(1889-1958)
Along with Dashiell hammett, Daly is one of the inventors of the hard-boiled detective story. The two writers were first published within months of each other in the pages of the same magazine, Black Mask, then a three-year-old pulp “louse” in the words of the magazine’s cofounder, H. L. Mencken. Hammett was a fascinating and colorful character, a self-taught intellectual and former Pinkerton private eye. Daly, on the other hand, was not the sort anyone would have expected to launch a literary or any other sort of revolution. He had been usher, projectionist, and owner of a movie theater in Atlantic City, New Jersey, before he took up writing, and for most of his life he lived quietly on a quiet block in White Plains, New York. He was afraid of cold weather and dentists. His violent, tough-talking detective stories were a fantasy outlet for the mild-mannered man.
When Daly got into print in December 1922, beating Hammett by three months, the detective story was still the domain of aristocratic twits and brainy, eccentric puzzle-solvers. The writing was Victorian, the murders emotionally sterile. Yet the times were calling for something different, something stronger. America in the 1920s was a tough, wised-up place, with its veterans of the World War I trenches, its flappers and gangsters and speakeasies. Cynicism was in the air, crime in the headlines. Someone was bound to take mystery fiction out of the vicarage and the country home and drop it down on the turbulent mean streets, to give murder—in Raymond chandler’s words—”back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide the corpse, and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare or tropical fish.”
Daly’s debut in Black Mask, “The False Burton Combs,” featured a tough-talking gentleman adventurer. The anonymous, first-person narrator is colloquial, wisecracking, violent. The second Daly tale, “Three-Gun Terry,” published in Black Mask in May 1923, was in a similar vein, with the hero Terry Mack calling himself a “private investigator,” completing the prototype. This is officially the first private eye story in the new hard-boiled style that would alter the future of mystery fiction. The ferocious, trigger-happy Terry Mack is familiar with both sides of the law. “I play the game on the level, in my own way,” says Mack. “I’m in the center of a triangle, between the crook and the police and the victim.” This would be exactly the position occupied by thousands of tough detectives to follow. As pulp historian William Nolan would write, “This pioneer private eye tale is remarkable in that almost every cliche that was to plague the genre from the 1920s into the 1980s is evident in ‘Three Gun Terry.’”
Black Mask’s next issue was its notorious Ku Klux Klan issue, and Daly was represented with another action-packed tale called “Knights of the Open Palm” (it was, at least, one of the anti-Klan stories in the issue). This time the hero was called Race Williams. The name would stick, and Race would go on to be the star of some 70 pulp stories and eight novels. He was an immediate hit with readers and became the single most popular private eye in the history of the pulps.
Daly is often dismissed as a primitive talent, and many of his hyperbolic narratives sound shrill and phony. To properly appreciate Daly’s impact, one must compare him not to Hammett or Chandler but instead to the typical mystery fiction writers who preceded him. Here is dialogue from a pre-Daly story, “The Clue from the Tempest”:
“If there was a scintilla of evidence to verify this extraordinary hunch of mine—well, I shall be at one end of a thread which has begun to disentangle itself from the whole maze.”
And now here is Race Williams speaking:
“You’ve had one look at my gun,” I told them as they sneaked out. “The next time you have cause to see it you’ll see it smoking. Now—beat it!”
Race Williams was at times closer to an avenging vigilante than an investigator. “The law,” Daly once wrote, “is too cumbersome, too full of loopholes to be of much use.” With his philosophy of “shoot first and gather clues later,” detective Race Williams may have had little in common with Sherlock Holmes, but he was a blood relative of James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, Wyatt Earp, Deadeye Dick, and other rugged, individualist Americans of fact and fiction. This was a crucial innovation of the new hard-boiled style, an emphasis on action and style over mystery. Cases were solved in a torrent of flying fists and blasting .45 s, not by studied ratiocination. As Williams once said, “There might be a hundred clues around and I’d miss them. I’ve got to have a target to shoot at.”
Daly, in any case, was not a writer who would have been comfortable with elaborate plot puzzles and the logical explications of the classical detective story. His storytelling was crude, repetitive, illogical, and prone to exaggeration. His blunt, colloquial style was not to be confused with realism or with art. Daly’s editors at Black Mask had little affection for him, but his work sold magazines. His name on the cover meant a guaranteed increase in sales, as much as 25 percent. Daly once recalled that his initial entry into the magazine only came about because the chief editor was on vacation. After the stories were published, that editor, George Sutton, summoned Daly to his office for some reluctant praise. “It’s like this, Daly, I am editor of this magazine to see it make money. To see the circulation go up. I don’t like these stories, but the readers do. I have never received so many letters about a single character before. Write them. I won’t like them. But I’ll buy them and print them.”
Daly’s work began appearing in topic form beginning in 1926. The first Race Williams topic, The Snarl of the Beast, was published the following year. The story deals with Williams’s pursuit of “The Beast,” a supercriminal whose dreaded exploits have left the big-city police department at wit’s end. The antic, action-packed adventure is Daly at his best—or worst, depending on your perspective. In either case, the topic is clear evidence that while Daly and Dashiell Hammett might historically share credit for the birth of a style and genre, their approach and results were very different. The Snarl of the Beast had nearly as much in common with the adventures of the old dime novelists as it did with the new hard-boiled form.
Daly never altered his style much, and by the 1940s his gunslinging Roaring Twenties detective had finally gone out of favor. What had once seemed hip and startling now seemed corny. Daly’s emulators had refined the style through the years and kept it up to date, but Daly had not. He continued writing detective stories, but mostly for second- and third-rate pulp titles. Ironically, as Daly was becoming a forgotten name, a writer who had been a rabid admirer of Race Williams, Mickey spillane, introduced his own blunt, two-fisted EI., Mike Hammer, and his own frenetic blood-and-thunder stories made him the most popular author in the world. The Spillane stuff was different, of course—tougher and sexier and more modern— and Spillane had a lyrical gift under all the raw energy, but the direct connection was there. Early on, Spillane actually wrote Daly a gracious letter admitting the great influence the older writer had on his work. The admission may have left Daly with mixed feelings. “I’m broke,” he is said to have told a friend, “and this guy gets rich writing about my detective.”
Works
STORIES
- “Action, Action!” (1924);
- “Alias Buttercup” (1925);
- “Answered in Blood” (1934);
- “Anyone’s Corpse” (1937);
- “Blind Alleys” (1927);
- “Blood on the Curtain” (1933);
- “Topic of the Dead, The” (1938);
- “Bridal Bullet, The” (1935);
- “Brute, The” (1924);
- “Clawed Killer, The” (1934);
- “Conceited Maybe” (1925);
- “Cops Came at Seven, The” (1953);
- “Corpse and Company” (1936);
- “Corpse for a Corpse” (1938);
- “Corpse in the Hand, A” (1939);
- “Dead Hands Reaching” (1935);
- “Dead Men Don’t Kill ” (1937);
- “Death Drops, The” (1933);
- “Death Drops In” (1934);
- “Death for Two” (1931);
- “Devil Cat” (1924);
- “Dolly” (1922);
- “Egyptian Lure, The” (1928);
- “Excuse to Kill” (1934);
- “Eyes Have It, The” (1934);
- “Face Behind the Mask, The” (1925);
- “False Burton Combs, The” (1922);
- “False Clara Burkhart, The” (1926);
- “Final Shot, The” (1930);
- “Five Minutes for Murder” (1941);
- “Flame and Race Williams, The” (1931);
- “Flaming Death” (1934);
- “Framed” (1930);
- “Gas” (1953);
- “Gun Law” (1929);
- “Half a Corpse” (1949);
- “Half-Breed” (1926);
- “Head over Homicide” (1955);
- “Hell with the Lid Lifted” (1939);
- “House of Crime, The” (1928);
- “I Am the Law” (1938);
- “If Death Is Respectable” (1933);
- “I’ll Tell the World” (1925);
- “It’s All in the Game” (1923);
- “Kiss-the-Canvas Crowley” (1923);
- “Knights of the Open Palm” (1923);
- “Make Your Own Corpse” (1934);
- “Men in Black” (1938);
- “Merger with Death” (1932);
- “Monogram in Lead” (1937);
- “Morgue’s Our Home, The” (1936);
- “Murder topic” (1934);
- “Murder by Mail” (1931);
- “Murder in the Open” (1933);
- “Murder Made Easy” (1939);
- “Murder Theme” (1944);
- “Murder Yet to Come” (1954);
- “No Sap for Murder” (1940);
- “One Million Dollar Corpse, The” (1937);
- “One Night of Frenzy” (1924);
- “Out of the Night” (1926);
- “Quick and the Dead, The” (1938);
- “Race Williams Cooks a Goose” (1949);
- “Race Williams’ Double Date” (1948);
- “Red Friday” (1934);
- “Red Peril, The” (1924);
- “Roarin’ Jack” (1922);
- “Satan Returns” (1934);
- “Satan Sees Red” (1932);
- “Say It with Lead” (1925);
- “Shooting Out of Turn” (1930);
- “Sign of the Rat, The” (1933);
- “Silver Eagle” (1929);
- “Six Have Died” (1934);
- “Some Die Hard” (1935);
- “South Sea Steel” (1926);
- “Strange Case of Alta May” (1950);
- “Strange Case of Iva Grey” (1940);
- “Super Devil” (1926);
- “Tainted Power” (1930);
- “Them That Lives by Their Guns” (1924);
- “Three Gun Terry” (1923);
- “Three Thousand to the Good” (1923);
- “Twenty Grand” (1927);
- “Undercover” (1925);
- “White Headed Corpse, The” (1939);
- “Wrong Street” (1938)
BOOKS
- Amateur Murderer, The (1933);
- Hidden Hand, The (1929);
- Man in the Shadows, The (1928);
- Murder from the East (1935);
- Murder Won’t Wait (1933);
- Snarl of the Beast, The (1927);
- Tag Murders, The (1930);
- Tainted Power (1931);
- Third Murdered, The (1931);
- White Circle, The (1926)
