A century ago, in the pages of the pulp magazine Black Mask, the writers Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett invented hard-boiled crime fiction. They positioned Black Mask as the flagship of this influential genre and used their respective detective characters Race Williams and the Continental Op to battle the Ku Klux Klan’s nativist racial fantasy with two-fisted gusto and a spray of bullets.
Black Mask’s origin hardly prepares us, however, for the magazine’s legacy. It was launched in April 1920 by the editors of The Smart Set, H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, to subsidize that more prestigious publication and to sop up some of the fiction submissions that didn’t quite fit in the pages of their “Magazine of Cleverness.” At the helm of The Smart Set since 1914, Mencken and Nathan aimed for the ironic, sophisticated, and urbane market years before The New Yorker debuted in 1925. F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Dorothy Parker, Willa Cather, Ezra Pound, Eugene O’Neill, Somerset Maugham, and Anita Loos, among many others, were found in its pages.
But literature was as hard a sell then as it is now. Mencken and Nathan had figured out how to jumpstart pulps and sell them off quickly for a nice mark-up they could channel into their more respectable publication. Using pseudonyms, they pumped and dumped The Parisienne and Saucy Stories. These “sideline pulps” promised more eroticism than they delivered, writes curator Gabrielle Dean in her examination of the “clever packaging” the editors used in The Smart Set family of publications. As always, sex sold; and that’s what counted.
Pulp magazines were designed to be disposable. Named after the cheap pulpwood paper they were printed on, they aimed for a mass audience—particularly working-class readers—and specialized in genres like detective, erotica, science fiction, and romance. Lurid, over-the-top cover art made the pulps both notorious and iconic.
In her examination of the mostly white working-class men who made up the readership of Black Mask and other detective pulps, American Studies scholar Erin A. Smith stresses how such magazines traded on an ideal of tough masculinity. This was combined with ads for self-improvement via “job training by correspondence, body-building programs, elocution lessons, and conduct manuals.” Here’s your cake, these pulps seem to say, and here’s how to buy the skills you need to eat it.