Joseph T. Shaw

Milton Shaw

Description

Joseph T. “Cap” Shaw enjoyed several distinguished careers—military man and champion fencer, among them—before he assumed the editorial chair of the most significant fiction magazine since The Strand gave the world the immortal Sherlock Holmes. 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.

But there is more to Joe Shaw than his editorial career. 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 persona….

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique
• Hardboiled
• Black Mask
• Pulp Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Black Mask
• Date de parution: 25 décembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9788835350330
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Joseph T. Shaw: The Man Behind Black Mask
by
Milton Shaw

Black Mask • 2019
Copyright Information

Text and interior photos © 2019 the Estate of Milton Shaw. Front and back cover photos © 2019 Steeger Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. Published by Black Mask.

BLACK MASK® is a registered trademark of Steeger Properties, LLC. Authorized and produced under license.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dedication
This story of the life of Joseph Thompson Shaw is dedicated to Joe and Sandy, and our families. It is the legend of a remarkable man, a legacy that is deeply cherished.

Milton Shaw
24 May 2004
Introduction

It was January 1952, Nan and I had finished packing the car in readiness for our impending trip to the West Coast. Our destination was to be Camp Pendleton, California. This post was the staging area for Marines being funneled into the First Marine Division, a combat organization that was in its second year of fighting in that three year “forgotten” war in Korea. Nan and I had been married the previous June, and Nan was now pregnant with our first child. Our decision was to stay together as long as we could before I shipped out from San Diego with the eighteenth replacement draft.
It was now time to say goodbye to my mother and father. As my father and I embraced, I looked into his face and the thought flashed through my mind that we would never see each other again in this life. Because of the relatively high attrition rate of Marine second lieutenants, I sensed that I would precede my father in death. I was correct in my assessment that one of us would perish before we had the opportunity to be together again, but I was wrong as to who would precede whom in death. On August 1, 1952, my father died of a coronary thrombosis. He was seventy-eight years old.
Although there was a vast disparity in our ages, my father was fifty-three when I was born. I never knew my father as an old man, rather, as a very close friend. No single individual has had a more profound impact on my life than my father. We were father and son, but more than that, we were best friends. Both my mother and my wife Nan have been two major influences as to who I am and where life’s paths have taken me; however, the significance of my father’s influence on my life was during those formative years when I was a young person struggling to find myself and establish my identity.
When the Red Cross representative informed me of my father’s death, among the many thoughts passing through my heart and mind was the realization that Dad and I had been together for only twenty-five years. Yes, I was grateful for that time together, but I regretted the fact that even though we knew and understood each other from a personal point-of-view I was only aware of bits and pieces of his professional life. My father never talked about his accomplishments; his interest and energies were always focused on me, my growth, my needs.
Another mitigating factor in my lack of knowledge of this facet of my father’s life was that at age seventeen, as World War II was winding down, I enlisted in the Marine Corps. This step was the start of a journey that kept me away from home, except for periodical leave and liberty visits, for the next twelve years. One benefit from this absence was that my father and I corresponded by letter. Especially important is the fact that, for the five-month period I spent in Korea prior to his death, the weekly letters have been saved. As I reread these letters after not having seen them for forty-nine years, as expected, they contained no information about my father’s work-life even though at age seventy-eight he was still commuting to work in New York City on a daily basis. What the contents did reflect were observations of our respective environments, and my father’s continued words of advice and guidance.
My father left with us what he referred to as a “rambling” autobiography that was probably written in the late 1920s or early 1930s. It reads as follows:

I was born in Gorham, Maine, May 8, 1874, of the eighth generation on American soil of the descendants of Roger Shaw who sailed over here sixteen years after the Mayflower docked. It happens that one member of this line took part in each war of the country, and while I cannot claim a great part in sending Wilhelm to Doorn, at least I had the honor of maintaining the family tradition in the World War. The direct lineage on my mother’s side goes back to the family of Thomas a Becket, an uncle of Thomas of Canterbury. And, since, we are told, Gilbert married a Saracen princess, I have often wondered if a drop of the Saracen blood, persisting through the centuries, has been responsible for the very devil of a conflict I have constantly experienced between a desire for the sea and roaming adventure and the Yankee instinct to attend to business. I have wondered also if it gave me preference in reading for romance and adventure over philosophy and psychology and my willingness, indeed, to draw my philosophy from adventure and romance.
I commenced my attendance at school at the rather early age of three-and-a half, walking a mile or so for that rather dubious pleasure, and kept at it for seventeen years or so, graduating at Bowdoin where I majored in every form of athletics in the college curriculum. It has been said that we of Anglo-Saxon derivation possess a hereditary instinct for the bow and arrow. I know at least that my choice of all weapons has been a sword. As a boy a stick felt natural in my grasp; striking and guarding a matter almost of intuition. This may explain why I was able to win the national championship in sabers, after a little more than a year of instruction in that weapon, and the president’s medal for the championship in all three weapons, foil, épée and saber.
Analogous to my tendency for roaming, my preference for an occupation has always been for that of writing. This too was subjected to the same conflict with business. If I prepared for anything in college, where I was editor of the college periodical, it was for the writing game. On graduation I went immediately to a New York metropolitan daily and from that to a semi-trade weekly of which I became editor. A tempting business opportunity presented itself and I was associated with other business enterprises until the war broke out. During that earlier period I found opportunity to write short stories, a more or less technical history of one of the country’s industries and a book of impressions of Spain.
Before my own chance came, I specialized in training pre-draft men and in bayonet instruction with some of the national army units. Commissioned as Captain I went over in 1918. On the Armistice I was offered the post of athletic director of the Ninth Corps, in the Army of Occupation. It was so tempting I refused it and went instead to Czechoslovakia as chief of a Hoover Mission. My experience there was of a Graustark variety with practically unlimited power with respect to anything I wanted. My technique was very simple. In a country impoverished of the necessities of life by four years of war and plunder, I employed the slogan of the starving child and used the mighty weapons of the army commissariat. Racial editors, who had been forever fighting each other with drawn knives and no quarter asked or given, met at my board and for the first time in four years tasted white bread, butter, bacon and cream. Under the influence of their first cigarettes in that period they shook hands in the common cause. They and the hungry child did the business. An entirely new and all-embracing organization was put over that included the president, all members of the political government and the heads of every religious order. The food for the purpose was ‘somewhere on the ocean.’ A hundred odd tons were requisitioned elsewhere and within five weeks their own organization was feeding daily 400,000 children.
“I remained in the country nearly five years and had the unique opportunity of observing and studying the birth and first infantile steps of a republic. Tempting business opportunities obtruded on every hand. A recurrence of an illness contracted in the war sent me to the mountains and gave opportunity for meditation. Business and the mere acquisition of wealth had lost their flavor. I turned seriously to writing. I brought back two unforgettable souvenirs. The lesser is a sculptured marble group of a Slovakian peasant mother and two children, the gift of the Republic. The first and paramount is—Mrs. Shaw.
My training in writing in the past few years has been most intensive. I became editor of Black Mask in 1926. In creating a new form of detective fiction, in developing a magazine of quality in its field, and incidentally in trebling the output, the opportunity for study has been a rare one of which I have sought to avail myself. Reading has always been a passion with me, vying with the appeal of the out-of-doors. As a boy I absorbed everything within two covers upon which I could lay my hands. By fourteen I had read all of Scott’s, a mass of miscellaneous works of American and English authors and a fair share of classics. What I especially liked I read with memory—and often some for which I did not care.
My dislikes run to cant and loafing of mind or body. My hobby is for the primitive—a tent, a campfire, a pipe, with perhaps a canoe at hand—or the tiller or wheel of a boat on the open sea. My philosophy is summed up mainly by a word of four letters meaning work.

In the ensuing years since my father’s death I have become far