Veronica Talks Black Mask Magazine
Manage episode 511098484 series 3677863
Black Mask debuted in April 1920, launched by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan to help subsidize their higher-brow monthly The Smart Set.
In its earliest years it ran a grab-bag of adventure, romance, and occult yarns, but the magazine’s identity snapped into focus when Joseph T. “Cap” Shaw took over as editor in 1926.
Shaw cultivated a spare, kinetic prose style and a stable of writers—Dashiell Hammett, Earl Stanley Gardner, Raoul Whitfield, Frederick Nebbel—that forged the hard-boiled idiom and the modern private-eye template.
Shaw's 1926–1936 tenure is widely seen as the magazine’s golden age.
After Shaw’s resignation in 1936, Fanny Ellsworth steered the magazine toward more subjective, psychologically driven crime fiction and brought in voices like Cornell Woolrich and Steve Fisher.
Popular Publications acquired Black Mask in 1940, installing Kenneth S. White as editor; the pulp finally ceased publication in 1951, with the brand and backlist later absorbed by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and periodically revived in anthologies and reissues.
Black Mask’s significance is hard to overstate: it incubated serials later issued as landmark novels (from Red Harvest to The Maltese Falcon), set the tone for American noir on page and screen, and professionalized a fast, streetwise realism that still shapes crime writing today.
Here's a somewhat subjective list of the top 5 black mask stories!
Number 5. “Finger Man” — Raymond Chandler, October 1934.
This is vintage early Chandler—it has FIRST-PERSON BITE, crooked politics, and the moral weather that soon becomes Philip Marlowe’s world.
4. “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” — Raymond Chandler, December 1933.
Chandler’s print debut; the template for his wise, weary voice and the Hollywood-corruption vein he’d mine for decades.
3. “Knights of the Open Palm” — Carroll John Daly, June 1923.
First Race Williams story; establishes the shoot-first hard-boiled private eye and pits him against the Klan—hugely influential.
At number 2 is “Red Harvest” (Part 1: “The Cleansing of Poisonville”) — Dashiell Hammett, November 1927.
The Continental Op’s gang-war clean-up; a proto-noir masterpiece of institutional rot and ruthless tactics.
You can listen to our pilot episode for our Continental Op SERIES right here on the Pulp Preservation Project podcast.
And the number one story HAS TO BE Sam Spade’s debut, “The Maltese Falcon” (Part 1) — Dashiell Hammett, September 1929.
This serial is TRULY "the stuff that dreams are made of."
It is the story that crystalized hard-boiled detection and became one of crime fiction’s canonical novels, not to mention an iconic movie.
Hammett's style continues to influence contemporary crime novelists. Writers like James Ellroy and Sara Paretsky are heirs to the hardboiled tradition that Hammett pioneered.
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