Before the mid-1920's, most pulp mystery authors were little more than meek imitators of the great English pioneers. Most of their stories featured stereotypical elements -- the brilliant detective, the clueless sidekick and narrator, the cases that were too baffling for the police -- in endless reiterations of the Sherlock Homes formula.

Things began to change in 1923, in a previously undistinguished mystery and adventure magazine named Black Mask. That year marked the appearance of two new authors, Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett. Daly wrote about a two-fisted vigilante named Race Williams, who shot the bad guys to pieces and slept with a gun in his hand. Dashiell Hammett, on the other hand, wrote far more realistic stories about a fat, middle-aged detective known as The Continental Op.

While Daly faded into obscurity, Hammett became a national sensation, moving on to publish such novels as The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. Under the editorship of Joseph T. Shaw, a number of popular writers followed in Black Mask, including Earle Stanley Gardner (author of the Perry Mason novels), Frederick Nebel, Paul Cain, Raoul Whitfield, and most famously of all, Raymond Chandler, who would go on to write The Big Sleep and other Phillip Marlowe stories. More than anyone else, Hammett and Chandler, together, gave us the hard-boiled genre we know today.

After the hard-boiled formulae became popular, Black Mask faced competitors from a hugh number of imitators, until the tough, wise-cracking private eye became something of a cliche. A few other magazines merit distinction: Dime Detective, by Popular Publications, was the most popular mystery pulp of the era; it became the home to Raymond Chandler and other Black Mask alumni after Joseph Shaw was fired in 1936. Ten Detective Aces specialized in mysteries tinged with horror and weird menace. Spicy Detective and Hollywood Detective featured stereotypical private-eye stories, but charged with erotic content that was considered pornographic in its day. Other magazines, such as Detective Tales, shied away from the cool, hard-boiled style, and emphasized a more emotionally intense narrative, characteristic of Cornell Woolrich and other pioneers of noir. Probably the most bizarre detective pulp was Dime Mystery, which after pioneering the "Weird Menace" genre, specialized in "defective detectives" with deformities. (Fortunately, this experiment didn't last long.)

Few of these variations had much long-term impact. In the end, the hard-boiled school survived them all, and became one of the most popular genres in the pulp era and beyond.

Bibliography

There are probably as many books on private-eye fiction as there are on all other pulps put together. Possibly the best place to begin is William Nolan's collection, The Black Mask Boys. Another good source is Ron Goulart's The Dime Detectives. There are also innumerable collections of short-stories from the era; Herbert Rhum's The Hard-Boiled Detective is a collection of stories from Black Mask, while Ron Goulart's The Hard-Boiled Dicks, and The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction and Hard Boiled, both edited by Bill Prozini, collect stories from a broader range of magazines (many from after the pulp era).

Other Sites

You can find more information about hard-boiled fiction at any of the following sites:

• This site talks about the History of the Hard Boiled Mystery.
• Here's a site full of Mystery Sites to Visit.
• The Continental Op Page -- Devoted to Hammett's first detective hero.  (If you want to read about his more famous creation, Sam Spade, turn to this page on The Maltese Falcon.)
• Shamus -- This site is a tribute to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe.
• Here's a page devoted to Hard Boiled authors in Maryland --  Hammett, Cain, Gresham, and Pelecanos.
• RARA-AVIS -- The homepage for William Denton's newsgroup of hard-boiled fiction. Useful bibliographies and paperback images, among other things.
• This is the main site for the Hard-Boiled Noir Web Ring.
• Hard-Boiled Slang -- William Denton has compiled a useful glossary of the slang used in the hard-boiled classics.
• This is a page devoted to Pulp Fiction Postcards by Archive Books.
• James Stephenson's Paperback and Pulp Images -- Another site full of pulp and paperback images.
• Hard Boiled -- Dedicated to hard boiled literature, film noir, radio and TV.
• Black Widow's Web -- Another page with lots of links to mystery sites.
• Locked-Room Murders -- Here's a discussion of a mystery subgenre that was as popular in the pulps as anywhere else.
• You can find sites devoted to post-pulp hard boiled stories in the last section of The Pulp Page, The End.