As editor of Black Mask mystery magazine from 1926 to 1936, Joseph T. ("Cap") Shaw brought the pulp magazine a measure of literary respectability by publishing the early work of such writers as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner. In so doing, he helped to establish the characteristics of the distinctively American genre of the "hard-boiled" detective story.

Joseph Thompson Shaw was born in Gorham, Maine, on 8 May 1874 to Milton and Nellie Morse Shaw; an ancestor, Roger Shaw, had immigrated to New England in the 1630s. At Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, Joseph Shaw edited the campus newspaper, was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, and led the school fencing team. After graduating in 1895 he worked briefly for the New York Globe and a trade journal, then became secretary of the American Woolen Company in Boston. His pamphlets From Wool to Cloth (1904) and The Wool Trade...