Best of Manhunt 2

"Manhunt holds a unique niche among magazines specializing in crime, mystery, and detective fiction. In fact, it ranks among the three or four most important and influential in its genre. The first issue was dated January 1953, the last April/May 1967, a 14-year run roughly parallel to that of The Saint, not an especially long life for a digest-sized magazine that claimed to be the world's most popular in its category... From its first issue, Manhunt declared itself different. For one thing, all the stories were claimed to be new and remained that way until near the end. And many of the early contributors were familiar names from hardcover publishing, including William Irish (a.k.a. Cornell Woolrich), Kenneth Millar (as himself and as John Ross Macdonald), Eleazar Lipsky, Bruno Fischer, Craig Rice, Harold Q. Masur, Leslie Charteris, William Lindsay Gresham, Henry Kane, and David Goodis... The essence of Manhunt was not the private eye story, though it published plenty of them. What set it apart was what is now called noir fiction, a term often thrown around very loosely but in its purest form concerning a flawed but not necessarily unsympathetic protagonist who will not have a happy outcome." --