Steeger Properties, LLC, Acquires Black Mask Magazine
With the acquisition of Black Mask magazine, Steeger Properties, LLC’s intellectual property holdings now total nearly 35,000 stories.
July 19, 2016— Steeger Properties, LLC, is pleased to announce that it has added the most prominent pulp magazine ever published, Black Mask, to its intellectual property holdings. As the periodical where the hard-boiled detective story was created and cultivated, Black Mask’s historical significance in popular fiction is unequaled.
Originally launched in 1920 by H.L. Mencken, Black Mask magazine became the most influential detective magazine beginning in 1926 when Joseph T. Shaw became editor. It was the foresighted Shaw who championed the use of tough crimefighters and private detectives portrayed in a more violent, hard-boiled fashion, as written by influential American fiction writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Cornell Woolrich, Max Brand, Steve Fisher, Carroll John Daly, and many others. It was also in the pages of Black Mask wherein Hammett introduced Sam Spade and first published The Maltese Falcon.
Before its demise in 1951, Black Mask published some 2,500 stories by scores of professional authors.
Black Mask’s place in popular culture history is well-documented. Joseph Shaw once claimed that “President Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, and Herbert Hoover read Black Mask.” In fact, the Library of Congress considers the magazine so important that it has retained its Black Mask set in its permanent holdings of Special Collections.
Black Mask rejoins Dime Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly in Steeger Properties, LLC’s holdings once owned by Popular Publications, Inc., and comprise the three greatest detective magazines ever published. This marks the first time in over 50 years that all three titles were owned by one entity.
Black Mask and the other holdings in the Steeger Properties, LLC, catalog is available for licensing in all media and will soon be available in licensed editions in print, ebook, and audiobook formats.
To license material from Black Mask magazine, please contact Steeger Properties at steegerproperties.com. For more information, please follow Steeger Properties on Facebook at facebook.com/steegerproperties or on Twitter at @SteegerProps. For dramatic rights, please contact The Coppage Company at coppage@aol.com.
