I’m going to begin with a disclaimer, because I wrote the “Foreword” for Beat to a Pulp: Round One edited by David Cranmer and Elaine Ash. It was David Cranmer’s idea to publish a short story online every week at Beat to a Pulp . The stories are in the pulp tradition, and they’ve proved to be so popular that they’ve led to the publication of this collection. Not all the stories in the book have appeared on the website.

The contents include a story by the late Paul S. Powers, whose 2007 memoir entitled Pulp Writer, I commend to your attention. It tells of his “twenty years in the American Grub Street,” and it’s an interesting and poignant tale, indeed. His “The Strange Death of Ambrose Bierce” was unpublished during his lifetime. James Reasoner has a haunting war story, “Heliotrope,” that you won’t soon forget, and Robert J. Randisi offers a story featuring his series PI Miles Jacoby. There are other excellent crime stories by writers both well-known and not-so-well-known, SF stories, and even a pirate story, “The Ghost Ship,” by Evan Lewis. Don’t pass up Beat to a Pulp: Round One.