Joseph T. “Cap” Shaw enjoyed several distinguished careers—military man and champion fencer, among them—before he assumed the editorial chair of the most significant fiction magazine since The Strand gave the world the immortal Sherlock Holmes. Between 1926 and 1936, Shaw edited Black Mask magazine. The pioneering first stories of Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett had just begun to appear in its pages. Shaw recognized in their hard-boiled treatment of the American crime story the potential for a new literary school. Working closely with his hand-picked writers, he pulled the magazine back from the brink of cancellation, and transformed the staid detective story into a vigorous and modern genre, discovering and championing important inheritors of this new tradition, among them, Raymond Chandler. But there is more to Joe Shaw than his editorial career. Here, in the first biography ever written of this editorial giant, his son relates the full fascinating story of the man behind the revolutionary editorial persona….

Joseph T. "Cap" Shaw enjoyed several distinguished careers-military man and champion fencer, among them-before he assumed the editorial chair of the most significant fiction magazine since The Strand gave the world the immortal Sherlock Holmes. Between 1926 and 1936, Shaw edited Black Mask magazine. The pioneering first stories of Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett had just begun to appear in its pages. Shaw recognized in their hard-boiled treatment of the American crime story the potential for a new literary school. Working closely with his hand-picked writers, he pulled the magazine back from the brink of cancellation, and transformed the staid detective story into a vigorous and modern genre, discovering and championing important inheritors of this new tradition, among them, Raymond Chandler.But there is more to Joe Shaw than his editorial career. Here, in the first biography ever written of this editorial giant, his son relates the full fascinating story of the man behind the revolutionary editorial persona....

Jonathan Shaw’s Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist is a surreal, multi-generational roller coaster ride through the underbelly of modern culture, charting the course of a life measured by extremes, and all the people, places, and events that shaped that life into a survivor’s tale of epic proportions. In its pages, Shaw takes the reader deep, not only into the recesses of his extraordinary mind and adventures, but also into the strange and magical process of memoir-writing itself. If truth is indeed stranger than fiction, then, as Shaw’s friend and literary mentor Charles Bukowski once told him, much of this book would have to be lived before it could be written. In that sense, Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist is much more than a fascinating chronicle of a popular outlaw artist's creative evolution. It is a multicolored, cinematic, modern-day Odyssey, written in blood, ink, and tears—a kaleidoscopic, visionary roadmap to the journey of the human soul.

The tie that binds this collection of ten stories is their Southern setting. Yet their themes are universal: love, loneliness, friendship, family, infidelity, revenge. The stories range widely, from a struggle to survive in the wilderness to the powerful bonds of a friendship that time and distance can't erode. The people in the stories are movingly portrayed, at times brutal, at times achingly gentle. What stands out in most of these stories is the importance of character--the determination to triumph over adversity and to live with dignity. Dogs play a part in several of the stories, and the author's affection for them is as clear as a blue sky on a bright sunny day. This is the first of three collections set in the South. Volumes two and three are forthcoming.

Joseph T. Shaw, the editor of Black Mask Magazine, has written one of the most exciting adventure mysteries of 1936.Blood on the Curb is the dramatic story of the New York Police Department's bloody battle to wipe out the famous "Black Hand" gang which terrorized the Lower East Side.Newly-recruited Paul Cardine is placed in charge of a special squad of officers-all of Italian decent-to find the man at the top of what appears to be a consolidated conglomerate of crime families.Never before reprinted, Blood on the Curb is one of Shaw's rarest hardcovers, and it contains all the hallmarks of his hard-boiled novels that saw publication in Black Mask Magazine.