The
Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories, edited
and introduced by Otto Penzler and Keith Alan Deutsch (Vintage Crime/Black
Lizard, 2010)
Lee Horsley, Lancaster University
“This panoramic
collection of stories and novels from Black Mask Magazine (1920
to 1951) is the most comprehensive presentation of the
hard-boiled tradition of writing ever published from this great magazine. I
believe this is a significant publishing event because Black Mask Magazine introduced the hard-boiled detective, and a new style of narration, to American
literature.” (Keith Deutsch, “Introduction” to The Big Book of Black Mask Stories)
No publication was as crucial in
encouraging and marketing the hard-boiled crime story as Black Mask. Pulp magazines had been gaining in popularity since the
1880s, but the market expanded greatly from the turn of the century, and by
their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s they were displayed in their hundreds on
newsstands and in drugstore racks. In comparison to the more sophisticated
‘slicks’, the pulp magazines opened the way for a freer approach to popular
literary forms and to engagement with contemporary urban life. Pulp magazines
offered romance, fantasy and escapism, but also, especially in the pulps
devoted to crime fiction, they registered the anxieties of the time. Being rapidly and cheaply produced,
they allowed space for innovatory ways of writing, most importantly for the colloquial,
racy hard-boiled style. The magazine gave readers tough, realistic action, with
material ranging from tales of adventure and Westerns to detective series and early
noir crime stories. Keith Deutsch writes in his “Introduction”,
“In many ways, Black Mask Magazine took the nineteenth century American Western tale of outlaws and vigilante
justice from its home on the range in dime novels, and transplanted that mythic
tale to the crooked streets of America’s emerging twentieth century cities. It
introduced a new landscape for both American adventures of justice, and also a
new kind of narration told with the vernacular language of the streets, and
featuring new urban villains, and urban (if not always urbane) heroes for the
mystery story.”
As the circulation of Black Mask grew, other pulp crime magazines (for example, Action Detective, Dime Detective, Detective
Fiction Weekly, Black Aces) entered the market. There were over fifty other detective magazines by the late
30s, but Black Mask retained its
supremacy, with a circulation of 130,000 by 1930. As Deutsch’s Introduction
says, “More than any other pulp fiction magazine, Black Mask was recognized
for the quality, and for the cultural significance of its writing. With the
growing literary reputations of Hammett and Chandler, now generally accepted as
major American writers of the twentieth century, Black Mask’s cultural
significance continues to grow.”
In addition to his general Introduction,
Deutsch provides an account of his own involvement with Black Mask: “Over the years since I
first edited and produced the last newsstand issue of Black Mask Magazine in 1974, I have been asked many times to tell how I acquired
the rights to this famous magazine. Because the history of Black Mask is
intimately entangled in the history of fiction magazines in America, I thought
I would tell my own personal history of Black Mask against an idiosyncratic
history of American magazine publishing.”
It's a fascinating story!
The Black Lizard collection of stories has
been undertaken in collaboration with Otto Penzler, who has edited over seventy
anthologies of crime fiction, including The
Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2007), Pulp
Fiction collections covering The Crimefighters, The Villains and The Dames (all from Quercus
Publishing, 2007-08), and The Best American Noir of the
Century (Houghton Mifflin, 2010) – an excellent collection, the whole of
which was reviewed in a November 2010 series of guest reviews on the Spinetingler site. Penzler says in interview (Tangent
Online Interview), “With the help of Keith Deutsch and the librarians at UCLA
(which has a great Black Mask collection) I got access to hundreds of
stories and selected those that I thought were the best and most representative
of the authors' works, of the magazine, and indeed of the whole pulp era. Very
few of the stories are from the 1940s, when the quality level wasn't as high as
in the 1920s and 1930s. Most of the stories have never before been reprinted.
In addition to the famous authors you note, there are several stories by
authors that only die-hard pulp fans will know, but many of their stories are at
least as good as those by the biggest names.”
The
Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories is 1,136
pages long, and contains over fifty stories, including the whole of the original Black Mask version of Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, which was serialised
from September 1929 to January 1930 and to which some 2,000 revisions were made
for the hardback version published by Knopf. It also includes Chandler’s “Try the Girl,” his last story
for Black Mask (January 1937) and one
of three stories cannibalized to form the basis of Farewell, My Lovely; and six connected Jo Gar stories by Raoul
Whitfield writing as Ramon Dacolta - Rainbow
Diamonds, never before published in book form. The collection reprints stories by Erle Stanley
Gardner, John D. MacDonald, Frederic Brown, George Harmon Coxe, Frederick Nebel,
Brett Halliday, Day Keene, Steve Fisher, Horace McCoy, Bruno Fischer, Carroll
John Daly, Cornell Woolrich and over thirty more writers. Each is concisely
introduced, with an overview of their lives and their work for the pulps, their
series characters, novel writing, film and TV scripts.
The hard-boiled protagonist is
represented here in many of his varied incarnations. The collection includes “Knights of the Open Palm” (June
1923), which first presented the most popular detective hero of the 1920s,
Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams – the first hard-boiled series
detective, whose all-conquering two-fisted action carried him through over
fifty Black Mask stories and eight
novels between 1923 and 1934: “Oh, there ain’t no doubt that both the cops and
the crooks take me for a gun, but I ain’t – not rightly speaking. I do a
little honest shooting once in awhile – just in the way of business. But
my conscience is clear; I never bumped off a guy what didn’t need it.” A quarter of a century later, an
altogether more literate but equally tough hard-boiled hero, in John D.
MacDonald’s “Murder in One Syllable” (May 1949), has been on the receiving end
of violence: “In childhood there had been a sentence, a trick sentence, to
punctuate. That that is is that that is not is not that that is. ‘That that is,
is.’ The sodden handkerchief, growing crusty furthest from the wound, was an
actuality. It was wedged under his belt…Nor could the existence of a small bit
of lead be denied…”
The stories also, of course, give a lot of
space to the women who helped to define both hard-boiled and noir narratives
– temptresses, tough women, manipulative women. And, of course, dead women, as in two strong stories written
by a couple of less well-known but very prolific pulp writers, Talmadge Powell
and Hank Searls. The opening sentences of Searls’ “Drop Dead Twice” (March
1950) are: “It was a very nice job – definitely professional. And final. The blonds lay across the hotel bed lengthwise, a gleam of
golden flesh showing above her stocking, but otherwise perfectly presentable…
She had been mugged – strangled – throttled. Whatever you want to call it, the
killer had quite thoroughly known his business.” Powell’s “Her Dagger Before Me” (July 1949) ends with, “Somehow
I got out of the room. I walked down the corridor outside, not seeing its
walls, not feeling its floor under my feet. Only remembering. That longing that
was almost pain. That terrible pitiful hunger. Even death hadn’t erased it from
her face, and I knew at last why Allene Buford had never been quite beautiful…” And, while I’m thinking of
examples of female death, there are the memorable first paragraphs of a much
better-known writer, Steve Fisher, whose classic novel I Wake Up Screaming (1940) was the basis for one of the earliest films
noirs. “Wait for Me” (May 1938) opens by introducing us to the beautiful Anna: “Anna leaned down and
kissed the bleeding girl, kissed her cooling cheeks, and said softly, ‘We will
have no more sailors together, eh, Olga?’ She smiled faintly, and shrugged, for
Olga was gone, like yesterday’s breath. Gone, Anna thought, quite fortunately and painlessly…But Anna, living,
must go on.”
At first looked down on as “publishing’s
poor, ill-bred stepchild”, the pulps, as Lee Server says in Danger Is My Business, “had to make do
with imagination and the power of the written word. This, as it happened, was their glory.” The hard-boiled style, which soon
crossed over into more mainstream fiction, became one of the most recognizable
of the twentieth century. The
writers who exemplified it most powerfully became some of the most widely read
authors of the time. But most of
the crime stories of those decades are now impossible to find, and the
reputations of the great majority of pulp writers are only revived when someone
puts together an anthology of their work. This wonderfully wide-ranging selection of pulp stories publishes some
of the most famous pulp writing of the period alongside dozens of other tough,
vital, colloquial, fast-paced stories, and in doing so demonstrates
unequivocally that Black Mask was, as
Penzler says in interview, “the greatest of all the pulp magazines for crime
fiction.”
Copyright © 2011 by Lee Horsley