Steve Fisher earned a living in the pulp-magazine market through his ability to develop simple, fast-moving plots devoid of embellishments but invested with real emotion. Although many of his hard-boiled stories featured the unsentimental private eye, Fisher made a niche for himself among genre writers by revealing a more human side of his private eyes, cops, and adventurers. In his essay "Pulp Literature: A Sub-Culture Revolution in the Late 1930s" in The Armchair Detective , Fisher claimed that a story he originally published in May 1938 contributed significantly to a tonal change in the genre: "One of my Black Mask stories was 'Wait for Me,' about a white Russian whore in Shanghai trying to escape the country, a U.S. sailor tagging after her everywhere, calling out 'Wait for me,' but she didn't, and in her devious manipulations to obtain a phony passport, was murdered in an upstairs...