"The Black Mask Boys" "The Fictioneers" Captain Joseph T. Shaw Hand-Written Notation

Black Mask was a pulp magazine launched in April 1920 by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. At one point Captain Joseph Shaw took over as editor and the sales increased.

The photo above is a photo known as "The Black Mask Boys" or "The Fictioneers." My cousin, and the daughter of one of the writers, Herbert Stinson, sent me this photograph. She wrote on the back:
"These are the 'Fictioneers' My dad is 3rd from the left top row."

Others in the photo are as follows:

Back (left to right): Raymond J. Moffatt; Raymond Chandler; Herbert Stinson; Dwight Babcock; Eric Taylor; Dashiell Hammett
Front (left to right): Arthur Barnes; John K. Butler; W.Ballard; Horace McCoy; Norbert Davis

My cousin states that these writers often met at her parent's home in California.

The second photo is a Black Mask Magazine featuring a Herbert Stinson story.

The third photo shows a hand-written notation to Herbert Stinson from Captain Shaw regarding a story that Herbert Stinson was trying to sell unsuccessfully. The letter is from "King Features Syndicate" and is dated May 28, 1947.

The last photo shows the novel "Fingerprints" by Herbert Stinson under an alias, Hunter Stinson.

The following is from BlackMask.com regarding Captain Shaw:

Black Mask was colonized by a new school of tough crime writers, under the direction of an imaginative and inspired new editor, "Cap" Joseph Shaw.
Under Shaw, this crude but immediately successful type of story was made a priority. He spent a week reading through Black Mask back issues. He decided that the best writers were those producing detective stories and, as a result, decided to drop most of the rest. He outlined his plans for Black Mask in a 1927 editorial. "Detective fiction as we see it has only commenced to be developed. All other fields have been worked and overworked, but detective fiction has barely been scratched."
By December 1933, the magazine was publishing nothing but crime stories, and its national circulation had risen from 66,000, when Shaw had taken over, to 103,000. The cover price was 20 cents.