506 Making It New: 1900–1945into fashion, and soon afterwards the mass audience tale of detection emerged. “Old
Sleuth, the Detective” was published in Fireside Companion in 1872 and was soon
followed by many other fictional investigators. Not all of them were men – successful
series featured such female sleuths as Round Kate and the Western Lady Detective.
But the most popular of them was Nick Carter, whose career spanning two decades
of publication began in 1886 in New York Weekly. These dime-novel detectives
offered little in the way of character complexity or development; they were, for the
most part, narrative ciphers, convenient vehicles for carrying a plot full of action
and adventure to its inevitable conclusion. Contrivances though they were, however,
they signaled the beginning of the transference of the hero from the wide open
spaces of the West to the cavernous streets of the city. Following on them, the
detective in American twentieth-century fiction would slowly supplant the cowboy
as a mythic embodiment of national values: an urban individualist whose
commitment to his own code was more internalized, more a matter of maneuvering
his way within the labyrinth of society rather than outside it. From 1915, prototypical
detective stories also began to appear in the pulp magazines, the first being
a conversion of a dime novel thriller, Nick Carter: which, in addition to the
eponymous hero, featured tales about other sleuths. In this genre, as in the others,
pulps soon replaced dime novels and story-paper weeklies as the staple source of
cheap fiction. So, by the late 1920s, dime novels and weeklies were virtually extinct.
Prior to that, in 1920, H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan had founded a pulp
monthly called The Black Mask. Their aim in starting what Mencken dismissively
referred to as “a lousy magazine” was to subsidize another periodical they owned,
the Smart Set, a “magazine of cleverness” that was in constant financial trouble. The
magazine began by publishing traditional drawing-room mysteries, with mannered
characters modeled after English stereotypes. After Mencken and Nathan sold it,
however, at a tidy profit, it became the medium for a new kind of detective tale,
involving hardbitten detectives and tough-minded stories, and reflecting the gritty
realities of post-World War I America. Many writers were to experiment with writing
in this vein for The Black Mask, before it began to decline in the 1940s, supplanted
by its numerous imitators like Black Aces, Dime Detective, Detective Tales, and New
Detective. They included John Carroll Daly (1889–1958) and Earle Stanley Gardner
(1889–1970). But easily the most important were Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961)
and, later in the history of the magazine, Raymond Chandler (1888–1959).
Dashiell Hammett had worked as a private detective for the Pinkerton Agency in
San Francisco, shortly before serving in the army in World War I. That experience
served him well in his stories for The Black Mask, set in a sharp and credibly drawn
northern California landscape. Beginning in 1923, they featured a character called
the Continental Op, the toughest and shrewdest investigator in an outfit called the
Continental Detective Agency. Altogether, the Op was to appear in two dozen Black
Mask stories, and in the serialized versions of the novels, The Dain Curse (1929) and
Red Harvest (1929). His other, hugely influential heroes were the mildly inebriate
husband and wife team of Nick and Nora Charles, in The Thin Man (1934), and the
protagonist in what is perhaps the single most important private-eye novel,GGray_c04.indd 506ray_c 04 .indd 506 8 8/1/2011 7:54:06 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 06 AM