THE dust cover of this book features a bald, scowling, grimlipped villain blazing away with his gun while clapping his hand over the mouth of a frightenedlooking woman. Her eyes are wide with terror and she's wearing a bright yellow, lowcut dress, which reveals an ample bosom, also heaving in terror.

Nowadays, crime writers have to know their weaponry.

So he (or she) would know that anyone who fires a large automatic pistol so close to their face risks having an eye struck out or being knocked unconscious by the recoil. At the very least the shooter would have his arm broken if he fired such a heavy weapon in such a casual way.

So, in a way, the dust cover of this book is a picture of innocence. It belongs to the days when the consumers of crime fiction were more ingenuous than they are now. Historians of pulp fiction like to talk up as "hardboiled" Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and all the other heroes of the 1930s, '40s and '50s but they seem almost dewy-eyed compared with the gore-steeped, morally ambiguous men and women created by today's novelists.

And this collection of short stories, edited by Otto Penzler, is a reminder of just how innocent and escapist these tales were.

There are 21 in total, all by men, all set in the US and mostly gleaned from the pages of the now defunct Black Mask Magazine. Some of the writers are well known (Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, Leslie Charteris, Raymond Chandler, James M Cain), while others will be familiar only to aficionados (Cornell Woolrich, Frank Gruber, Frederick C Davis, Raoul Whitfield).

Penzler's collection purports to be about the villains of the genre, not the heroes, and in his introduction he makes an interesting point. "Virtually all the thieves who became successful series characters in the pulps were Robin Hood-type crooks. They did not commit violent acts, and they stole from the rich. Not just any rich person, mind you, but always someone who had come by his fortune illicitly." Which, he says, went down well in the Great Depression, when hardpressed folk liked to blame "Wall Street brokers, bankers, big businessmen and factory owners for their plight".

Penzler has dug up one or two intriguing examples. Richard B Sale's anti-hero Cobra, a detective who disposes of evildoers with darts loaded with snake venom. Moon Man, created by Frederick C Davis, is a police detective by day and a space-helmeted burglar by night.

His criminal proceeds go to the poor. And one story features that most respectable of semi-crooks, The Saint. More than one of these latter-day Robin Hoods have a distinct Deacon Brodie feel about them. I suspect the influence of Stevenson.

Most of the story titles are pretty good too: 'The Dilemma Of The Dead Lady', 'The House Of Kaa', 'The Sad Serbian', 'You'll Always Remember Me', 'Pigeon Blood', 'About Kid Deth', 'You'll Die Laughing'. Under the title 'The Crimes Of Richmond City', the writer Frederick Nebel gets a series all of his own: Raw Law, Dog Eat Dog, The Law Laughs Last, Law Without Law, Graft.

It's all great fun, even if the quality of the writing varies hugely. A few of the stories are so badly written they almost parody the genre: "Maxie Gorgan rose steadily to his feet. His voice was icy and sinister. His hand stole stealthily inside of his coat." On the other hand, I'd forgotten just how good Raymond Chandler was. His crisp dialogue is a joy to read and he can set up a character or a dodgy situation in about five words.

And I was mightily impressed by the output of some of the pulpfiction hacks. Penzler cites the example of Erle Stanley Gardner who contrived to churn out well over a million words a year, "the equivalent of one 10,000-word novella every three days for 365 days. And he had a day job as a lawyer." Then there's Frank Gruber who managed three or four novels a year, a clutch of superior screenplays (one a vehicle for Frank Sinatra) not to mention a couple of dozen western novels.

But then when you were being paid at the rate of a cent a word, or a dollar for every 100 words, maybe such productivity was necessary. The workrate may explain why so many of the pulp writers took the big sleep at an early age. Norbert Davis, who'd abandoned his legal studies to write crime fiction, killed himself with carbon monoxide at 40.

Most of the pulp-fiction hacks seem to have made a decent enough living doing what they enjoyed . . . and you cannot ask more from life than that. They also left us a vigorous, eminently readable literary hoard from which Otto Penzler has plucked some choice items. One way or another, he has put together a rattling good read.