The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

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This is not the first anthology to be devoted entirely to the mystery fiction contained in the pages of Black Mask magazine, but I am confident that I will be accused of neither hyperbole nor immodesty when I state unequivocally that it is the biggest and most comprehensive. Indeed, apart from The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, published by Vintage in 2007 and to which this volume is a sequel of sorts, The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories is the biggest and most comprehensive collection of pulp crime fiction ever published.

The first anthology of Black Mask stories, The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), was compiled and edited by the legendary editor Joseph T. Shaw, who was more responsible than anyone else for the elevation of the magazine to the stature it achieved during his tenure and which it still enjoys today, all these years after it ceased publication. Had he done nothing more than write to Dashiell Hammett to encourage him to produce a detective story for the magazine, Shaw would still have gone down in the history of the American mystery story as one of its handful of most significant and influential figures. This groundbreaking book was subtitled “Early Stories from Black Mask” and contained fifteen stories by many of the stalwarts who regularly contributed to the magazine, eleven of whom are also in these pages, though not with the same stories. While the remaining four authors had some historical interest, the fact that they have gone on to be largely forgotten today is not pure happenstance. Few readers of this current volume will lament the absence of J. J.

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