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

EQMM and Black Mask by Janet Hutchings

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