Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks

Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks, by Geoffrey O’Brien (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 144 pp., $16.95).

This is a curious hybrid of a book. The first half is an informative, profusely illustrated monograph on the early years of the mass-market paperback; the second half is a rather woolly-minded critical survey of the mystery genre in the Forties and Fifties. (Sample sentence: “In the world of Spillane’s anarchic private eye, everything reduces to a Manichaean struggle between the essentially solitary Mike Hammer and a shadowy inexorable network of moral monsters whom it is his mission to destroy.”) Mr. O’Brien is no George Orwell, and so Hardboiled America becomes something of a bore from page 66 on; but. up to that point, it is a most entertaining evocation of the days when an invigorating dose of Raymond Chandler, complete with embarrassingly garish cover, could be purchased for a quarter. The many illustrations, among them 16 pages of fullcolor plates, are sure to stimulate pleasant memories in older readers. Best of all is the cover of Signet 937, Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (“Bohemian Life in a Wicked City!”), which sports an apple-cheeked lady of dubious honor posing languidly on a couch, cigarette holder in hand. It may not have been quite what Herr Issyvoo had in mind, but she sure looks like Sally Bowles to me.