Walker Martin: Collecting and Reading Black Mask

[In a recent mail thread with Walker Martin, I was joking about how his set of Black Mask would have kept him safe from the coronavirus, if only he hadn't sold it. He could have read every issue while saying to his family - "See, a Mask a day keeps you safe." 

Because he's a nice guy, he responded to this sick humor with a mail about collecting Black Mask. Sensing an opportunity for a free article on this blog, i asked him a few more questions and he responded to those too. The result is what you have before you today. 

If you want more in this vein, tell Walker that. Leave a note in the comments section - you don't have to have a Google login to do that.] 

Your question about Black Mask has started me thinking about how I collected the set and then read most of it.  In fact, I've often said once you complete a set and then read much of it, the next step in the collecting process is to sell it.

I may have told you this story before and some of it I wrote online for Mystery File back when I started the Collecting Pulps: A Memoir series but it all started when I was drafted into the army in 1966.  The Vietnam war was heating up and I was headed for an infantry company when the army discovered I knew how to type thus possibly saving my life. I now had plenty of time to read and while in the PX I noticed Ron Goulart's The Hardboiled Dicks.

US Army PX - inset image of Ron Goulart's The Hardboiled Dicks

Merle Constiner - biographical article

RARE MOMENT—It seldom happens that writer Merle Constiner is seen away from his typewriter, even for a few minutes. Here in one of those rare moments he is pictured in the living room of his 130-year old home in Monroe.

(Journal photo—Barr)

This article about one of my favorite historical mystery and western writers was published in the Middletown, Ohio Journal on April 20, 1958. Constiner created two well-regarded series for Black Mask and Dime Detective, and I enjoy them, but i enjoy his historical fiction in Blue Book and the Country Gentleman more.

Richard Deming - Detective/Mystery author

Read a story by Richard Deming in the  August, 1952 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The story is “For Value Received” and it’s an excellent revenge story. I wanted to learn something about the author and came across this article in the Dunkirk-Fredonia Evening Observer, July 9^th, 1960. If you have any recommendations of stories by him that you’ve read, leave a note in the comments.

Full Name: Richard Franklin Deming

Born: Apr 25 1915 in Des Moines, Iowa

Died: Sep 05 1983 in Los Angeles, California

Richard Deming - Crime/Mystery/Detective Author c. 1960

Gloria Stoll Karn talks on video

Gloria Stoll Karn painted covers for Black Mask, Rangeland Romances, Detective Tales and Dime Mystery. This video was made as part of a recent exhibition of her work; she talks about how she got into pulp illustration. Worth watching.

Fanny Ellsworth article on writing western stories for Ranch Romances

Fanny Ellsworth, editor of Ranch Romances and Black Mask magazine

Fanny Ellsworth was one of the many uncredited women editors of the pulps who did an excellent job editing Ranch Romances - the longest running pulp that appeared from 1924 to 1971 - and Black Mask (the premier detective pulp that had the first print appearances of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler).  This article originally appeared in the newspaper The Ogden Standard-Examiner, on March 26, 1941. 

 

Collection of Frank Gruber's Black Mask short stories about Oliver Quade, Encyclopedia salesman just released

MysteriousPress just released the complete short stories of Oliver Quade, encyclopedia salesman. These stories originally appeared in the Thrilling Detective and Black Mask magazines.

Kevin Burton Smith has an excellent summary of the Oliver Quade series over at the excellent Thrilling Detective website.

I have the earlier collection Brass Knuckles, and when this released, I bought it in ebook format immediately to read the four stories that were not collected in that book. The stories are light, fun reads. If you read one or two at a time, they're good. Otherwise you might overdose on Gruber's pulp formula.

Links to the books in Ebook and paperback formats:

Ebook	Paperback

Altus Press reprints from Dime Detective and Black Mask

 

We live in an amazing time when a lot of pulp stories are being reprinted. Reprints from Altus Press (wide range of pulpy stuff), Black Dog Books (focuses on adventure pulps) and Haffner Press (concentrates on science fiction and fantasy, with some detective stuff as well), to mention a few, are doing an amazing job of selecting the best pulp stories and reprinting them.

For detective and mystery lovers, there is a lot to look forward to this fall. Altus Press has an amazing line of reprints from Black Mask and Dime Detective lined up.

Robert Sampson in Yesterday’s Faces – The Solvers:   The MacBride-Kennedy stories were one of Nebel’s major contributions to the magazine. Not as poetic as Chandler, not as realistically detailed as Hammett, the series is an extended masterpiece of hardboiled fiction, violence wrapped around a core of pity. MacBride and his wayward cops are unlike any police you meet in more gritty police procedurals. But in spite of their imperfect professional techniques, they come alive. They move through that terrible world you sometimes sense behind the headlines, that fouled place where graft, corruption, and murder are customary.   A comprehensive introduction to the series can be found at the Black Mask Magazine site.
	James Reasoner on Vee Brown:   Brown is one of the first playboy/detectives, but unlike Bruce Wayne or Richard Curtis Van Loan, his activities as a cop are known to all while the source of his considerable wealth is a secret. This leads a newspaper reporter to investigate him, and the reporter is the narrator of the story, not Brown, which makes for a considerable difference from Daly's yarns about Race Williams. The prose is more restrained, though it can get get pretty lurid in the action scenes. And Vee Brown is an interesting character, small and unathletic, but deadly with a gun and willing to meet the criminals on their own ground and deal out his own brand of justice. Cultured, well-educated, and wryly humorous even as he's gunning down the villains, it's almost like Niles Crane became the Spider instead of Richard Wentworth.
From the Thrilling Detective site:   CASS BLUE's a New York private dick who appeared in several short stories in Dime Detective back in the thirties. With his hard-ass attitude, a conveniently flexible set of morals and a blackjack on his hip, he's ready for just about anything. His pals include speakeasy owner Al Lascoine, who serves up booze and alibis.   The stories are all rendered in pulpster Lawrence's trademark first person, over-boiled prose style, full of gunfights and plot holes. Lawrence may not have been much of a writer, but he sure knew how to slap together the usual suspects to make a slam-bang action story.
	From the Thrilling Detective site:   Lawrence is probably best known for his tales of The Broadway Squad, the most ruthless, vicious gang of thugs to ever pin on badges in the pulps.   Courtesy alt.pulp:   Marty Marquis was an amoral detective in charge of a squad of thieves, extortionists and murderers, who were cops.
Walker Martin on Mr. Maddox (courtesy Mysteryfile):   Flynn’s major detective effort was the long running Mr Maddox series in Dime Detective. Between 1938 and running into 1950 he appeared at least 35 times, all of them long novelets, some close to 20,000 words. Each story was a mystery/detective tale starring Joe Maddox, a racetrack bookie who along with his sidekick, Oscar, was always involved in complex murder cases. His nemesis was a cop named Cassidy.   Now frankly, when I first started reading these stories in 1969 and 1970, I did not particularly like them at all. They were ok but definitely not favorites of mine. However, as I continued collecting Dime Detective and completing my set(274 issues), I realized that this was the longest running series by far and must of been very popular with the readers. So I kept giving him a chance and reading others in the series and you can guess what happened. I began to love the character and the stories.   Give Mr Maddox a try and you too might become a fan of “The Bland Buddha Of the Bangtail Circuit”.
	Ron Goulart on the Rambler in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine:   Murphy shared his creator’s peripatetic inclinations. In the dozen and a half Rambler yarns he crisscrossed the country, working as a reporter on big  metropolitan tabloids and small-town sheets. He generated front-page stories that unmasked gambling kingpins, cunning kidnappers, tommyguntoting hoodlums and once a “night-shirted order that [combined] the worst features of the Ku Klux and the Black Legion.” In all of the Rambler adventures certain things were certain. Murphy would always get a job on a newspaper, he would meet an attractive and bright young woman, he would crack a baffling case, and then, no matter how tempted to stay, would resume his rambles.
Can anyone help here? I couldn’t find anything online. Edit: From a comment by Walker Martin below: The Keyhole Kerry series lasted for 8 novelets during 1937-1939. He was a sort of Walter Winchell type reporter that had his own radio show and was constantly getting involved in murder cases. Another interesting series character from Fred Davis who was cranking out unusual detective series characters for editor Ken White at DIME DETECTIVE during the mid-thirties through the 1940's period.
	Hugh B. Cave:   Tough, cantankerous Inspector Allhoff, who lost his legs in a shoot-out with crooks armed with a machine-gun, lives across the street from Police Headquarters in a slum tenement building and solves intricate mysteries while guzzling endless cups of coffee. Allhoff is one of the characters who graced the lively pages of Dime Detective Magazine in the heyday of that magazine's highly successful career. These Inspector Allhoff stories are great detective mystery yarns, mostly developed via lively dialogue between Allhoff and his colleagues, and told in the first person by one of the colleagues. And from myself: I have enjoyed all the stories of Inspector Allhoff I've read so far in the collection, Footprints on the Brain.

Black Mask - recent reprints

 Recently, I've been seeing an increasing number of reprints from Black Mask, the hard-boiled crime fiction magazine magazine. Black Mask was the magazine that first published authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, the creators of the American private eye story. Otto Penzler, the editor of the Black Mask series of reprints, talks about it in this video.

Today, issues of Black Mask at it's peak routinely sell above 100$, putting it out of reach for most people. Thankfully, the reprints aren't priced so high and they're pulling out the best stories from Black Mask.

The first two books are recent reprints, and the third is _the_ definitive collection of stories from Black Mask.

 

	Ebook only