Bill Crider - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 1. Whole No. 797, January 2008

As publisher and conservator of Black Mask Magazine , it is a great pleasure for me to help return the publication, after more than a thirty-year absence, to the pages of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Black Mask (1920–1951) introduced the American hardboiled detective to our popular culture in the early 1920s and has influenced magazines and books, radio, movies, television, and every new form of popular entertainment up to this day.

Perhaps even more importantly, particularly in the writing of Dashiell Hammett and later Raymond Chandler, Black Mask Magazine helped change the way American fiction (and literature) was written and paced. Although Hemingway is routinely congratulated for the invention of the terse, “modern” declarative sentence, Gertrude Stein (Hemingway’s mentor) made it clear in her book Narration that it was Dashiell Hammett, in his Black Mask work, who originated the modern narrative style. As to pace, as Raymond Chandler often explained, in the Black Mask story, incident and action piled on action were more important than a clear linear plot. A Black Mask tale was hard-hitting and left the reader breathless.

Black Mask Magazine is also famous, of course, for taking mystery stories out of the parlors of polite society and into the dark underworld of the ever-evolving mean streets of the modern metropolis.

Fred Dannay, an original member of the writing team called Ellery Queen, and the founding editor of EQMM, appreciated as much as anyone the importance of Black Mask to the history of the detective story. During the 1940s and 1950s when Dashiell Hammett was out of favor because of his political views, Mr. Dannay helped keep Hammett’s Black Mask stories in print in a celebrated series of Dell paperbacks, which he edited and promoted.

After 1951, when Black Mask Magazine stopped publishing in America, Mr. Dannay acquired the title and kept Black Mask alive in the pages of EQMM, introducing the Black Mask Department, which featured a story from Black Mask (or a tale in the Black Mask style) in almost every issue of EQMM.

In 1973, when I was acquiring all the rights to Black Mask (which by that time had been scattered among many different companies), Mr. Dannay was kind enough to pass the Black Mask name and legacy over to me, and the Black Mask Department in EQMM came to an end. And so I end this brief introduction where I began, by stating again my pleasure in helping to bring Black Mask back to the pages of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine .

Copyright (c) 2007 Keith Alan Deutsch

What can readers expect from EQMm’s newly restored department Black Mask? Selections will include reprints from the original magazine, rediscovered with the assistance of conservator Keith Alan Deutsch, and new stories commissioned and chosen by EQMm’s own editors. Since virtually all of contemporary “hardboiled” and “noir” fiction has qualities that can be traced back to the great early contributors to Black Mask , we will consider the full range of the current field to be our domain, with emphasis (when we can find them) on fast-paced stories full of action.

The most important of all the early contributors to Black Mask was Dashiell Hammett, whose stories about his “Continental Op,” during the magazine’s first decade, brought him immediate fame. We begin our series with a reprint of one of the most intriguing of the Continental Op stories, “Bodies Piled Up,” a twisty mix of action yarn, gangster tale, and detective puzzle. Though many of his stories (like “Bodies Piled Up”) fall squarely within genre fiction, Hammett’s authentic characterizations and his uncompromising depictions of American society earned him a place in mainstream literature as well. His work has become the standard beside which the work of crime writers at the so-called “literary” end of the spectrum is judged. In 1992, the International Association of Crime Writers established an award in Hammett’s name “for literary excellence in the field of crime writing.” For this first Black Mask issue we have paired our Hammett reprint with a new story by the 2005 winner of that award, Chuck Hogan. Mr. Hogan’s “Two Thousand Volts” is a classic example of the “noir” story: a tale about characters who cannot put things right without crossing a dangerous moral boundary, and in which justice, once considered essential to the conclusion of a mystery, has become something admitting shades of gray.

Just as the original Black Mask Magazine was hard-hitting, readers of our new series should expect the tales contained under this banner to be edgy, and sometimes more violent and harsher in language than other EQMM stories. We hope you’ll find this expansion of our range of fiction an enhancement to the magazine. We’ll be featuring the department every other month, and we’ve got some treats in store, including several never before published stories by another past master of hardboiled fiction, Mickey Spillane. Stay tuned!

(c)2007 by Keith Alan Deutsch

Among the many good collections of the work of Dashiell Hammett is the recently published The Drain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Stories (Everyman’s Library, September 2007) with an introduction by James Ellroy. Also well worth a look is the 2005 collection Lost Stories (Vince Emery Productions), introduced by Joe Gores, which includes some stories never before reprinted in book form.

The Montgomery Hotel’s regular detective had taken his last week’s rake-off from the hotel bootlegger in merchandise in-stead of cash, had drunk it down, had fallen asleep in the lobby, and had been fired. I happened to be the only idle operative in the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco branch at the time, and thus it came about that I had three days of hotel-coppering while a man was being found to take the job permanently.

The Montgomery is a quiet hotel of the better sort, and so I had a very restful time of it — until the third and last day. Then things changed.

I came down into the lobby that afternoon to find Stacey, the assistant manager, hunting for me.

“One of the maids just phoned that there’s something wrong up in 906,” he said.

We went up to that room together. The door was open. In the center of the floor stood a maid, staring goggle-eyed at the closed door of the clothespress. From under it, extending perhaps a foot across the floor toward us, was a snake-shaped ribbon of blood.

I stepped past the maid and tried the door. It was unlocked. I opened it. Slowly, rigidly, a man pitched out into my arms — pitched out backward — and there was a six-inch slit down the back of his coat, and the coat was wet and sticky.

That wasn’t altogether a surprise: The blood on the floor had prepared me for something of the sort. But when another followed him — facing me, this one, with a dark, distorted face — I dropped the one I had caught and jumped back.

And as I jumped a third man came tumbling out after the others.

From behind me came a scream and a thud as the maid fainted. I wasn’t feeling any too steady myself. I’m no sensitive plant, and I’ve looked at a lot of unlovely sights in my time, but for weeks afterward I could see those three dead men coming out of that clothespress to pile up at my feet: coming out slowly — almost deliberately — in a ghastly game of “follow your leader.”