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

Black Mask by Keith Alan Deutsch

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