The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

  A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL, SEPTEMBER 2010

  Foreword and compilation copyright © 2010 by Otto Penzler

  Introduction copyright © 2010 by Keith Alan Deutsch

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Owing to limitations of space, permissions to reprint previously published material appear following the text.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The Black Lizard big book of Black Mask stories / edited and with a foreword

  by Otto Penzler ; introduction by Keith Alan Deutsch.

  p. cm.— (A Vintage crime/Black Lizard original)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80825-7

  1. Noir fiction, American. 2. Detective and mystery stories, American. 3. American fiction—20th century. I. Penzler, Otto. II. Black mask; a magazine.

  PS648.N64B57 2010

  813.’087208—dc22

  2010024508

  v3.1

  For Michael Connelly

  Whose generous friendship

  can never be repaid

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword Otto Penzler

  Introduction Keith Alan Deutsch

  Come and Get It

  Erle Stanley Gardner

  Cry Silence

  Fredric Brown

  Arson Plus

  Peter Collinson

  Fall Guy

  George Harmon Coxe

  Doors in the Dark

  Frederick Nebel

  Luck

  Lester Dent

  The Maltese Falcon

  Dashiell Hammett

  Ten Carats of Lead

  Stewart Sterling

  Murder Is Bad Luck

  Wyatt Blassingame

  Her Dagger Before Me

  Talmadge Powell

  One Shot

  Charles G. Booth

  The Dancing Rats

  Richard Sale

  Bracelets

  Katherine Brocklebank

  Diamonds Mean Death

  Thomas Walsh

  Murder in the Ring

  Raoul Whitfield

  The Parrot That Wouldn’t Talk

  Walter C. Brown

  Let the Dead Alone

  Merle Constiner

  Knights of the Open Palm

  Carroll John Daly

  Waiting for Rusty

  William Cole

  Rainbow Diamonds

  Ramon Decolta

  The Ring on the Hand of Death

  William Rollins Jr.

  Body Snatcher

  Theodore A. Tinsley

  Murder on the Gayway

  Dwight V. Babcock

  The Key

  Cleve F. Adams

  The Bloody Bokhara

  William Campbell Gault

  A Taste for Cognac

  Brett Halliday

  Sauce for the Gander

  Day Keene

  A Little Different

  W. T. Ballard

  The Shrieking Skeleton

  Charles M. Green

  Drop Dead Twice

  Hank Searls

  The Sound of the Shot

  Dale Clark

  Flaming Angel

  Frederick C. Davis

  Odds on Death

  Don M. Mankiewicz

  Those Catrini

  Norvell Page

  Smoke in Your Eyes

  Hugh B. Cave

  Blood, Sweat and Biers

  Robert Reeves

  The Black Bottle

  Whitman Chambers

  The Corpse Didn’t Kick

  Milton K. Ozaki

  Try the Girl

  Raymond Chandler

  Don’t You Cry for Me

  Norbert Davis

  T. McGuirk Steals a Diamond

  Ray Cummings

  Wait for Me

  Steve Fisher

  Ask Me Another

  Frank Gruber

  Dirty Work

  Horace McCoy

  Merely Murder

  Julius Long

  Murder in One Syllable

  John D. MacDonald

  Three Apes from the East

  H. H. Stinson

  Death Stops Payment

  D. L. Champion

  The Color of Honor

  Richard Connell

  Middleman for Murder

  Bruno Fischer

  The Man Who Chose the Devil

  Richard Deming

  Beer-Bottle Polka

  C. M. Kornbluth

  Borrowed Crime

  Cornell Woolrich

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Also Edited by Otto Penzler

  FOREWORD

  THIS IS NOT THE FIRST anthology to be devoted entirely to the mystery fiction contained in the pages of Black Mask magazine, but I am confident that I will be accused of neither hyperbole nor immodesty when I state unequivocally that it is the biggest and most comprehensive. Indeed, apart from The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, published by Vintage in 2007 and to which this volume is a sequel of sorts, The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories is the biggest and most comprehensive collection of pulp crime fiction ever published.

  The first anthology of Black Mask stories, The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), was compiled and edited by the legendary editor Joseph T. Shaw, who was more responsible than anyone else for the elevation of the magazine to the stature it achieved during his tenure and which it still enjoys today, all these years after it ceased publication. Had he done nothing more than write to Dashiell Hammett to encourage him to produce a detective story for the magazine, Shaw would still have gone down in the history of the American mystery story as one of its handful of most significant and influential figures. This groundbreaking book was subtitled “Early Stories from Black Mask” and contained fifteen stories by many of the stalwarts who regularly contributed to the magazine, eleven of whom are also in these pages, though not with the same stories. While the remaining four authors had some historical interest, the fact that they have gone on to be largely forgotten today is not pure happenstance. Few readers of this current volume will lament the absence of J. J. des Ormeaux, Reuben Jennings Shay, and Ed Lybeck; the fourth, the excellent Roger Torrey, failed to be included only because I reluctantly had to accept the fact that even the thickest book in the store has a finite number of pages. Perhaps it is a greater surprise to note the absence in Shaw’s compilation of some of Black Mask’s most beloved authors, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Carroll John Daly, Frederick Nebel, and Cornell Woolrich.

  A quarter of a century after the magazine went out of business, Herbert Ruhm edited a paperback original, The Hard-Boiled Detective (New York: Vintage, 1977), that contained fourteen stories. Again, most of those authors are represented on the pages of this book, with only three failing to make the cut: William Brandon, Paul W. Fairman, and Curt Hamlin. Strangely, the greatest of all suspense writers, Cornell Woolrich, was also omitted from this ot
herwise exemplary anthology, as were Horace McCoy (absent from Shaw as well) and Raoul Whitfield (represented twice in Shaw’s book, the only author so honored, both under his own name and as Ramon Decolta).

  Seven years later, William F. Nolan, a pulp fiction expert and a talented writer of stories and novels in his own right, compiled The Black Mask Boys (New York: William Morrow, 1984). Subtitled Masters in the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction, this handsome volume contained a mere eight stories but managed to nail most of the big names (Chandler, Daly, Gardner, Hammett, McCoy, Nebel, Whitfield), all of whom are included in the present volume. As is Woolrich, who once again was omitted from the otherwise stellar lineup.

  The biggest names in the crime fiction pulp world were all published by Black Mask, and it should be noted that they didn’t become names because of expensive advertising campaigns or because of the excesses of their private lives. They achieved it the old-fashioned way—by putting to work the genius with which they were blessed, producing much of the greatest hard-boiled fiction ever written.

  If you are an aficionado of this type of literature, as most serious readers of fiction are, you will have noticed that so many stories, even by the best pulp writers, are virtually impossible to find. Copies of the original Black Mask magazines turn up in used bookstores and on eBay from time to time, with the early issues commanding prices in the hundreds of dollars. They are so rare that only two (and a rumored third) complete collections of Black Mask exist; one is at the Library of Congress and the other is in the hands of a private collector. The Special Collections department of UCLA has a superb collection and the good people who are involved in its day-to-day activities, notably Octavio Olvera, have been enormously helpful and generous in making these elusive stories available, and my sincere thanks go out to them. Likewise, Clark W. Evans and Margaret Kieckhefer at the Library of Congress have disproved the notion that all government agencies are inefficient and unfriendly. Thanks to them for filling gaps with copies of some of the most impossibly rare issues.

  Finally, a note of appreciation to Keith Alan Deutsch, who wrote the introduction to this monumental collection and who owns the Black Mask magazine name and a huge percentage of the material that appeared in it. It should be self-evident that this collection would have been impossible without his encouragement and cooperation, but, beyond the obvious, he has been unfailingly honorable and courteous in all the dealings I’ve had with him, making the compilation of this wonderful addition to the literature of vintage crime fiction a delightful experience, rather than an onerous chore.

  —OTTO PENZLER

  INTRODUCTION

  Keith Alan Deutsch

  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 introduced the hard-boiled detective, and a new style of narration, to American literature.

  In many ways, Black Mask 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.

  The first hard-boiled detectives were men of the city, all: Carroll John Daly’s Three Gun Terry and Race Williams appeared primarily on the wild streets of New York, talking wise and walking that eternal tough-guy-detective line between the law and the outlaw. The first great detective narrator of the new hard-boiled fiction, Dashiell Hammett’s professional lawman, the Continental Op (the first Op tale is included in this collection), operated famously in San Francisco, as did Hammett’s iconic detective, Sam Spade.

  Surprisingly, soon after the publication of The Maltese Falcon, Gertrude Stein declared Hammett, not Hemingway, the originator of the modern American, declarative, narrative sentence.

  Arguably the greatest stylist of the hard-boiled genre, Raymond Chandler, observed such a fully realized and corrupting Los Angeles landscape in his poetic vision of the Black Mask detective tale that his writing has become the literary standard for all twentieth-century narratives of that city, or of any other American city.

  All of this said, I do not mean to imply that the hard-boiled Black Mask detective always operated in a big city.

  Race Williams’s first appearance in the magazine in 1923, “Knights of the Open Palm,” took place in a Southern, rural setting, and featured the KKK for Black Mask’s all-KKK issue (!). In 1925, Hammett’s San Francisco Op headed out to Arizona for what was billed by Black Mask editors as “a Western detective novelette” in the story “Corkscrew.” This tale, by the way, might be considered a warm-up for what I consider to be the Op’s finest novel, Red Harvest, a kind of Western-town gang showdown that inspired Akira Kurosawa’s film Yojimbo and the Sergio Leone Man with No Name series of Western films.

  In this regard, it should be noted that through the 1920s and 1930s Black Mask continued to feature Western adventure tales, often mixed with hard-boiled detective elements, notably in Erle Stanley Gardner’s seven Black Barr bandit stories, Nels Leroy Jorgensen’s thirty-two (!) gambling Black Burton tales, and in Horace McCoy’s thirteen Jerry Frost of the Texas Air Rangers border mysteries.

  Also of note for his decidedly screwball Southern gothic tales of logical detection is Merle Constiner’s Memphis-based Luther McGavock, whose eleven oddball adventures all take place in the most rural of settings, and are often filled with local country vernacular and regional folkways.

  The new urban mythology of the hard-boiled American hero, with his streetwise language and tough and often dark vision of a corrupt society, immediately influenced the popular American entertainments of radio and silent film. As early as the October 1922 issue of Black Mask, the incipient playwright Robert E. Sherwood began a movie review column, “Film Thrillers.”

  After 1926, when Joseph Shaw took over editing chores, he regularly pitched and sold stories and plots from his favorite contributors for screen adaptation to the emerging Warner Bros. studio.

  Both the hard-boiled and the noir genres invented in Black Mask by writers who wrote for the magazine and later wrote for radio and film in the 1930s and 1940s, and finally for television in the 1950s, still inform many of the genres that dominate entertainment in all our modern, digital media, from computer games to global film franchises.

  Every period from the magazine’s influential history is represented in this definitive anthology. All but a few historically significant stories of the more than fifty tales in the collection have never been reprinted before.

  One story, “Luck,” by Lester Dent, is an unpublished discovery of some note: a completely rewritten version of Dent’s often anthologized and much praised classic tale “Sail,” which is introduced for the first time in this volume thanks to the help of Will Murray and Dent’s estate.

  Also newsworthy is the first book publication of two major Black Mask novels in their original serialized format with Arthur Rodman Bowker’s magnificent illustrated headings, and all the original editorial comments to each segment. The iconic The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett and the long-lost Rainbow Murders by Raoul Whitfield are alone worth the price of admission to this generous collection.

  Included also are many of the most popular series characters that were featured over the years: Sam Spade, the Continental Op, Race Williams, Mike Shayne, Flashgun Casey, Bill Lennox (Hollywood Troubleshooter), Oliver Quade (the Human Encyclopedia), Ed Jenkins (the Phantom Crook), Jo Gar (the Little Island Detective), Jerry Frost of the Texas Air Rangers, Kennedy and MacBride of Richmond City, and Raymond Chandler’s precursor to Philip Marlowe.

  Also in the lineup, most for the first time in a
ny book, are less well-known recurring characters who in their time were an important mainstay of the magazine’s identity, and who still retain their original charm: Black Mask’s first series character, Ray Cummings’s “honest” underworld rogue Timothy McGuirk, who starred in fourteen tales from 1922 to 1926; the first of D. L. Champion’s twenty-six funny tales starring Rex Sackler; Dale Clark’s house dick O’Hanna appeared in twenty-eight stories; the first of Julius Long’s seventeen Ben Corbett tales; one of seven Cellini Smith mysteries by Robert Reeves (typically titled “Blood, Sweat and Biers” by Ken S. White, Black Mask’s editor in the 1940s); one of nine “Special Squad” stories by Stewart Sterling that each feature an expert division of the New York Police Department; and one of Theodore A. Tinsley’s twenty-five tales starring the wisecracking newspaper columnist Jerry Tracy.

  These series characters provided continuity to the run of the magazine issues, and helped maintain reader interest. When featured on the cover, Race Williams, Ed Jenkins, or the Continental Op could increase newsstand sales by ten percent or more.

  Speaking of popularity, it should be noted that Black Mask quite early on developed a deserved reputation for attracting the most distinguished and respected thinkers and writers among its readership.

  As I have already said, Gertrude Stein loved hard-boiled detective fiction, “and how it moves along and Dashiell Hammett was all that and more.” Other intellectuals living in France praised Hammett for his moral ambiguity and how all the characters try to deceive one another, including those siren women, but Stein went further and called this Hammett kind of detective story “the only really modern novel form.”

  Similarly, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great twentieth-century Cambridge University philosopher, loved hard-boiled detective stories, but, unlike Gertrude Stein, he favored Black Mask’s inimitably wry Norbert Davis, with whom he tried to correspond unsuccessfully. Wittgenstein raved to friends about Davis’s first novel, Mouse in the Mountain (1943). He said hard-boiled detective stories were like “fresh air” compared to “stuffy” English mystery tales. When these hard-boiled detective stories became hard to get during World War II, he wrote: “If the United States won’t give us detective mags, we can’t give them philosophy, and America will be the loser in the end.”