Books
January, 1977
In the olden days before television, when people weren't procreating, busting frontiers or watching stock markets crash, they were reading schlock. But their schlock, unlike ours, was high quality. For example, in 1920, H. L. Mencken started a magazine called Black Mask, which published the authors who would shape the modern detective story. The Hard-Boiled Detective (Random House), edited by Herbert Ruhm, is a collection of 14 of the best yarns published in Black Mask between 1920 and 1951, inc...
