Joseph T. Shaw The Man Behind Black Mask

Between 1926 and 1936, Shaw edited Black Mask magazine. The pioneering first stories of Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett had just begun to appear in its pages. Shaw recognized in their hard-boiled treatment of the American crime story the potential for a new literary school. Working closely with his hand-picked writers, he pulled the magazine back from the brink of cancellation, and transformed the staid detective story into a vigorous and modern genre, discovering and championing important inheritors of this new tradition, among them, Raymond Chandler.
Here, in the first biography ever written of this editorial giant, his son relates the full fascinating story of the man behind the revolutionary editorial person.