BLACK MASK

by James Lincoln Warren

“I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.” — Dashiell Hammett

Next month, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine introduces as an included feature the return of Black Mask, the legendary pulp magazine that gave the world the hard-boiled P.I. story. This is cause for rejoicing.

The first hard-boiled P.I. story ever published was called “Three Gun Terry”, by Carroll John Daly. It appeared in the May 15, 1923, issue. Although in his day, Daly was one of the most popular writers of gritty crime fiction, the one true indispensible gift that Black Mask gave to American letters was a certain Samuel Dashiell Hammett. Just as it was Arthur Conan Doyle who perfected the ratiocinative detective story invented by Edgar Allan Poe, so it was that Hammett took Daly’s idea and elevated it to a literary archetype. 1

In his doctoral dissertation, Robert B. Parker argued that the P.I. story was an update of that most American of genres, the Western, particularly as its most salient characteristics are a rugged individualist battling against a corrupt status quo in the interest of justice and the prominence of crime as the central motivating element. This, of course, is much too broad a topic to be discussed in any depth here — there are many valid points to be made on both sides of the argument — but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many writers of P.I. fiction have also written tales of frontier lawmen and itinerant gunslingers.

So in one sense, at least, the invention of the hard-boiled story was an extension of an already well-established literary convention. But this is illustrative of the evolution of art — there is nothing worth reading that doesn’t arise from a context. Continuity is at least as meaningful as innovation; imagination can be evoked as much by comparison (which is, after all, the function of metaphor) as by contrast.

Either way, the real value of Black Mask is that it provided a vehicle for one of the great literary voices of the 20th century, after which nothing would be the same. Saying that Hammett influenced mystery writing is like saying that Socrates influenced philosophy: well, duh.

So EQMM’s resurrection of Black Mask should be viewed as a celebration of a high mark in American culture. Hemingway? Simplistic. Faulkner? Turgid. Fitzgerald? Shallow. Give me Hammett every time — the greatest American author of the first half of the 20th century. It is not overstating the case that Hammett influenced as many writers in as many places as Leo Tolstoy or Charles Dickens. Certainly we are living with his influence today.

And what was Hammett’s creative canvas?

The mystery short story.

The irony is that Black Mask was meant by its founders, H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, to act as a commercial crutch for a “literary” magazine called Smart Set; intended, in other words, to publish trash and make money so that Smart Set, a financial loser, could stay in print. Mencken and Nathan sold the magazine at a huge profit after only eight issues. And that’s when literature in America changed. Transmogrifying from its beginnings as a general pulp fiction adventure magazine, Black Mask began to focus exclusively on crime stories, and eventually on crime stories of an exclusive character. It started with trite stories of diabolical masterminds bent on world dominion, but it didn’t take long for things to settle down to the mean streets.

If nothing else, the story of Black Mask shows how much is possible — how much can be done with the mystery short story as a literary vehicle, as well as more generally how great things can arise from humble beginnings, and how the best stories can always surprise you in the end.

So let’s all celebrate. Run out and buy the next issue of EQMM as soon as it hits the newsstands, crack open a bottle of cheap bourbon, and slam a shot in salute to the tough guys. Tell ’em the Continental Op sent you.

1. It can certainly be argued that the tough private detective story was an idea whose time had come, and that Daly’s creation of the genre was virtually coincidental. Hammett’s first Continental Op story was published in Black Mask in the October, 1923, issue, a matter of a mere five months after Daly’s introduction of the genre, and it is indisputable that Hammett drew heavily on his own experiences as a Pinkerton man in his stories. –JLW [↩]