The kids who used to read dime novels seized on the new type of magazine with whoops of joy. The stories far exceeded in danger, suspense, thrills and excitement the most gory dime novel yarns they had ever read! But they grew up, these youngsters; they became adolescents and young men, and many of them got dangerous ideas from the racketeer and gangster stories. Many a prison warden can tell you, grimly, that plenty of his “cons” are in “stir” now because they got the idea of becoming gangmen and racketeers solely from these stories, which pictured crime and organized rackets and mobs so alluringly.
Naturally, clergymen, the Police, civic bodies, and so on, all protested against the type of crook and gangster story in which crime was pictured so attractively, with the law getting a “sock in the eye” in the finish instead of the criminals. So editors were forced to change fashions in fiction of this type again.
Hence, if you are ambitious to write the gangster story, make sure that your crook hero, your gang chief, your mobs, your racketeers, never beat the law in the climax of your stories. This type of yarn commands one of the juiciest markets today, now that the air magazines and the Western story magazines are not as “hot” as they were in their demands for material.
Practically every detective magazine can use a fast-moving gangster story in which the criminal leading protagonist or protagonists are engaged in a duel of wits with a detective or detectives, and in which the detective or detectives finally triumph. If your gangster or gang has a feud with another mobster or mob, and the law is after both and wins out in the end, that’s an even better bet for the detective magazines.
You don’t have to follow the usual formula for a detective story at any time. No murder need be the mystery in the beginning of the tale which a detective sets out to solve in the orthodox way. The gangster story depends on its thrills, its suspense and its fast-moving action for its punch, and there need be no mystery in it whatever. Clever and unusual stuff pulled by both the criminals and the detectives is what counts tremendously in these yarns. If you have the Erle Stanley Gardner flair for making masterly criminal minds do their stuff until some cleverer gent representing the law outwits them in the end, you can write your own ticket with editors right now!
Stereotyped yarns will not sell. Your racketeers and gangsters must be as clever as Satan. They must have the most devilish and ingenious and devious minds you can create out of an imagination running riot, in addition to their deadly skill with lethal weapons. For example, in my gangster story one gang chief had a feud with another one. He visited the enemy in his lair. He gave him fifty “grand” notes in a wager that he’d walk out of his gambling hell with the stolen “ice” he’d been gypped out of by his rival. The latter had him covered by the invisible machine guns of four mobmen in a spy gallery, in addition to menacing him with his own automatic pistol. The first gang chief seemed to have no chance whatever to walk out alive from that gambling hell. Suddenly, as his enemy sneeringly counted the fifty “grand” notes, he slumped unconscious to the floor, also the four mobmen in the spy gallery! The notes had been sprinkled with a deadly, invisible poison which engendered a lethal gas, and the crook who had invented that formula had also invented a tiny gas mask so small it didn’t even bulge out a coat pocket. The first gang chief whipped out the mask from his pocket and as the five mobsters passed out, he donned it, got the “ice” for which he had come, and coolly sauntered from the gambling hell!
If you think this is fairly clever, however, you should read the gifted Mr. Gardner’s stories. He invents things in his yarns which would make your hair acquire a permanent wave! The point is, though, you can’t simply depend on stickups, hijacking, machine-gun play, and stereotyped stuff like that in your gangster stories. These may enter incidentally into your plots, of course, but they should be merely trifles, a part of your atmosphere. Your mobster and racketeer “heroes” must continually put over totally unexpected things of the cleverest kind — fast ones that will make the reader fairly gasp with their satanic ingenuity.
Did you ever read one of Mr. Gardner’s yarns in Black Mask where the villain had a pocket flask with a trick compartment for poisoned booze and another trick one for the right stuff? If a guy drank from the wrong side of that flask — good night! And how about that fountain pen which is really a deadly pistol that shoots tear gas bullets? I used that one in my story very effectively in the climax, and I got the idea from a newspaper account of a Chinaman in real life who sold those cute toys by the gross to gangsters.
The cleverer and more Machiavellian your gangsters are the more chance you’ll have to put these stories over. It is not enough to make your mobmen mere roughnecks who depend on their gats and machine guns alone; you must give them brains of the most cunning sort, too — minds which will continually invent the trickiest stuff with which to outwit the law or their rivals. Then if your detective hero is even cleverer than the criminals he’s after, and if he wins out in the climax in a most unexpected, stupefying way, your yarn will be according to present-day demands, provided, of course, that the plot and the action are equally clever and move at top speed.
Suspense! That’s what you need more than anything else in this type of story, too. Mr. Gardner’s yarns are masterly chiefly because of this element, in addition to their cleverness. Every incident, every situation, every crisis and complication must pack a wallop, must hold the reader breathless with uncertainty as to what the next development will bring. Thrill the reader all the time! Keep him gasping! Don’t let his interest flag for a moment! Not only physical action alone will do the trick for you, remember. It must be brains against brains — deadly ruthless cunning against equally deadly ruthless cunning — the gangster, or gangsters pitting their wits and rattlesnake minds against a “dick” who is wise to every fast one the underworld “can pull.” Combine powerful suspensive mental action with equally gripping physical action, and do it without a moment s let-down, and you’ll have a real gangster story.
Read these stories for inspiration. And above all, if you want to get new stunts for your gangster stories, read the papers! Truth is always stranger than fiction, and the news stories every day prove this overwhelmingly. A coal truck is sent out by a bank with twenty-one thousand dollars hidden under a pile of coal to throw gangmen off the scent! A mysterious murderer “bumps off” two different men who had been petting in lovers’ lanes with their sweeties; sends notes to the police saying he’s going to bump off sixteen more male petters, and defying the police to prevent him from doing so!
The newspapers are a gold mine for the writer of gangster stories. They will provide you with stunts of the most ingenious and diabolically clever variety to amaze your readers. Not only are the detective magazines eager for clever gangster yarns, but also out-and-out action magazines like Short Stories, Adventure, and so on, welcome them. And, if you can write artistically enough, the pulps are not your only market. The slick-paper lads will take your gangster yarns too. The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and American Magazine can be favorably impressed if you’ve got the goods they like.
If you’re wondering what to write next, if that’s the burning question in your mind, make a stab at the gangster story. It’s one of the most promising and lucrative markets to try for right now. It bids fair to be so for several years to come. Following are some of the magazines that use the new gangster story: