Herbert Ruhm’s 1977 anthology The Hard-Boiled Detective: Stories from Black Mask Magazine, 1920-1951 contains a dozen stories drawn from the most influential of the American crime pulps, founded by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan to help support their loss-making literary magazine The Smart Set. The subtitle is a slight misnomer because that was the lifespan of Black Mask but the stories reprinted here, presented in chronological order, run from 1922 to 1948.
There are some well-known names: Carroll John Daley, Dashiell Hammett, Norbert Davis, Frederick Nebel, Raymond Chandler, Lester Dent and Erle Stanley Gardner, plus Merle Constiner, William Brandon, Curt Hamlin and Paul W Fairman. Their contributions range in length from a four-page squib by Hammett (though it is followed by a more substantial story from him) to a 70-page novella by Constiner. If the concluding couple of entries are the best that could be found, then Black Mask certainly was in decline during its final years.
Ruhm’s informative introduction, though, emphasises how innovative the magazine was in 1920, helping to break the dominant influence of British detective fiction written by the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, R Austin Freeman and E C Bentley. These presumed a stable order, with crime an aberration and order ultimately restored. The Black Mask contributors, writing in the shadow of war, followed by Prohibition and later the Depression, assumed such stability did not exist, rather a world in which force trumped reason; and they marked that innovation with an increasing emphasis on an energetic, cynically urban, home-grown vernacular.
Ruhm concludes by referring to the difficulty of selecting a handful of stories from a choice of over 30 million words across 340 issues printed during a 31-year span for a compilation about the length of two single issues of the magazine. He concludes he has chosen the best – stories that are ‘neither repetitive nor formularized.’ They are certainly neither, and it is an entertaining collection, but it would have been even better had Ruhm dug deeper and omitted the already much-anthologised likes of Chandler and Hammett in favour of obscure gems by forgotten writers.
The Joy of Mere Words 