Fiction of the era

[Finarvyn]

One of my favorite settings for Gangbusters is the pulp detective, and one of the best of these was Philip Marlowe as written by Raymond Chandler. Even though they are more 30's and 40's instead of 20's, one thing that makes them special is that they were written more "back in the day," with copyright within a few years of the time (as opposed to someone today writing 80 years after the fact).

Here is a list of the Chandler books, for anyone interested.

• Trouble Is My Business (1934, 35, 36) - short essays
  
• The Big Sleep (1939)
  
• Farewell, My Lovely (1940)
  
• The High Window (1942)
  
• The Lady in the Lake (1943)
  
• The Little Sister (1949)
  
• The Simple Art of Murder (1950)
  
• The Long Goodbye (1953)
  
• Playback (1958)
  

Anyone else with fictional inspriations for the time period?

[coffee]

Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op (an Operative of the Continental Detective Agency). Hammett actually started writing these in the 20's. (This was before he wrote Sam Spade. Spade was good, too, of course, but the Op was there first.)

As well as a number of stories, the Continental Op starred in Hammett's first two novels

Red Harvest
The Dain Curse

[rick krebs]

One of the prized book's in my library was from my grandfather's collection, "The Greene Murder Case" (1928) by S. S. Van Dine and featured Detective Philo Vance. Later, two different movies were made from the book, "The Greene Murder Case", in 1929, starring William Powell and "Night of Mystery" in 1937.

gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0606351.txt