'Black Mask', as 'The Black Mask' became in 1927, is one of the most famous pulp magazines, with much of its fame hinging on its publication of hardboiled crime, starting with Carroll John Daly's 'Three Gun Terry' in May 1923, featuring a private investigator called Terry Mack; Daly opens up the stories in this issue, though not with a story that features any of his major detectives. All the biggest authors in detective fiction wrote for 'Black Mask', including Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich and Erle Stanley Gardner, whose story in this issue comes seven years before he created Perry Mason. Raymond Chandler's first eight published stories were in this magazine.

I have a bunch of copies of 'Black Mask' but sadly only two around this timeframe, so it's not going to come up often in this project. My previous issue to this is August 1922 while the next, after the one I have for September 1928, is April 1932. That's a shame because it was a crucial period for the genre, Hammett first appearing in December 1922, under the name of Peter Collinson; Gardner in the 15 December 1923 issue when it was bimonthly; and Chandler in December 1933. Why they all debuted in December, I have no idea. Maybe tough genres are best suited to the winter or maybe 'Black Mask' just dished out a lot of valuable literary Christmas presents.

This issue is before the magazine dedicated itself to detective fiction, so that's not all that's here. The Gardner story is a western, as is the Hal Rammel piece, while the only story I knew going in is true adventure. That's the first part of a serialisation of a 1907 non-fiction book, 'The Man-Eaters of Tsavo', the source material for three separate feature films. The rest are mysteries, but from a broad spectrum, the cover story mostly unfolding on water with a strong side of adventure and the others in varying degrees of politeness, from a sedate murder at a society party to a revenge story set within organised crime.

It's a big issue at 154 pages, but there are lots of ads, including all the last twenty-four pages; the page with an actual story on it is page 128. Those ads are mostly as expected, with a whole slew of training schools, books and other recognisable brands. At this point, I'm used to Wurlitzers being violins and Studebakers being watches, though the Listerine for dandruff ad isn't here. There are ads for other pulps, like 'Action Stories', 'The Danger Trail' and 'North-West Stories'. Oddly, there are two ads for muscle builders and two for caps that make money but only one to teach us how to be a detective. Go figure.

And yes, I did say caps that make money! "Do you really want to make from $75 to $100 a week?" I sure do! Well, "Just Wear this FREE Cap." Erm. The only thing odder than this concept of magical financial headgear is the fact that there are two different companies offering the same product in different words. They're Taylor Cap Manufacturers and Fits-U Cap Co., and both of them are in Cincinnati. I'm intrigued by the ad hawking used tyres and the one that states that you can grow taller, as if that's a medical tweak. The former involves a "secret process" that treats used tires to endow them with a much longer life, only at the Chicago Tire & Rubber Co. The latter says that, "Science has found the way to add inches to your height." Just order the course. Sure.

But we're here for the stories and the first is a Carroll John Daly, pioneer of the hardboiled crime story but a man mostly forgotten today. Tracey Rhodes leaves prison on parole after three years inside and he wants revenge on Parsons, as the man had promised him an alibi but didn't deliver. Unfortunately, Parsons is now the biggest mob boss in town. Fortunately, Tracey finds himself in work with rising competitor, Joe Saunders, to get the revenge he wants anyway. That puts him up against a former flame, Curly White, who works for Parsons now, but also with Molly O'Neil, who likes him a lot.

This is a complex story that's easy to follow even through a tangled web of plan and counter plan, offer and counter offer, scheme and counter scheme. I liked it and I liked Tracey Rhodes, who gets through a decent test to see if he's truly planning to go straight and tries to do the right thing at every point, even though revenge is an important component. It also boasts a word I didn't know, which is "gay-catted", but that's not an easy word to search the internet for in 2026. It would have been a far easier search in 1926 before the advent of furries. Any ideas?

I think I like the Erle Stanley Gardner even more, 'Buzzard Bait' being the second of seven stories about the killer "Black" Barr. Fed up with his dangerous reputation as a gunslinger and too many challenges, he tears off to Phoenix and pops his recognisable Black Barr outfit into storage. Now he's B. Black and he's hired on as a cowpuncher on the Gila Mesa. Jean Page owns the ranch there, the Diamond M, and she gets a couple of other new hires at the same time, Dick Graves and Pedro Murietta, who seem suspicious. Of course strange things are afoot at the Diamond M and it ought to have something to do with the west line, a long fence bordering a neighbouring ranch, to which foreman Bill Purdy sends B. Black.

This isn't a particularly surprising story but it's very well told, even with some overt telegraphing of the eventual romance angle. It's action western drama and "Black" Barr has a good showing in many ways, not only as a good gunslinger but also as a good detective and, perhaps most crucially, as a good man. I like him and would like to read more of those stories, all of which were published in 'The Black Mask' or 'Black Mask' from November 1925 to November 1928.

I knew Gardner coming in, but only John Henry Patterson of the other authors. That's Lieut. Col. J. H. Patterson D.S.O., to give him his full credit, and I only know him because of the book that shows up in part here, 'The Man-Eaters of Tsavo'. Patterson was a British military officer born in 1867, so very much a product of the Victorian colonialist era, who was sent to East Africa in 1898 to ensure that a railway bridge was built over the Tsavo river. Soon after he got there, two lions proceeded to terrorise the workforce for an astounding nine months before they were finally killed. Dozens died, possibly over a hundred, and work was shut down completely at one point for three weeks.

I know the story because it's been filmed multiple times. I reviewed 1953's 'Bwana Devil', the film that sparked the early fifties 3D craze, in my award winner, 'A Hundred in 2016', but, even with the likes of Robert Stack and Nigel Bruce in the cast, more people are likely to know the 1996 version, 'The Ghost and the Darkness', with Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas feature. There is another film in between them, 1959's 'Killers of Kilimanjaro', and I'll get to that one day because it's part of the First Thirty of one of my favourite actors, Donald Pleasence.

The privilege drips off the page from the outset, not necessarily white privilege but still privilege nonetheless. For instance, on the way to the Tsavo, Dr. McCulloch shoots an ostrich from the train and the driver has to backtrack so he can haul the body on board. Never mind the schedules of the rest of the passengers, let's stop for the doctor's ostrich! The lions show up very quickly and cause absolute chaos, but in good old English tradition, they keep calm and carry on, while doing all they can to track the maneaters, even though they mostly find things like Ungan Singh's head instead.

It's notable too that Patterson can recount highly serious sections about how they bolster up the defences on the camp and make all sorts of changes to minimise the potential for casualties, only to then lighten the mood with a humorous anecdote, as if to deliberately keep a story about two prolific man-eating lions from getting too gruesome. For instance, there's a Greek contractor who escapes one of the lions when it made off with his mattress instead of him. That's funny, right? It seems like a worthy irony. Except the very same Greek contractor promptly dies of thirst one day while taking a shortcut back to camp after shopping for cattle. Suddenly, I'm not laughing.

'The Man-Eaters of Tsavo' would continue over the next six issues, completing in April 1927, which isn't too surprising for a book length serialisation. However, there's an ad within the huge clump of them at the back that suggests that the very same book will be republished in 'Field & Stream', starting in the September issue. Given that this is the October issue of 'The Black Mask', I'm more than a little confused. Did they aim at 'Field & Stream' in September and then switch the location for some reason? Certainly, the two magazines were run by the same publisher.

While Patterson's book continues to be remembered and Gardner was the best-selling American author of his century (at the time of his death in 1970), Daly isn't remembered as much as he may deserve. However, the other authors here all remain obscure, even Carl Clausen, who was prolific from 1917 to 1944. Donald McGregor and Cyril J. Conrad sit an order of magnitude lower in output but still published a lot of stories over decade-long spans, even though they only just overlapped, the former active from 1911 to 1926 and the latter from 1925 to 1936. The other two, S. H. Weaver and Hal Rammel, only published six stories each, though the former debuted in the first issue of 'The Black Mask' and also sold a short story to 'Weird Tales' in 1923.

They're all good quality without any really standing out above their peers and the last of them is probably the weakest, so I guess I'll run through them in order for once, which means 'Full Speed Ahead' first. That's the McGregor and it was his final fiction story after a decade and a half, with only a quartet of articles still to come much later in 1940 and 1941. It's the story set on the water, where it begins with Tex Robbins of the Tex Robbins Agency out on the 'Dauntless' when a faster boat takes a wide berth, turns off her lights and speeds out to sea. That's suspicious.

Back on land, he finds that Lloyd Robertson, who runs the Oceanic Insurance Company, wants him to sign on as bodyguard for the next shipment of silk bales that's coming in. There have been two robberies already, worth sixty grand each, and another thirty grand's worth goes missing before Robbins can start work. There's four million more coming in soon, hence the urgency. This is half a mystery and half an adventure story that clearly wants to ditch the land and get back out on the water as soon as possible, even though the title ties to a speedboat chase that reaches the wild and crazy speeds of... thirty miles per hour.

Carl Clausen's 'The Turquoise Ring' stars another reliable detective, Constable James Hathaway, who's a twenty-year veteran at Rocky Ford, a hamlet of five hundred on Long Island. He's called in when Douglas Poole is murdered at Soundview Manor and nothing seems to add up. For instance, the body is staged like the suicide of a left-handed man but Poole was right-handed. He's wearing a ring he didn't own and a suit he hated and there's a cigarette, even though he doesn't smoke. It doesn't take a genius to figure out the gimmick here, but it's an enjoyable story with an excellent ending and a decent amount of honour.

That's apparent in the next story, whose hero is an honest lawyer, Howard Stevens. The story is 'A Knight's Night Out' by S. H. Weaver, those initials standing for Sarah Harbine, making her the only female author in this issue. I'm eager to see if the proliferation of female authors in 'Weird Tales' is echoed in any other pulp of the time, but that it doesn't seem to true thus far. Howard is taking care of his sister's apartment, because she's worried about burglars while she's away, but he finds a mystery instead in a red-eyed man and moaning from the apartment below.

It seems to tie to the Nacrosses, described as a "family of purple mystery" and it's a frantic story with Stevens bouncing around like a rubber ball trying to figure out what's going on. The romance after everything's successfully wrapped up is utterly inevitable, but the motives rely on Stevens's law background. Apparently there was a thing called the decedent estate law, which states that if a son dies intestate, leaving both parents, then the father inherits his property. I believe that the law means that we must be in New York State.

Cyril J. Conrad's 'A Breath of Suspicion' feels acutely like it’s part of a series focused on a detective called Mansfield Mills, but I don't see any evidence that that's the case. Maybe it was intended to be but it was the only story the author was able to sell to 'The Black Mask'. His most frequent pulp was another detective magazine called 'Clues', starting with his next story in January 1927. This is an exquisitely polite mystery and it's outrageously convoluted, with lots of people interconnecting in lots of ways. For a while, I had absolutely no idea what it was about, eventually revealing that it revolves around Elinor Colby, whose grandfather, Joseph Temple, is about to be murdered.

There's a busy party going on in Temple's house and everyone realises that the obvious suspect is Elinor's boyfriend, Walter Harmon, who was in the study trying to persuade Temple to allow him to marry her. Of course, that means that Walter is the only character we know didn't do it, even if we can't prove it. That's where Mansfield Mills comes in, a character utterly unlike every other in the story, standing out like a sore thumb but coming into his own when the mystery manifests. It's a pretty easy to mystery to figure out with a convenient confession by a dying man to wrap it up in a bow, but it's enjoyable, especially for the character dynamics.

Finally, there's the most unusual story, 'So Spake the Prophet' by Hal Rammel. He was new at the time, his six-story output started by three in September and October alone, with the other three published by 1928, meaning that he started out strong but then faded away quickly for whatever reason. The Great Spiegel arrives in Cactus Junction by freight train, intending to get work in Dr. Wilmington De Vito's medicine show, which he does, as a fake medium telling the audience what they want to hear and hawking his boss's pills in the process. The best aspect to it is that it didn't remotely go to a place I expected it to go and there's a good dose of irony to how it works out.

That's it for my only 1926 issue of 'The Black Mask' but, unless I can track down more copies, I'll be back in a couple of years for the September 1928 issue of what had become simply 'Black Mask'. It features another bunch of authors I don't know, but another Carroll John Daly, this time starring his most famous detective, Race Williams, and another "Black" Barr novelette from Erle Stanley Gardner. ~~ Hal C F Astell