In the first of a series, three famed private-eye authors, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner, team up as the Black Mask Boys to solve a 1930s Hollywood murder, with Hammett acting as the story's narrator. Dashiell Hammett was a real-life detective as well as the author of several classic detective novels, including The Maltese Falcon . Now he's also a fictional character, the narrator of this series debut that also features two of Hammett's fellow contributors to Black Mask magazine, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler. The real author, William Nolan, is a scholar of Black Mask-era fiction and the author of Hammett: Life at the Edge (1987). Set in Hollywood shortly before the appearance of the Falcon movie, the story finds Hammett asked to deliver a jewel-encrusted ruby to a local mobster. A shootout occurs, and the bad guy gets the icon and the girl for which it was to serve as ransom. Hammett, Gardner, and Chandler work to recover both the jewel and the girl. Nolan mixes as many biographical facts into the narrative as possible, serving up a healthy portion of literary history along with the action. There's gunplay, humor, and just enough realism to humanize Hammett and his cronies. The premise may ultimately wear thin, but for now, it's perfectly good fun for the hard-boiled crowd. Wes Lukowsky