The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original) Page 2

  No less a critic than Raymond Chandler also favored Norbert Davis’s Black Mask fiction. He even studied Davis’s early stories while practicing to write his own first detective tale. Despite Davis’s penchant for humor, Chandler considered Davis’s work to be “noteworthy and characteristic of the most vigorous days” of Black Mask.

  Even before Hammett’s first novels were published as books in 1929, and certainly by the time The Maltese Falcon ran in the magazine in 1929 and 1930, Black Mask was being read and discussed by notable readers around the world.

  In an interview with editor Joseph Shaw in Author & Composer magazine in August 1932, Ed Bodin (a pulp fiction agent of the time) mentions that Black Mask is read in the White House.

  By February of 1934, in Writer’s Review, in an article called “Are Pulp Readers Kid-Minded?” Joseph Shaw is quoted as “receiving letters from the most intelligent people in the country,” and reporting “President Roosevelt, J. P. Morgan and Herbert Hoover read Black Mask for relaxation.”

  In Philadelphia, as a graduate student on a tour of their late residence (now a museum), I discovered that Philip Rosenbach and his younger brother Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, the preeminent dealers of rare books, manuscripts, and decorative arts during the first half of the twentieth century, were, from early in its run, Black Mask subscribers and collectors.

  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.

  A PERSONAL HISTORY OF

  BLACK MASK MAGAZINE

  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 will tell my personal history of Black Mask against an idiosyncratic history of American magazine publishing.

  The first great magazine person I met was Adrian Lopez. He was my publisher for Black Mask, and I remember with great fondness the hours I spent at his side listening to stories about magazine history. Starting in the 1940s, Adrian published magazines for over sixty years, including Sir, True, Laff, Real Crime, Surfing, and Lady’s Circle. He had been a newspaper reporter and a pulp fiction author in the 1930s. He told me he had written for Black Mask, Dime Detective, Argosy, and many other pulps, but I have been able to confirm that he wrote under his own name only for Gangster Stories.

  One of the first lessons of pulp magazine publishing is that much information has been left off the magazines’ mastheads and contents pages. One of the most perplexing problems facing a pulp fiction historian is the endless and confusing array of pseudonyms and house names behind which authors hide.

  As a matter of fact, both Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner made their first appearances in Black Mask in the early 1920s under pseudonyms Peter Collinson and Charles M. Green, respectively. In the early 1930s, Raoul Whitfield often appeared twice in a single issue of Black Mask, once under his own name and once as Ramon Decolta, under which all his famous Jo Gar stories appeared. Many pulps had house names that were used by any writer as needed whenever he had already contributed a story to an issue. But not Black Mask. Very few writers appeared twice in one issue of Black Mask under any name. An exception I discovered is the tale “Long Live the Dead,” by Allen Beck. It was actually written by Hugh B. Cave, but “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” which is included in this collection, also appeared in that same December 1938 issue of Black Mask, and the editors gave Hugh a pen name for that one issue. Even E. R. Hagemann, who compiled the meticulous index of record A Comprehensive Index to Black Mask, 1920–1951 (Popular Press, Bowling Green, Ohio, 1981), missed that pseudonym.

  Few writers kept records of all their pen names, which makes setting the record straight difficult. Prentice Winchell, who wrote famously for Black Mask as Stewart Sterling, was kind enough to send me a long list of his pen names in the early 1970s. Hugh B. Cave kept meticulous records, and I have published a partial bibliography of his writings and pseudonyms in Long Live the Dead (Crippen & Landru, Norfolk, Virginia, 2000). But this kind of magazine detective work is always hit-and-miss.

  I was lucky exploring and detecting the past of magazine publishing, and especially the history of Black Mask. When I suggested to Adrian Lopez that we bring back Black Mask in 1973, he was excited. Not only did he like the idea; he knew the man who could help us. His good friend David Geller had acquired Popular Publications, Inc., then the current owner of Black Mask, and forty or so other pulp magazines. None were being published. World War II and the rise of paperback books had killed them all.

  That David Geller, who was a magazine advertising man and never a magazine editor or publisher, ended up as the proprietor of a treasure chest of famous pulp fiction titles, and hundreds of thousands of intellectual property rights in stories and art in which he had little interest, reveals something about the power and the vulnerability of advertising in the cultural history of twentieth-century magazine publishing.

  As Adrian Lopez explained it to me, people like Geller placed direct-mail-order advertisements in magazines, and these direct-mail pitches were often more successful commercial enterprises than publishing the magazines themselves. Geller was one of the best advertising placement men, representing himself and other advertisers, and, as magazines began to fail, he found it profitable to take them over from desperate publishers in order to maintain these publications just for the advertising revenue. Magazines that were losing money on subscriptions and newsstand sales could still be profitable. David Geller Associates is still a major player in direct-response magazine advertising and today represents a monthly marketplace of over 200 million readers.

  And so, with Geller’s backing, I soon found myself at the editorial offices of Popular Publications, seeking magazine mysteries deep in the complete run of the original bound publisher’s volumes of Black Mask. When I visited Popular in 1973, it had been reduced from one of the greatest pulp fiction houses of all time to primarily the publisher of Argosy, then a large-circulation general-interest magazine that featured factual articles and popular fiction starring famous characters like James Bond, Shane, and Captain Horatio Hornblower.

  Argosy had been the very first pulp fiction magazine, started in the 1890s by Frank A. Munsey, whose company went on to produce myriad classic pulp fiction magazines. In 1942, Popular Publications, under the guidance of its founder, Henry Steeger, acquired all the Frank A. Munsey Co. pulp titles. Two years earlier, Steeger had acquired Black Mask, which he considered the jewel of the pulps, from Black Mask’s original publisher, Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc.

  The name of Black Mask’s original publisher is significant, and has been overlooked by many historians. In the first decades of the twentieth century, as pulp fiction and slick magazines became designed commodities sold in the national marketplace as impulse items, the national distribution network grew in importance. Like newspaper distribution on a local city scale, magazine distribution was a tough business on a regional and national scale, and winning good display space could be a battle.

  Much has been made of H. L. Mencken’s role as the originating publisher of Black Mask. Despite his assertions of original ownership, nowhere on any masthead does Mr. Mencken’s name appear, nor does his alleged initiating partner George Jean Nathan’s. Although Black Mask’s address in the first issue is given as 25 West 45th Street in New York, the same as Smart Set, which was edited by Mencken and Nathan, Smart Set was published and owned by Eltinge F. “Pop” Warner and Eugene F. Crowe. “Pop” Warner also owned Pro-Distributors Publishing Company.

  I could never find a chain of title that indicated that ownership in Black Mask, or Pro-Distributors, went back to Mencken. That d
oesn’t mean I do not find his statements credible. In fact, given his stated distaste for the early issues, and the rather lackluster editing done by F. M. Osborne, a woman also on the staff of Smart Set, I believe Mencken did help start up Black Mask. What is certain is that Pro-Distributors Publishing Company, Inc., was the publisher of record from 1920 until 1940, when Henry Steeger acquired Black Mask for Popular Publications.

  Eltinge “Pop” Warner, who is usually overlooked by commentators, must be given some credit for the success of Black Mask. Warner acquired Field & Stream magazine from its founders in 1906 and ran that publication so successfully that it is now one of the oldest continuously published magazines in America, and still going strong with an estimated 10 million circulation! Warner had a sure hand as a publisher.

  As an aspiring publisher myself, I took about three months to study Black Mask in preparation for assembling my first issue. The formative issues of the magazine, from 1922 to 1924, after George W. Sutton Jr. took over as editor, with H. C. North as assistant editor, contain letters by Dashiell Hammett describing his life and professional experiences, and his struggles to improve his writing. There is a vibrant dialogue between editors, readers, and writers of the new fiction. And once the original illustrated headings and illustrated capital initials by that genius of dry brush Arthur Rodman Bowker were added to the mix, the magazine soared.

  I was struck by the power of these illustrations, and also by the dynamic way in which these original early editors introduced the stories in their headings and in editorial comments, and in response to letters written by the contributors. Sutton and North, and later Phil Cody, were interesting and intelligent editors, setting trends before the advent of the more famous Joseph Shaw.

  Popular Publications was a valuable place for me to study, filled with thousands of issues of perfectly maintained pulp magazine issues of every genre imaginable. I became interested in the magazine publishing context in which Black Mask hit its stride in the late 1920s and through the 1930s. I also studied the bound volumes through the 1940s, when Popular Publications took over Black Mask.

  I discovered that Henry Steeger, once Popular’s creative publisher, now had a small office in the Graybar Building near Grand Central Station. When I told Mr. Steeger I was preparing to edit and produce a new newsstand issue of Black Mask, he invited me over to talk and we became great magazine friends. Steeger had two brilliant ideas that contributed greatly to Popular’s success: First, inspired by the Grand Guignol theater, which he had seen in France, Steeger created Dime Mystery, a new kind of pulp that, along with its later companion titles Horror Stories and Terror Tales, started the “Shudder Pulp” publishing phenomenon. Second, Steeger understood the essential marketing psychology that gave birth to the pulp fiction magazine: that readers wanted exciting entertainment reading value, and so Steeger decided to title most of his fiction genre magazines with a value reminder, using “Dime” in his titles: Dime Detective, Dime Adventure, Dime Western, and so on. He told me that his appeal to value was one of his great strategies, and led to his extraordinary publishing success. In fact, Steeger’s Dime Detective became Black Mask’s only true rival in the hard-boiled detective field.

  Steeger was a brilliant editor. He explained how he raised his rates to attract writers who had long been associated with Black Mask to his magazines, especially Dime Detective. After the firing of Joseph Shaw from Black Mask in 1936, Steeger was able to attract even more famous Black Mask writers to his magazines. Raymond Chandler was probably his greatest catch. But Steeger also started increasing the number of series characters in Dime Detective so writers would have a steady venue to place heroes in the magazine who became familiar. And Steeger demanded that these new characters be exclusive to Dime Detective. Once he acquired Black Mask in 1940, he could use all his techniques on both of his hard-boiled magazines.

  Like Munsey, Steeger was a magazine genius in his own right. In 1943, one year after he acquired Argosy from Munsey, Steeger changed the publication to a slick magazine. As an editor and a publisher, Steeger had innovative vision. He saw that the pulp market was fading in the 1940s. By the beginning of the 1950s, when Black Mask and most pulps had stopped publishing, Steeger had evolved Argosy into one of the largest-circulation general-interest magazines in the country. He was now making a fortune on advertising—something a slick could do more easily than a rough paper pulp. By the early 1950s, a single color page of advertising sold for over $5,000 in Argosy. And so when David Geller became interested in Argosy as a major advertising medium for both direct response and display advertising, Steeger sold all of his interest in Popular.

  In the early 1970s, when I interviewed Steeger, I noted that general interest magazines were fading. Under David Geller’s editors, Argosy was losing its luster, it seemed to me. Steeger remained confident, and told me that if he were editing it he could attract a massive circulation again.

  At some point in my Black Mask preparations, I remembered that I had seen Black Mask on the masthead of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, a publication started by one-half of the Ellery Queen writing team, Fred Dannay. EQMM was started in the 1940s as the pulps were fading. Carefully and beautifully edited, it was a success and continues to this day. Dannay had been a friend of Dashiell Hammett during the 1940s and 1950s and kept Hammett’s Black Mask stories in print in a series of paperback books and in EQMM. Always an excellent historian of mystery and detective fiction, Dannay saw a need to keep the hard-boiled tradition alive in the more sedate pages of his magazine and decided to include Black Mask on his masthead, maintaining in a modest way the title and the goodwill, and also giving him a department to feature tougher, darker stories by writers like Hammett and Cornell Woolrich.

  I made contact with Joel Davis, the publisher of EQMM, and also the son of the founder of the famous magazine publishing house Ziff-Davis. He said I needed the permission of Fred Dannay, with whom I had a number of pleasant conversations, and I negotiated the purchase of the name and goodwill of Black Mask magazine, which Dannay had acquired from Steeger in the early 1950s.

  During this time of preparation, I had been talking to the great literary agencies that had been around during the pulp days. I spoke with Carl Brandt of Brandt & Brandt, and Lurton Blassingame, both of whom had represented Black Mask contributors in the 1930s. I spent a day in Rafael DeSoto’s studio interviewing a man I consider the greatest Black Mask cover artist of the late 1930s and 1940s. DeSoto spoke widely about other pulp cover artists, interior illustrators, editors, and publishers at many of the great pulp magazine houses. I spoke to writers, too, like Curt Siodmak, who serialized his novel Donovan’s Brain for Black Mask in 1942. Curt had also scripted noir and horror films that made a lasting impact on popular entertainment, like Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie and Universal’s The Wolf Man.

  Word about my project got around. Lillian Hellman, Hammett’s executrix, made contact with me through Don Congdon, an influential agent. Hellman allowed me to reprint a Hammett Continental Op story in return for certain research I had done in the Black Mask stacks. Helga Greene, Raymond Chandler’s executrix, asked me to share my Raymond Chandler letters and information with Frank MacShane, a professor at Columbia who was writing an authorized critical biography of Chandler. Steven Marcus, another professor at Columbia, got in touch with me through Hellman. He was writing an introduction and editing a new collection of Hammett stories from Black Mask. It turned out that neither Marcus nor MacShane knew each other or their work on Black Mask fiction. I introduced them and we all met for a talk at Columbia.

  I became friends with Prudence Whitfield and bought a few of her husband’s stories for the magazine from her. In time she told me wonderful stories about how Hammett, evidently her lover, had written lines in Hellman’s plays. Hammett and Raoul Whitfield had been friends since the early 1920s, and, when Prudence came along and married Raoul, she became one of the “hard-drinking boys.” She loaned me about ten unpublished Whitfield stories to read
, but asked me not to copy them, and I didn’t.

  Adrian Lopez decided not to continue publishing Black Mask, even though I had produced a second issue ready to go to press. The first issue had done well on the stands, and even garnered a spread in the Philadelphia Inquirer under the headline: “Black Mask Returns to the Newsstand.” The reasons for abandoning the project are complex and no longer important. After my one issue came out, I received queries from many writers as well as Hollywood people. I continued working on Black Mask. I had a number of telephone conversations with James M. Cain, who wanted me to make it clear that he was not a hard-boiled writer and did not want to be lumped in with Hammett and the Black Mask boys. He considered his major theme one of sexual passion driving and corrupting behavior between a man and a woman in a doomed relationship.

  In the late 1970s, when the Filipacchi Group (now Hachette Filipacchi Media) came to the United States from France to produce a doomed new edition of Look magazine, they bought Popular Publications from David Geller in order to acquire Argosy. Through mutual acquaintances in publishing, I met their international attorney, Didier Guérin, and after a number of talks, he made it clear that they wanted to sell a few of Popular’s publications, like Camera 35, which was still making money, and Railroad magazine, which had been the first special-interest pulp magazine started by Munsey in the 1880s. Amazingly, it was still making money. They did not know what to do with the pulps. So we made a deal. They agreed that despite my ownership of the name Black Mask through purchase from EQMM, they would transfer all interest, title, and goodwill in Black Mask, and all the copyrights to all the fiction and all the art, to me. They also transferred certain intellectual property rights to all the original Popular Publications pulps Henry Steeger had originated, as well as all the Munsey pulps Steeger had purchased in the 1940s. This acquisition included some Street and Smith pulps Popular acquired in 1949. In exchange I gave service and other considerations to the Filipacchi Group, which had assumed the name Popular Publications International when it purchased David Geller’s holdings. I also helped them sell Railroad magazine in return for my Popular intellectual property rights.