by Unknown
A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL, SEPTEMBER 2010
Foreword and compilation copyright © 2010 by Otto Penzler
Introduction copyright © 2010 by Keith Alan Deutsch
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Owing to limitations of space, permissions to reprint previously published material appear following the text.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Black Lizard big book of Black Mask stories / edited and with a foreword
by Otto Penzler ; introduction by Keith Alan Deutsch.
p. cm.— (A Vintage crime/Black Lizard original)
eISBN: 978-0-307-80825-7
1. Noir fiction, American. 2. Detective and mystery stories, American. 3. American fiction—20th century. I. Penzler, Otto. II. Black mask; a magazine.
PS648.N64B57 2010
813.’087208—dc22
2010024508
v3.1
For Michael Connelly
Whose generous friendship
can never be repaid
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword Otto Penzler
Introduction Keith Alan Deutsch
Come and Get It
Erle Stanley Gardner
Cry Silence
Fredric Brown
Arson Plus
Peter Collinson
Fall Guy
George Harmon Coxe
Doors in the Dark
Frederick Nebel
Luck
Lester Dent
The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett
Ten Carats of Lead
Stewart Sterling
Murder Is Bad Luck
Wyatt Blassingame
Her Dagger Before Me
Talmadge Powell
One Shot
Charles G. Booth
The Dancing Rats
Richard Sale
Bracelets
Katherine Brocklebank
Diamonds Mean Death
Thomas Walsh
Murder in the Ring
Raoul Whitfield
The Parrot That Wouldn’t Talk
Walter C. Brown
Let the Dead Alone
Merle Constiner
Knights of the Open Palm
Carroll John Daly
Waiting for Rusty
William Cole
Rainbow Diamonds
Ramon Decolta
The Ring on the Hand of Death
William Rollins Jr.
Body Snatcher
Theodore A. Tinsley
Murder on the Gayway
Dwight V. Babcock
The Key
Cleve F. Adams
The Bloody Bokhara
William Campbell Gault
A Taste for Cognac
Brett Halliday
Sauce for the Gander
Day Keene
A Little Different
W. T. Ballard
The Shrieking Skeleton
Charles M. Green
Drop Dead Twice
Hank Searls
The Sound of the Shot
Dale Clark
Flaming Angel
Frederick C. Davis
Odds on Death
Don M. Mankiewicz
Those Catrini
Norvell Page
Smoke in Your Eyes
Hugh B. Cave
Blood, Sweat and Biers
Robert Reeves
The Black Bottle
Whitman Chambers
The Corpse Didn’t Kick
Milton K. Ozaki
Try the Girl
Raymond Chandler
Don’t You Cry for Me
Norbert Davis
T. McGuirk Steals a Diamond
Ray Cummings
Wait for Me
Steve Fisher
Ask Me Another
Frank Gruber
Dirty Work
Horace McCoy
Merely Murder
Julius Long
Murder in One Syllable
John D. MacDonald
Three Apes from the East
H. H. Stinson
Death Stops Payment
D. L. Champion
The Color of Honor
Richard Connell
Middleman for Murder
Bruno Fischer
The Man Who Chose the Devil
Richard Deming
Beer-Bottle Polka
C. M. Kornbluth
Borrowed Crime
Cornell Woolrich
Permissions Acknowledgments
Also Edited by Otto Penzler
FOREWORD
THIS IS NOT THE FIRST anthology to be devoted entirely to the mystery fiction contained in the pages of Black Mask magazine, but I am confident that I will be accused of neither hyperbole nor immodesty when I state unequivocally that it is the biggest and most comprehensive. Indeed, apart from The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, published by Vintage in 2007 and to which this volume is a sequel of sorts, The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories is the biggest and most comprehensive collection of pulp crime fiction ever published.
The first anthology of Black Mask stories, The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), was compiled and edited by the legendary editor Joseph T. Shaw, who was more responsible than anyone else for the elevation of the magazine to the stature it achieved during his tenure and which it still enjoys today, all these years after it ceased publication. Had he done nothing more than write to Dashiell Hammett to encourage him to produce a detective story for the magazine, Shaw would still have gone down in the history of the American mystery story as one of its handful of most significant and influential figures. This groundbreaking book was subtitled “Early Stories from Black Mask” and contained fifteen stories by many of the stalwarts who regularly contributed to the magazine, eleven of whom are also in these pages, though not with the same stories. While the remaining four authors had some historical interest, the fact that they have gone on to be largely forgotten today is not pure happenstance. Few readers of this current volume will lament the absence of J. J. des Ormeaux, Reuben Jennings Shay, and Ed Lybeck; the fourth, the excellent Roger Torrey, failed to be included only because I reluctantly had to accept the fact that even the thickest book in the store has a finite number of pages. Perhaps it is a greater surprise to note the absence in Shaw’s compilation of some of Black Mask’s most beloved authors, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Carroll John Daly, Frederick Nebel, and Cornell Woolrich.
A quarter of a century after the magazine went out of business, Herbert Ruhm edited a paperback original, The Hard-Boiled Detective (New York: Vintage, 1977), that contained fourteen stories. Again, most of those authors are represented on the pages of this book, with only three failing to make the cut: William Brandon, Paul W. Fairman, and Curt Hamlin. Strangely, the greatest of all suspense writers, Cornell Woolrich, was also omitted from this ot
herwise exemplary anthology, as were Horace McCoy (absent from Shaw as well) and Raoul Whitfield (represented twice in Shaw’s book, the only author so honored, both under his own name and as Ramon Decolta).
Seven years later, William F. Nolan, a pulp fiction expert and a talented writer of stories and novels in his own right, compiled The Black Mask Boys (New York: William Morrow, 1984). Subtitled Masters in the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction, this handsome volume contained a mere eight stories but managed to nail most of the big names (Chandler, Daly, Gardner, Hammett, McCoy, Nebel, Whitfield), all of whom are included in the present volume. As is Woolrich, who once again was omitted from the otherwise stellar lineup.
The biggest names in the crime fiction pulp world were all published by Black Mask, and it should be noted that they didn’t become names because of expensive advertising campaigns or because of the excesses of their private lives. They achieved it the old-fashioned way—by putting to work the genius with which they were blessed, producing much of the greatest hard-boiled fiction ever written.
If you are an aficionado of this type of literature, as most serious readers of fiction are, you will have noticed that so many stories, even by the best pulp writers, are virtually impossible to find. Copies of the original Black Mask magazines turn up in used bookstores and on eBay from time to time, with the early issues commanding prices in the hundreds of dollars. They are so rare that only two (and a rumored third) complete collections of Black Mask exist; one is at the Library of Congress and the other is in the hands of a private collector. The Special Collections department of UCLA has a superb collection and the good people who are involved in its day-to-day activities, notably Octavio Olvera, have been enormously helpful and generous in making these elusive stories available, and my sincere thanks go out to them. Likewise, Clark W. Evans and Margaret Kieckhefer at the Library of Congress have disproved the notion that all government agencies are inefficient and unfriendly. Thanks to them for filling gaps with copies of some of the most impossibly rare issues.
Finally, a note of appreciation to Keith Alan Deutsch, who wrote the introduction to this monumental collection and who owns the Black Mask magazine name and a huge percentage of the material that appeared in it. It should be self-evident that this collection would have been impossible without his encouragement and cooperation, but, beyond the obvious, he has been unfailingly honorable and courteous in all the dealings I’ve had with him, making the compilation of this wonderful addition to the literature of vintage crime fiction a delightful experience, rather than an onerous chore.
—OTTO PENZLER
INTRODUCTION
Keith Alan Deutsch
THIS PANORAMIC COLLECTION OF stories and novels from Black Mask magazine (1920 to 1951) is the most comprehensive presentation of the hard-boiled tradition of writing ever published from this great magazine. I believe this is a significant publishing event because Black Mask introduced the hard-boiled detective, and a new style of narration, to American literature.
In many ways, Black Mask took the nineteenth-century American Western tale of outlaws and vigilante justice from its home on the range in dime novels, and transplanted that mythic tale to the crooked streets of America’s emerging twentieth-century cities. It introduced a new landscape for both American adventures of justice and also a new kind of narration told with the vernacular language of the streets, and featuring new urban villains, and urban (if not always urbane) heroes for the mystery story.
The first hard-boiled detectives were men of the city, all: Carroll John Daly’s Three Gun Terry and Race Williams appeared primarily on the wild streets of New York, talking wise and walking that eternal tough-guy-detective line between the law and the outlaw. The first great detective narrator of the new hard-boiled fiction, Dashiell Hammett’s professional lawman, the Continental Op (the first Op tale is included in this collection), operated famously in San Francisco, as did Hammett’s iconic detective, Sam Spade.
Surprisingly, soon after the publication of The Maltese Falcon, Gertrude Stein declared Hammett, not Hemingway, the originator of the modern American, declarative, narrative sentence.
Arguably the greatest stylist of the hard-boiled genre, Raymond Chandler, observed such a fully realized and corrupting Los Angeles landscape in his poetic vision of the Black Mask detective tale that his writing has become the literary standard for all twentieth-century narratives of that city, or of any other American city.
All of this said, I do not mean to imply that the hard-boiled Black Mask detective always operated in a big city.
Race Williams’s first appearance in the magazine in 1923, “Knights of the Open Palm,” took place in a Southern, rural setting, and featured the KKK for Black Mask’s all-KKK issue (!). In 1925, Hammett’s San Francisco Op headed out to Arizona for what was billed by Black Mask editors as “a Western detective novelette” in the story “Corkscrew.” This tale, by the way, might be considered a warm-up for what I consider to be the Op’s finest novel, Red Harvest, a kind of Western-town gang showdown that inspired Akira Kurosawa’s film Yojimbo and the Sergio Leone Man with No Name series of Western films.
In this regard, it should be noted that through the 1920s and 1930s Black Mask continued to feature Western adventure tales, often mixed with hard-boiled detective elements, notably in Erle Stanley Gardner’s seven Black Barr bandit stories, Nels Leroy Jorgensen’s thirty-two (!) gambling Black Burton tales, and in Horace McCoy’s thirteen Jerry Frost of the Texas Air Rangers border mysteries.
Also of note for his decidedly screwball Southern gothic tales of logical detection is Merle Constiner’s Memphis-based Luther McGavock, whose eleven oddball adventures all take place in the most rural of settings, and are often filled with local country vernacular and regional folkways.
The new urban mythology of the hard-boiled American hero, with his streetwise language and tough and often dark vision of a corrupt society, immediately influenced the popular American entertainments of radio and silent film. As early as the October 1922 issue of Black Mask, the incipient playwright Robert E. Sherwood began a movie review column, “Film Thrillers.”
After 1926, when Joseph Shaw took over editing chores, he regularly pitched and sold stories and plots from his favorite contributors for screen adaptation to the emerging Warner Bros. studio.
Both the hard-boiled and the noir genres invented in Black Mask by writers who wrote for the magazine and later wrote for radio and film in the 1930s and 1940s, and finally for television in the 1950s, still inform many of the genres that dominate entertainment in all our modern, digital media, from computer games to global film franchises.
Every period from the magazine’s influential history is represented in this definitive anthology. All but a few historically significant stories of the more than fifty tales in the collection have never been reprinted before.
One story, “Luck,” by Lester Dent, is an unpublished discovery of some note: a completely rewritten version of Dent’s often anthologized and much praised classic tale “Sail,” which is introduced for the first time in this volume thanks to the help of Will Murray and Dent’s estate.
Also newsworthy is the first book publication of two major Black Mask novels in their original serialized format with Arthur Rodman Bowker’s magnificent illustrated headings, and all the original editorial comments to each segment. The iconic The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett and the long-lost Rainbow Murders by Raoul Whitfield are alone worth the price of admission to this generous collection.
Included also are many of the most popular series characters that were featured over the years: Sam Spade, the Continental Op, Race Williams, Mike Shayne, Flashgun Casey, Bill Lennox (Hollywood Troubleshooter), Oliver Quade (the Human Encyclopedia), Ed Jenkins (the Phantom Crook), Jo Gar (the Little Island Detective), Jerry Frost of the Texas Air Rangers, Kennedy and MacBride of Richmond City, and Raymond Chandler’s precursor to Philip Marlowe.
Also in the lineup, most for the first time in a
ny book, are less well-known recurring characters who in their time were an important mainstay of the magazine’s identity, and who still retain their original charm: Black Mask’s first series character, Ray Cummings’s “honest” underworld rogue Timothy McGuirk, who starred in fourteen tales from 1922 to 1926; the first of D. L. Champion’s twenty-six funny tales starring Rex Sackler; Dale Clark’s house dick O’Hanna appeared in twenty-eight stories; the first of Julius Long’s seventeen Ben Corbett tales; one of seven Cellini Smith mysteries by Robert Reeves (typically titled “Blood, Sweat and Biers” by Ken S. White, Black Mask’s editor in the 1940s); one of nine “Special Squad” stories by Stewart Sterling that each feature an expert division of the New York Police Department; and one of Theodore A. Tinsley’s twenty-five tales starring the wisecracking newspaper columnist Jerry Tracy.
These series characters provided continuity to the run of the magazine issues, and helped maintain reader interest. When featured on the cover, Race Williams, Ed Jenkins, or the Continental Op could increase newsstand sales by ten percent or more.
Speaking of popularity, it should be noted that Black Mask quite early on developed a deserved reputation for attracting the most distinguished and respected thinkers and writers among its readership.
As I have already said, Gertrude Stein loved hard-boiled detective fiction, “and how it moves along and Dashiell Hammett was all that and more.” Other intellectuals living in France praised Hammett for his moral ambiguity and how all the characters try to deceive one another, including those siren women, but Stein went further and called this Hammett kind of detective story “the only really modern novel form.”
Similarly, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great twentieth-century Cambridge University philosopher, loved hard-boiled detective stories, but, unlike Gertrude Stein, he favored Black Mask’s inimitably wry Norbert Davis, with whom he tried to correspond unsuccessfully. Wittgenstein raved to friends about Davis’s first novel, Mouse in the Mountain (1943). He said hard-boiled detective stories were like “fresh air” compared to “stuffy” English mystery tales. When these hard-boiled detective stories became hard to get during World War II, he wrote: “If the United States won’t give us detective mags, we can’t give them philosophy, and America will be the loser in the end.”