Creeping Siamese and Other Stories Read Free Page A

sometimes, he would use them to enjoy ebooks. We hope you enjoy this one.
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    J.M.R.

INTRODUCTION
    The Later Years: 1926–1930
    Dashiell Hammett served his apprenticeship under editors Sutton and Cody, but by the end of 1925 he had outgrown them. When Cody refused his demand for more money, Hammett quit the magazine, and in March 1926 he took a job as advertising manager at Albert S. Samuels Jewelry Store in San Francisco, “the House of Lucky Wedding Rings.” The pay was $350 per month (about $55,000 per year in 2015 dollars), double his monthly income from writing for the pulps. It was his first full-time job in at least three years and, more likely, since he left the army. At Samuels he impressed his boss with his energy and ingenuity, working from 8 to 6, six days a week—but it was too much. Five months later, on 20 July, he was found collapsed in his office, lying in a pool of blood. His younger daughter Josephine was not quite two months old. Eight weeks later, Samuels wrote a notarized letter to the Veterans Bureau certifying that Hammett had resigned his position due to ill health. His earnings, now reduced to disability payments, dropped to $80 per month plus payment for some part-time work he did for Samuels. Moreover, the Veterans Bureau nurses insisted that Hammett live apart from his wife and children, which meant two rent payments. Within three months, he moved to 891 Post St. (the address of Sam Spade’s apartment in The Maltese Falcon ) and Jose and the girls stayed first in an apartment in San Francisco, then across San Francisco Bay in Fairfax in Marin County. Hammett, meanwhile, tried to revive his advertising career from his apartment, publishing how-to articles in Western Advertising.
    Meanwhile, a shakeup was materializing at Black Mask. Circulation was decreasing sharply, and Cody, whose attentions were divided among other Pro-Distributors projects, needed a new editor to revitalize the magazine. The successful applicant was a fifty-one-year old aspiring mystery writer who had submitted his first story to Black Mask in summer 1926. Joseph Thompson Shaw was a most unlikely candidate to edit a pulp detective-fiction magazine. He was a graduate of Bowdoin College, where he was a member of the editorial board for the school literary magazine. He was a four-time national sabers champion. He had worked as a journalist at The New York World , as a clerk at G. P. Putnam’s publishing company, and as editor of American Textile Journal, before embarking on a successful career in the textile business. Then he opened his own office to sell securities on the stock exchange. He wrote a history of the textile industry, From Wool to Cloth (American Woolen Co., 1904), and a travel book, Spain of To-Day (NY: Grafton, 1909). During WWI he served as a captain in the army and after the war as an officer in the American Relief Administration in France, and as director of the Bureau for Children’s Relief in Czechoslovakia. And he was socially connected. In February 1925, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that he was a member of the Pinehurst Country Club in Brooklyn, where he was frequently seen taking tea and dancing with his wife after polo and golf matches. Shaw’s first mystery story, “Makings,” was published in the December 1926 issue of Black Mask , the month after he took over from Cody as editor.
    Shaw was the first full-time editor of Black Mask , and he took his job seriously. Though he had no experience in pulp magazine publishing, he was an excellent businessman and a superb promoter. His primary goal was to separate Black Mask from the rest of the pulp-fiction field by virtue of the quality of its fiction, detective fiction. Upon assuming the editor’s chair, he read through back issues of the magazine to identify the authors he wished to cultivate. He chose four, whom he called his “backfield,” employing a football metaphor: Erle Stanley Gardner, J. Paul