The Black Mask School

Hardboiled fiction originated in short-story form, in pulp magazines such as Black Mask (edited by the legendary Joseph Shaw), but it couldn't stay there forever. By the late 1920s and early 30s, spurred on by the success of W. R. Burnett's Little Caesar, several of the Black Mask writers were ready to tackle novel-length fiction. In this article we'll look at three novels from the Black Mask school: Paul Cain's Fast One; Raoul Whitfield's Death In A Bowl; and Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.

Fast One opens with Kells, a gambler and former gunman, being courted by several players in an L. A. turf war. Kells does his best to stay out of it, but the opposing factions make it clear he's either with them or against them. When he still declines, he's first framed for murder, then nearly killed. Fighting at first only to save his skin, soon Kells begins to realize that he's in a perfect position to play the factions against each other and take over the city himself. He and his friends proceed to do exactly this, but their reign is short-lived and ends bloodily.

In Death In A Bowl, a feud between a screenwriter and a director escalates into a fistfight. Each of the combatants separately comes to private eye Ben Jardinn to act as a guarantor; if the director, Ernst Reiner, is killed, he wants Jardinn to investigate. Conversely, Howard Frey, the screenwriter, wants the detective to vouch for him. All this comes to a head during a concert in the Hollywood Bowl. Hans Reiner, the director's brother and a prominent conductor, is shot dead during the performance. Jardinn's investigation leads him to suspect not just Frey but star actress Maya Rand, who had her own quarrels with the Reiners, and Ernst Reiner himself. In addition, Jardinn finds he can't trust anyone within his own agency, as both his partner and their assistant seem to have loyalties elsewhere.

The Maltese Falcon is the most famous of these books, and arguably the most famous American detective novel. San Francisco detective Sam Spade is approached by a woman giving her name as Wonderly. She's in town trying to locate her sister, and has a meeting set for that evening with her sister's boyfriend, Floyd Thursby. Spade's partner Miles Archer agrees to follow Thursby. That night, Archer is murdered. Some time later, after Spade has learned of his partner's death, Thursby is killed as well, with Spade a prime suspect. Soon Spade catches up with Wonderly, whose real name is Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and of course, she's not looking for her sister. It turns out she's involved with an international gang of thieves who have stolen a rare prize - a jeweled bird presented by the knights of Malta to Charles V of Spain. Now Spade has to find the bird as well as his partner's killer.

So, what do these three books have in common? First, they are very similar in style. One of the great innovations of Black Mask was the attempt to capture the idiom of the American streets on the page. The result is a tough, spare style, but self-consciously so, and sometimes forced and awkward. To a modern reader familiar with later hardboiled works, it almost sounds like a parody of itself. This style doesn't always mesh well with the lurid plots involving colorful bands of jewel thieves, Hollywood intrigue, or high-level corruption. These were, however, pulp stories, and if they tended towards the outlandish, that wasn't unusual for the period.

What was unusual were the protagonists, the second point of similarity. Kells, Jardinn, and Spade are so hardboiled that they're practically men of iron. They've cut themselves off from emotion in order to survive. Love or friendship don't count for much; Spade, for example, sleeps with his partner's wife, and when Archer is killed casually tells his secretary to get rid of his desk and have his name removed from the door. Later he gives up his lover to the police, sending her to prison or the electric chair.

One reason for this isolation: these men can be trusted, but few others in their world can. Kells is betrayed by his friends and survives because he knew their friendship wasn't real. Jardinn suspects both his partner and his office girl of working against his interests; when the girl, who has a crush on him, is killed, he represses any feelings he has towards her in order to get the killer. Brigid tells Sam several different stories, finally telling him the truth only when he's discovered it himself. The lesson is that loyalty is for suckers, and these are men who "won't play the sap".

Within a few years, Raymond Chandler would rework the figure of the detective into a lonely man who wants more than survival, and his private eye Philip Marlowe soon eclipsed his predecessors in influence. Mickey Spillane and the writers of the 1950s and 60s who followed him would return to the realistic street vernacular and unsentimental protagonists, returning to and sometimes outdoing the hardboiled Black Mask style.

Ironically, Cain, Whitfield, and Hammett each had ceased making any real contributions to the field within a few years. Cain (under the name Peter Ruric) worked on the fringes of the film industry, dying in obscurity many years later. Whitfield died at 46, barely fifteen years after Death In A Bowl was published. Though Hammett's work continued to be popular, and has been regularly "rediscovered" by subsequent generations, he published very little after The Thin Man in 1933, and no novel length works.

The authors who graduated from Black Mask may not have had long careers, and the magazine's super-hardboiled style fell from popularity as more vulnerable heroes became popular, but even now, over seventy years since these books were published, it's possible to pick up a copy and recognize the similarities to today's hardboiled fiction. Unlike the English country manor, the American street scene of the Black Mask days is still contemporary - and so is the fiction.