More Advice from Joseph T. Shaw

Joseph T. Shaw was the famed editor of Black Mask, ushering in the age of the hard-boiled detective and paving the way for film noir. Under his guidance, "The greatest change in the detective story since Poe," wrote popular culture scholar Russell B. Nye, 'came in 1926 with the emergence of the Black Mask school of fiction.'" (h/t: Detnovel.com, who has an excellent overview of Black Mask and its effects on the detective story.) We have already read Shaw's thoughts on dialogue, but Detnovel supplies some of Shaw's approach to character and action. Called "objective realism" by some, he was more interested with creating an illusion of reality instead of a copy of it.

In his letters and memos, he articulated a clear vision of hard-boiled fiction. "We wanted simplicity for the sake of clarity, plausibility and belief," he wrote. "We wanted action, but we held that action is meaningless unless it involves recognizable human character in three dimensional form." Critics have called this style "objective realism," but Shaw's own explanation stresses the difference between exterior appearance and interior emotion. He counseled his writers that "in creating the illusion of reality" they should let their characters act and talk tough rather than make them be tough. This model of character -- a crisp exterior but an amorphous interior -- corresponds to Shaw's idea of his readership. Nor did Shaw urge plots of relentless action on his writers. "To accomplish action it's not necessary to stage a gun battle from start to finish, with a murder and a killing in every other paragraph," he later told Raymond Chandler: "You can keep it alive through dialogue."

To expand a bit, Shaw romanticized his readership, claiming that his readers "knew 'the song of a bullet, the soft, slithering hiss of a swift-thrown knife, the feel of hard fists, the call of courage.'" and:

The Black Mask reader, he wrote, "is vigorous-minded; hard, in a square man's hardness; hating unfairness, trickery, injustice, cowardly underhandedness; standing for a square deal and a fair show in little or big things, and willing to fight for them; not squeamish or prudish, but clean, admiring the good in man and woman; not sentimental in a gushing sort of way, but valuing true emotion; not hysterical, but responsive to the thrill of danger, the stirring exhilaration of clean, swift, hard action – and always pulling for the right guy to come out on top."

As for the results of Shaw's vision, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Lester Dent all wrote for him, and it is impossible to think of film, comics, or fiction without these men.