About This Issue

THE AUTUMN 2025 EDITION

Okay, that’s over.

The revamped Private Eye Writers of America is up and running, the 2025 Shamus Award Winners Winners have been announced, and summer is over.

The cover? Like a lot of you, I’m in love with the big, bold, kinetic covers of the 1930s and 40s pulp mags and all those post-WWII paperbacks, but this time I thought I’d step a bit back from that slam-bang era, go even more retro — to the earlier days of crime and detective pulps, and to the most iconic magazine of them all.

The November 1924 issue of The Black Mask (they would drop the “The” a few years later) reveals a far less in-your-face layout and illustrative vibe than later covers. Hell, it’s almost sedate, harkening back to the Victorian formality of early dime novels,  compared to what would be gracing the newsstands in another decade. Still, some gun hawk jamming his gat into a shattered window gives a hint of what lay inside its pages for readers willing to cough up the original cover price of twenty (count ’em, TWENTY!) cents.

And what a bargain! I have no idea who some of the writers are (Francis James? Solon K. Stewart?), but the two lead stories are by two of the magazine’s most important and iconic contributors. Kicking off the issue is a Race Williams tale, “Devil Cat,” by Carroll John Daly, and nipping at its heels is “The Golden Horseshoe” by some dude named Dashiell Hammett, which finds The Continental Op in Tijuana, on the hunt for a fugitive poet.

Not bad for a couple dimes.

Meanwhile, I’m anxiously awaiting the publication of Michael Bracken‘s upcoming Best Private Eye Stories of the Year. Which, I keep being told, will be out soon, and for which I did a roundup of the Shamus Game shenanigans of 2024. And I’m (maybe) doing an introduction for a soon-to-be-announced reprint of a classic crime novel. And revamping the PWA’s site.

#ElbowsUp
#CourageOurWord

Kevin Burton Smith
Editor/Founder