long ago, but it got stuck away on a shelf and covered with other books, and I more or less forgot about it.  I came across it yesterday while I was looking for something else.  I read a couple of stories in it last night, "The Crime Machine" by Carroll John Daly and "Ding Dong Belle" by Hugh B. Cave. 

I was interested in reading something by Cave because I'd seen James Reasoner's review of the new Cave bio (check it out at http://jamesreasoner.blogspot.com/) and because I hadn't read any of Cave's crime fiction.  This story features Peter Kane, a alcoholic p.i. who used to be a cop but who left the force because he couldn't control his drinking.  He's in love with a woman who also loves him but who refused to marry a drunk.  So she married his best friend, Captain of Detectives Moe Finch.  Moe's a good guy, but a little slow.  When he's faced with a tough case, his wife always calls in her old flame to solve it.  This time the case involves a woman who's shot dead while playing ping pong in a bathing suit.

"The Crime Machine," which I'd read before, is the first in Daly's series about Vee Brown, who's just as tough and ruthless as Race Williams, but not as burly.  He writes popular songs in his spare time.  Not long ago, Walter Satterthwait and I had an idea for a pulp detective who hums show tunes while he kicks the crap out of the malefactors.  I guess we were thinking of someone like Vee Brown, so we're about 70 years too late.