BENGALURU: In this and the next few articles, I will attempt to describe the fork in the road which split detective fiction into the cozies and the hardboiled genres in the 1920’s; and specifically focus on the hardboiled genre and a few of its leading lights.
Detective fiction started as a genre in the mid-1800s, with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue and other adventures of the detective C August Dupin. Some exceptional novels and short stories followed, most notably those of Wilkie Collins and Émile Gaboriau. The last years of the 1800s saw the arrival of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes and the Golden Age of detective fiction. Mostly, these mysteries eschewed too much of blood-and-gore, and were neither committed, nor solved by the common man. All that would change with the advent of the hardboiled detective and the Black Mask magazine.
The Smart Set, an American high-end literary magazine, had its publishing run from 1900 to 1930. It wasn’t especially successful, so its chief editor, HL Mencken, in 1920, devised a way to keep the magazine afloat. He launched a few offshoot pulp magazines as money-making ventures. One of them was Black Mask, a magazine of crime and detection. That decision changed the face of mystery fiction forever, and made the genre grow up in a hurry.
Black Mask was not initially thought to be a place for crime and mystery alone, and indeed claimed to have ‘Five magazines in one: the best stories available of adventure, the best mystery and detective stories, the best romances, the best love stories, and the best stories of the occult’. The initial editions were rather unexceptional, but they tasted some measure of success. After running eight issues, Mencken and his partner sold its rights to the publishers, Eltinge Warner and Eugene Crow, for a not-unsubstantial-for-the-age sum of $12,500.
The new ownership, and the recruitment of a new editor, ‘Cap’ Joseph Shaw, changed the direction of the magazine to a mystery-only publication. One of the most successful writers of the initial days was Carroll John Daly, who wrote perhaps the earliest hardboiled mysteries. Daly’s detectives, the tough-talking Terry Mack and Race Williams, would perhaps be rather crude to the taste of the sophisticated reader, but the buying public lapped it up. The editor, Shaw, was quick to realize the potential of the private detective who spoke like, and spoke to the common-man reader; and made this genre the priority of the magazine. What followed was the start of the hardboiled genre, something which continues to influence the mystery writers of the day. This was around the time when the first important writer of the hardboiled genre, Dashiell Hammett came to write for Black Mask. Hammett would establish, embellish, and popularize the hardboiled mystery, and the hardboiled mystery would be the making of him.
How Hammett, and his successors James M Cain, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane and others changed the tapestry of mystery fiction and American literature in general, though, is a story for another day.