O'Connor, Linda Marie.

Pulp fiction played an integral part in the development of mystery fiction through its establishment of hard-boiled fiction as a genre. Although a number of pulp magazines were popular between the 1920s and the 1940s, one of the most influential and well-remembered of these magazines was the Black Mask, which was the magazine primarily responsible for establishing "hard-boiled" detective fiction as a genre through the development of the hard-boiled fiction formula, as well as cementing the careers of some of the most well-known mystery writers, such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Erie Stanley Gardner. Through a close reading of these authors and other authors who appeared in the Black Mask from the 1920s to the 1940s, changes in societal values, as well as in hard-boiled fiction as a genre, may be seen.