{"id":1889,"date":"2011-12-31T00:46:50","date_gmt":"2011-12-31T00:46:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/wordpress\/?page_id=1889"},"modified":"2013-09-12T11:42:12","modified_gmt":"2013-09-12T11:42:12","slug":"black-mask","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=1889","title":{"rendered":"Black Mask"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories<\/em>, edited and introduced by Otto Penzler and Keith Alan Deutsch (Vintage Crime\/Black Lizard, 2010)<\/span><\/h3>\n

Lee Horsley, Lancaster University<\/p>\n

This panoramic collection of stories and novels from\u00a0Black Mask Magazine\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>(1920 to 1951)<\/em><\/strong>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\u00a0Black Mask Magazine<\/em>\u00a0introduced the hard-boiled detective, and a new style of narration, to American literature. (Keith Deutsch, \u201cIntroduction\u201d to\u00a0The Big Book of Black Mask Stories<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\"Black<\/a>No publication was as crucial in encouraging and marketing the hard-boiled crime story as\u00a0Black Mask<\/em>. 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 \u2018slicks\u2019, 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.\u00a0\u00a0Being 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 \u201cIntroduction\u201d,<\/p>\n

\u201cIn many ways,\u00a0Black Mask Magazine<\/em>\u00a0took 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As the circulation of\u00a0Black Mask\u00a0<\/em>grew, other pulp crime magazines (for example,\u00a0Action Detective, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, Black Aces<\/em>) entered the market.\u00a0\u00a0There were over fifty other detective magazines by the late 30s, but\u00a0Black Mask<\/em>\u00a0retained its supremacy, with a circulation of 130,000 by 1930. As Deutsch\u2019s Introduction says, \u201cMore than any other pulp fiction magazine,\u00a0Black Mask<\/em>\u00a0was 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,\u00a0Black Mask<\/em>\u2019s cultural significance continues to grow.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to his general Introduction, Deutsch provides an account of his own involvement with\u00a0Black Mask<\/em>: \u201cOver the years since I first edited and produced the last newsstand issue of\u00a0<\/strong>Black\u00a0<\/strong>Mask<\/em>\u00a0Magazine<\/em>in 1974, I have been asked many times to tell how I acquired the rights to this famous magazine. Because the history of\u00a0Black Mask<\/em>\u00a0is intimately entangled in the history of fiction magazines in America, I thought I would tell my own personal history of\u00a0Black Mask<\/em>\u00a0against an idiosyncratic history of American magazine publishing.\u201d\u00a0It’s a fascinating story!<\/p>\n

The Black Lizard collection of stories has been undertaken in collaboration with Otto Penzler, who has edited over seventy anthologies of crime fiction, including\u00a0The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps<\/em>\u00a0(Vintage Crime\/Black Lizard, 2007),\u00a0Pulp Fiction\u00a0collections covering\u00a0The Crimefighters,\u00a0The Villains\u00a0and\u00a0The Dames\u00a0(all from Quercus Publishing, 2007-08), and\u00a0The Best American Noir of the Century\u00a0(Houghton Mifflin, 2010) \u2013 an excellent collection, the whole of which was reviewed in\u00a0a November 2010 series of guest reviews on the Spinetingler site<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0Penzler says in interview (Tangent Online Interview<\/a>), \u201cWith the help of Keith Deutsch and the librarians at UCLA (which has a great\u00a0Black Mask<\/em>\u00a0collection) 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\u00a0at least\u00a0<\/em>as good as those by the biggest names.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/strong>\"Black<\/a>The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories<\/em>\u00a0is 1,136 pages long, and contains over fifty stories, including the whole of the original\u00a0Black Mask<\/em>\u00a0version of Hammett\u2019s\u00a0Maltese Falcon<\/em>, 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.\u00a0\u00a0It also includes Chandler\u2019s \u201cTry the Girl,\u201d his last story for\u00a0Black Mask<\/em>(January 1937) and one of three stories cannibalized to form the basis ofFarewell, My Lovely<\/em>; and six connected Jo Gar stories by Raoul Whitfield writing as Ramon Dacolta –\u00a0Rainbow Diamonds<\/em>, never before published in book form.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n

The hard-boiled protagonist is represented here in many of his varied incarnations.\u00a0\u00a0The collection includes \u201cKnights of the Open Palm\u201d (June 1923), which first presented the most popular detective hero of the 1920s, Carroll John Daly\u2019s Race Williams \u2013 the first hard-boiled series detective, whose all-conquering two-fisted action carried him through over fifty\u00a0Black Mask<\/em>\u00a0stories and eight novels between 1923 and 1934: \u201cOh, there ain\u2019t no doubt that both the cops and the crooks take me for a gun, but I ain\u2019t \u2013 not rightly speaking. I do a little honest shooting once in awhile \u2013 just in the way of business. But my conscience is clear; I never bumped off a guy what didn\u2019t need it.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0A quarter of a century later, an altogether more literate but equally tough hard-boiled hero, in John D. MacDonald\u2019s \u201cMurder in One Syllable\u201d (May 1949), has been on the receiving end of violence: \u201cIn childhood there had been a sentence, a trick sentence, to punctuate. That that is is that that is not is not that that is. \u2018That that is, is.\u2019 The sodden handkerchief, growing crusty furthest from the wound, was an actuality. It was wedged under his belt\u2026Nor could the existence of a small bit of lead be denied\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The stories also, of course, give a lot of space to the women who helped to define both hard-boiled and noir narratives \u2013 temptresses, tough women, manipulative women.\u00a0\u00a0And, 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\u2019 \u201cDrop Dead Twice\u201d (March 1950) are: \u201cIt was a very nice job \u2013 definitely professional.\u00a0\u00a0And final.\u00a0\u00a0The blonds lay across the hotel bed lengthwise, a gleam of golden flesh showing above her stocking, but otherwise perfectly presentable\u2026 She had been mugged \u2013 strangled \u2013 throttled.\u00a0\u00a0Whatever you want to call it, the killer had quite thoroughly known his business.\u201d\u00a0Powell\u2019s \u201cHer Dagger Before Me\u201d (July 1949) ends with, \u201cSomehow 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\u2019t erased it from her face, and I knew at last why Allene Buford had never been quite beautiful\u2026\u201d And, while I\u2019m thinking of examples of female death, there are the memorable first paragraphs of a much better-known writer, Steve Fisher, whose classic novel\u00a0I Wake Up Screaming<\/em>\u00a0(1940) was the basis for one of the earliest films noirs.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cWait for Me\u201d (May 1938) opens by introducing us to the beautiful Anna: \u201cAnna leaned down and kissed the bleeding girl, kissed her cooling cheeks, and said softly, \u2018We will have no more sailors together, eh, Olga?\u2019 She smiled faintly, and shrugged, for Olga was gone, like yesterday\u2019s breath.\u00a0\u00a0Gone, Anna thought, quite fortunately and painlessly\u2026But Anna, living, must go on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Arson<\/a>At first looked down on as \u201cpublishing\u2019s poor, ill-bred stepchild\u201d, the pulps, as Lee Server says in\u00a0Danger Is My Business<\/em>, \u201chad to make do with imagination and the power of the written word.\u00a0\u00a0This, as it happened, was their glory.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0The hard-boiled style, which soon crossed over into more mainstream fiction, became one of the most recognizable of the twentieth century.\u00a0\u00a0The writers who exemplified it most powerfully became some of the most widely read authors of the time.\u00a0But 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.\u00a0\u00a0This 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\u00a0Black Mask<\/em>\u00a0was, as Penzler says in interview, \u201cthe greatest of all the pulp magazines for crime fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

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AUTUMN 2013: \u00a0NEW FROM BLACK MASK MAGAZINE<\/strong><\/span> – A\u00a0new book line of fiction from\u00a0Black Mask Magazine<\/i>, THE BLACK MASK LIBRARY, is emerging this Autumn.\u00a0Forthcoming publications include important new collections of the work of Theodore A Tinsley and Paul Cain: \u00a0Theodore A. Tinsley,\u00a0Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter (Black Mask)<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>Introduction by\u00a0Boris Dralyuk,\u00a0MysteriousPress.com\/Open Road, 29 October 2013 –\u00a0available on Amazon<\/a>; \u00a0and\u00a0Paul Cain: The Complete Stories (Black Mask)<\/em><\/em>, Introduction by\u00a0Boris Dralyuk, MysteriousPress.com\/Open Road, 17 December 2013 –\u00a0available on Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Lee Horsley<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories, edited and introduced by Otto Penzler and Keith Alan Deutsch (Vintage<\/p>\n

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