The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories
- Автор: Adams Cleve F., Babcock Dwight V.
- Год: 2010
- Язык: английский
- Год: A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
- ISBN: 978-0-307-45543-7
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like “Murder Is Bad Luck,” “Ten Carets of Lead,” and “Drop Dead Twice.” Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America’s finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this.
I became friends with Prudence Whitfield and bought a few of her husband’s stories for the magazine from her. In time she told me wonderful stories about how Hammett, evidently her lover, had written lines in Hellman’s plays. Hammett and Raoul Whitfield had been friends since the early 1920s, and, when Prudence came along and married Raoul, she became one of the “hard-drinking boys.” She loaned me about ten unpublished Whitfield stories to read, but asked me not to copy them, and I didn’t.
Adrian Lopez decided not to continue publishing Black Mask, even though I had produced a second issue ready to go to press. The first issue had done well on the stands, and even garnered a spread in the Philadelphia Inquirer under the headline: “Black Mask Returns to the Newsstand.” The reasons for abandoning the project are complex and no longer important. After my one issue came out, I received queries from many writers as well as Hollywood people. I continued working on Black Mask. I had a number of telephone conversations with James M. Cain, who wanted me to make it clear that he was not a hard-boiled writer and did not want to be lumped in with Hammett and the Black Mask boys. He considered his major theme one of sexual passion driving and corrupting behavior between a man and a woman in a doomed relationship.
In the late 1970s, when the Filipacchi Group (now Hachette Filipacchi Media) came to the United States from France to produce a doomed new edition of Look magazine, they bought Popular Publications from David Geller in order to acquire Argosy. Through mutual acquaintances in publishing, I met their international attorney, Didier Guérin, and after a number of talks, he made it clear that they wanted to sell a few of Popular’s publications, like Camera 35, which was still making money, and Railroad magazine, which had been the first special-interest pulp magazine started by Munsey in the 1880s. Amazingly, it was still making money. They did not know what to do with the pulps. So we made a deal. They agreed that despite my ownership of the name Black Mask through purchase from EQMM, they would transfer all interest, title, and goodwill in Black Mask, and all the copyrights to all the fiction and all the art, to me. They also transferred certain intellectual property rights to all the original Popular Publications pulps Henry Steeger had originated, as well as all the Munsey pulps Steeger had purchased in the 1940s. This acquisition included some Street and Smith pulps Popular acquired in 1949. In exchange I gave service and other considerations to the Filipacchi Group, which had assumed the name Popular Publications International when it purchased David Geller’s holdings. I also helped them sell Railroad magazine in return for my Popular intellectual property rights.
Since those days, I have licensed many stories from Black Mask for book publication. I initiated a Black Mask Web site, blackmaskmagazine.com, in 2000. In 2007, I licensed back to EQMM, now published by Dell, the right to run a Black Mask department. Christmas 2008 saw the first CD issue of Black Mask Audio Magazine, full-cast dramatizations with sound effects and music of classic Black Mask tales produced with Blackstone Audio. Included will be a full-length performance of The Maltese Falcon authorized by Dashiell Hammett’s estate.
For readers interested in how the stage was set for the appearance of Black Mask magazine in 1920, here are a number of observations and facts about fiction magazines in America that may put my personal history in perspective.
Prior to the Civil War, magazines, like newspapers (which also published fiction), were local affairs primarily associated with cities. For example, all of the magazines that published Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction during the 1830s and 1840s were sold through subscription lists and published for readers near cities like Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia. At most, such publications had no more than three thousand subscribers.
Even Charles Dickens, whose novels were serialized in magazines and who became the first popular fiction sensation in America in the 1840s, reached only a small segment of the American population.
It was not until the American Civil War that literacy in the United States blossomed to numbers that would support a true mass market for magazine fiction. But it was the dime novel (five-and ten-cent weekly libraries of rough-paper books), and not magazines, that first found a regional, and then a national, audience for fiction during the last half of the nineteenth century.
Although it is primarily the American West that provides the mythology for most dime-novel fiction, the second-favorite theme of these first mass-market American fiction publications was crime and detection in the great cities, particularly New York. These two major themes of nineteenth-century dime-novel fiction, those that feature the American cowboy hero of the bright plains, or those that feature the American detective hero of the dark cities, became the two great streams of popular fiction and popular culture in twentieth-century America.
The longest-running American detective hero, Street and Smith’s Nick Carter, got his start in an 1886 dime novel that was so popular the character was featured in a weekly dime-novel series, the Nick Carter Library. In 1915, it became Street and Smith’s first mystery pulp, Detective Story Magazine. Similarly, in 1919, the dime-novel series starring the iconic hero Buffalo Bill, the New Buffalo Bill Weekly, became Street and Smith’s first Western pulp, Western Story Magazine.
But it was not Street and Smith that killed the dime novel. It was a genius of American magazine publishing, Frank Andrew Munsey (1854–1925), who invented the American pulp fiction magazine and ended the reign of the crudely designed dime novel. In 1896, Munsey’s Argosy magazine became the first true pulp, switching to an all-fiction format of 192 pages on seven-by-ten-inch untrimmed paper. With a cover price of less than half (ten cents) of more exclusive (twenty-five-cent) slick-paper magazines, circulation grew like a revelation, and by 1903 Argosy sold half a million copies per month.
Munsey was the first to take the new high-speed printing presses to print on inexpensive pulp paper to produce large runs of genre-fiction magazines at discounted cover prices that attracted a large working-class readership that could not afford and was not interested in the content of more expensive slick-paper magazines. Munsey also saw that large circulation could attract advertising as a major source of publishing income. The Argosy for December 1907 provides a wonderful history of the magazine, and of Munsey’s publishing struggles, “told” by Munsey.
Modern magazines, both pulps and slicks, arose at the turn of the twentieth century as a handmaiden to technological advances in printing and marketing. Magazines could be produced as designed objects with color covers, line drawings, and half-tone images to create a graphic editorial environment to sell their content. They also became a powerful emotional and visual marketing environment to sell new brand-name products.