![]() ![]() That story was Carroll John Daly’s crime novelette “Three Gun Terry.” Then in May 1923, a story appeared in The Black Mask that would forever change pulp fiction and American culture as a whole. This article originally appeared in The Pulpster (#19) for PulpFest 2010. ![]() Like television of today, the pulps were formula writing at its very best or, more often than not, its very worst. With their provocative titles, lurid covers, and racy illustrations, they were a cradle of sensationalism. Like all pulp magazines, The Black Mask “was about three things: action, adventure, and sex, not necessarily in that order.” In an era when literacy had never been higher, when the stock market was booming, the pulps enjoyed wide popular appeal. The Black Mask had been in circulation since 1920. In Paris, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and other expatriate writers were creating a revolution in literature that would come to be known as “modernism.” Stateside in Manhattan, another literary revolution was taking place, not in the garrets of Greenwich Village but in a 128-page illustrated pulp fiction magazine called The Black Mask. Hitler tried to seize Munich’s city government. ![]() The carnage of World War I had convinced Americans that “all Gods were dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” It was time to have fun, to forget the past, and, as the song said, “In the meantime, in between time, ain’t we got fun.” In America, Prohibition was swinging to the rhythms of jazz, a new style of music one commentator said “was the first step toward hell.” That hell was what F. Carroll John Daly Analyzing Carroll John Daly’s hard-boiled novelette reveals why he was eclipsed by Dashiell Hammett.ġ923 was a busy year. ![]()
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