The subject matter with which Hammett dealt and on which Shaw would focus Black Mask was not the bloodless crimes of Victorian-era mysteries or the hack-generated imaginary felonies of the dime novels; it was genuine sin and vice, of the sort their readers saw all around them and read about in their daily newspapers. The 1920s were a lawless decade, for this was the era of the Volstead Act, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which expressly forbade the brewing and distilling of all intoxicating alcohol. Prohibition, however lofty the motives and intentions behind it, was a staggering legislative and human blunder whose ramifications are still being felt three-quarters of a century later. The illicit manufacture of and trafficking in liquor was a winked-at commonplace, and illegality became an accepted norm. This nationwide amorality — crime almost as a way of life — allowed the underworld to organize and grow strong enough for its corruption to reach into the highest levels of government and society. Feud as they might, kill one another as they did, Alphonse Capone and his gangster cohorts flourished in a climate of violence, brutality, and unconstrained social and commercial vice. It was inevitable that the hard-boiled-fiction movement, given the leadership of individuals such as Hammett and Shaw, would also grow and flourish against this background of disorder and disaffection.
Shaw would later define the Black Mask prose style as “hard, brittle... a full employment of the function of dialogue, and authenticity in characterization and action.” A fast tempo and “economy of expression” were two other ingredients. (Neither Hammett nor Shaw invented the style, of course. Its emphasis on dialogue, its use of vernacular, and its basic colloquial rhythm were offshoots of the styles employed by Sherwood Anderson and Ring Lardner and polished and simplified by Ernest Hemingway. What Hammett brought to it was “romantic realism,” in Ellery Queen’s phrase: he placed his stories against a stark background; peopled them with men and women who seemed truly to sweat, bleed, and ache; and made the pursuit of justice a noble as well as a necessary goal.)
Over Shaw’s ten-year editorial reign, he developed a nucleus of writers who adhered to — and in some cases refined — what would come to be known as the Black Mask schooclass="underline" Raymond Chandler, Frederick Nebel, Raoul Whitfield, Paul Cain (George Sims), Horace McCoy, Dwight V. Babcock, George Harmon Coxe, Norbert Davis. These writers created heroes who were worthy of Cooper’s Bumppo and Melville’s Ahab — true rugged individualists who believed that murder will out, who were determined to see law and order prevail no matter what the cost. Chandler’s Carmady, an early version of Philip Marlowe, was one such creation. Others were Nebel’s police captain MacBride and Kennedy of the Free Press; Coxe’s crime photographer, Flashgun Casey; and Whitfield’s private detective, Ben Jardinn.
It should not be thought, however, that Hammett and his followers wrote for any high-minded or didactic purpose, or to any grand design. Although there was in their work the dominant element of “taking murder out of the library and putting it back on the streets where it belonged,” in Chandler’s celebrated phrase, these writers were essentially storytellers, aiming their wares at a large and sympathetic but by no means uncritical audience. It was incumbent on them to produce stories that gripped, entertained, surprised; otherwise, the stories would not be bought and published. Thus even though the writers were working with realistic material and in a fresh idiom, to some extent they still relied on past detective-story traditions, motivations, and (often enough) clichés.
The best of the craftsmen under Shaw’s tutelage were so adept at their lessons that they soon graduated to other, higher-paying media: glossy-paper magazines, novels, radio scripts, Hollywood screenplays. Some of their creations also went on to success outside the pages of Black Mask. Ben Jardinn was featured in one of the better early Hollywood private-eye novels, Raoul Whitfield’s Death in a Bowl (1931). Flashgun Casey enjoyed a wide following in a series of novels by George Harmon Coxe, as well as in his own radio show, Casey, Crime Photographer, in the 1940s. Curiously enough, the toughest of all the hard-boiled characters to come out of Black Mask, Paul Cain’s Gerry Kells, was neither a hero nor a detective; Kells, in fact, was in many ways the first true antihero in noir fiction — a murderous, amoral gambler and racketeer whose base of operations was the Los Angeles underworld. Five interconnected stories featuring Kells were joined in the 1933 novel Fast One, a rock-hard tale that is arguably the harshest and most relentless of all the hard-boiled crime novels.
With Shaw at the helm, Black Mask’s circulation increased dramatically at the end of his first year and peaked in 1930 at 103,000 copies a month. Predictably, its early success brought on imitators, including Fiction House’s short-lived Black Aces and Popular Publications’ long-lived Dime Detective. By the mid-1930s, however, Shaw had lost or was about to lose most of his major writers — Hammett, Nebel, Whitfield, Coxe, McCoy — to the more lucrative and challenging media; only Chandler remained. Circulation had fallen off, and financial cutbacks were imminent. One cutback was to be in Shaw’s salary; he objected vehemently, and in the fall of 1936 he was relieved of his editorial duties. (In sympathy, Chandler quit Black Mask as well. His last few pulp crime stories appeared in Dime Detective and in Street & Smith’s Detective Story.)
Despite the efforts of new editor Fanny Ellsworth, sales of Black Mask continued to decline, and in 1940 the magazine was sold to Popular Publications. It ended its life rather ignominiously in 1951, as a second-string title in Popular’s chain of detective pulps, behind Dime Detective, Detective Tales, and New Detective. But the Black Mask school remained the hard-boiled standard for all pulp crime fiction during the last twenty years of the pulp-magazine era, and for much of the hard-boiled fiction — short stories and novels alike — that has been published since.
The tough crime story was not limited to publication in pulp magazines or the tough crime novel to publication within the mystery and detective genre, once the Roaring Twenties gave way to the Depression thirties. Grinding poverty, unemployment, homelessness, bank and small-business failures in alarming numbers, ongoing police and political corruption and rampant gangsterism, violent clashes between union organizers and management scabs in both industry and agriculture — these were the social ills of the Great Depression. Combined with a vast westward migration from the Midwest and the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma and Arkansas to California’s “promised land,” these real-life trends gave rise to a different type of hard-boiled fiction that was more solidly rooted in the literary mainstream. Some of the period’s angriest and most savagely realistic short stories were published in such “quality” magazines as American Mercury, Story, Esquire, Harper’s, and Liberty. Many mainstream novels of the 1930s had grim themes, in particular those that championed the cause of the proletariat; many dealt wholly or in part with violent crime, often in a bitterly existential fashion. A few, although treated less than respectfully by critics of the time, have endured and achieved the status of classics: James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Benjamin Appel’s Brain Guy (1934), Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935), Edward Anderson’s Thieves Like Us (1937), Richard Hallas’s You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up (1938), and James Ross’s They Don’t Dance Much (1940).