Carroll John Daly

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Carroll John Daly
Born(1889-09-14)September 14, 1889
Yonkers, New York
DiedJanuary 16, 1958(1958-01-16) (aged 68)
Los Angeles, California
OccupationAuthor
Genre Hardboiled crime fiction
Notable worksThe Race Williams stories

Carroll John Daly (1889–1958) was a writer of crime fiction. [1] One of the earliest writers of hard-boiled fiction, he is best known for his detective character Race Williams, who appeared in a number of stories for Black Mask magazine in the 1920s.

Contents

Early life

Daly was born on September 14, 1889, in Yonkers, New York. He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. Before turning to writing, he was an usher, projectionist, and an actor, and opened the first movie theater in Atlantic City, New Jersey. [2] Unlike Hammett, who had actually worked as a Pinkerton detective before writing about similar if exaggerated fictional detectives, Daly was anything but a hardboiled antihero in real life. He was 33 years old before his first crime story was published, and up to that point lived quietly in the suburb of White Plains, New York. As Lee Server, author of the Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers, put it: "He was afraid of cold weather and dentists. His violent, tough-talking detective stories were a fantasy outlet for the mild-mannered man." [3]

Career

Cover of June 1923 issue of Black Mask featuring Daly's anti-Ku Klux Klan story "Knights of the Open Palm". The Black Mask cover 1923-06-01.jpg
Cover of June 1923 issue of Black Mask featuring Daly's anti-Ku Klux Klan story "Knights of the Open Palm".

Daly is generally considered vital to the history of the hardboiled crime genre, less for the quality of his writing than the fact that he was the first writer to combine all the elements of the style and form that we now recognize as the dark, violent hardboiled story. Enormously popular in his time, Carroll's no-nonsense tough-guy detective stories have gone on to influence not only contemporaries such as Dashiell Hammett, but Mickey Spillane and dozens of other writers. Daly's popularity was high enough that his name appearing on the cover of a magazine was enough to boost sales by 15 percent. A Black Mask readers' poll once showed Daly as the most popular writer in the magazine, ahead of Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner. Today, his writing is often considered "something between quaint and camp", in the words of genre historian William L. DeAndrea. [4] [2] [5] Lee Server has noted, however, that comparing Daly with his better-remembered successors may be unfair, and that Daly's most crucial influence on the genre was his rejection of what was mainstream detective fiction during Daly's own time—instead of the mannered, aristocratic sleuths of drawing-room mysteries, Daly was influenced by the avenging vigilantes of Westerns and stories of the American frontier, such as Wyatt Earp and James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, who were more likely to solve a case with their fists than a magnifying glass. [3]

Daly has been credited with creating the first hard-boiled story, "The False Burton Combs", published in Black Mask magazine in December 1922, followed closely by "It's All in the Game" (Black Mask, April 1923) and the PI story "Three Gun Terry" (Black Mask, May 1923). [6] [7] DeAndrea has noted that Daly's stories were less concerned with updating Victorian-era drawing room mysteries than Wild West stories, and that his tough, urban heroes were most similar to the gunslingers of Westerns than detectives or sleuths of earlier works, calling them "two-gun kids riding an urban range, delivering death and justice via the same hot lead route as the gunfighters of dime novels". [4] By virtue of being first (along with Hammett), Daly set the rules of the hardboiled genre that would be adhered to, or broken, by future writers. [8]

Race Williams

Daly's private detective Race Williams was his most successful creation, appearing in about 70 stories and eight novels. Lee Server has called the character "the single most popular private eye in the history of the pulps." [3] Although Black Mask editor Joseph Shaw did not like the Race Williams stories, they were so popular with readers that he asked Daly to continue writing them. [1] Thus, Race Williams became the first hardboiled detective to have his own series. [2]

He first appeared in "Knights of the Open Palm", an anti-Ku Klux Klan story. [1] "Knights of the Open Palm" was published June 1, 1923, in Black Mask, predating the October 1923 debut of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op character. [9] [10] [11]

Daly's Williams was a rough-and-ready character with a sharp tongue and established the model for many later acerbic private eyes. Race Williams' hards-as-nails, unsubtle characterization was in many ways a model for the taciturn, violent and hypermasculine hardboiled private eye. DeAndrea called Williams "a tough, cocky, nearly mindless investigator who shot his way through his cases." Williams exemplified the hardboiled P.I., from his generally antagonistic relationship with the police, to his (largely) aloof, even Victorian attitude toward women, to his disinterest in financial reward as much as the thrill of the hunt. [8]

Other work

Daly also created other pulp detectives, including Detective Satan Hall, "Three-Gun Terry" Mack, and Vee Brown. [4] In addition to Black Mask, Daly also wrote for other pulp magazines, including Detective Fiction Weekly and Dime Detective. [12] After leaving Black Mask, Daly found other magazines did not want serials. Daly’s solution was the ‘story arc’, stand alone stories that did not depend on each other, yet tied together to make a larger theme/plot.

His other characters included Clay Holt, a detective almost identical to Race Williams, created by Daly when he left Black Mask; all of the Holt stories were published by Dime Detective instead. One of the Holt stories, "Ticket to a Crime", has the distinction of being Daly's only story to be adapted into a Hollywood movie, the 1934 Lewis D. Collins film Ticket to a Crime . [13]

In the 1940s, Daly's work fell out of fashion with crime fiction readers, and he moved to California to work on comics and film scripts. [3] [4] [14] When Mickey Spillane became a bestselling novelist with Mike Hammer, a character similar to Daly's detectives, Daly remarked "I'm broke, and this guy gets rich writing about my detective." [1] However, Spillane wrote Daly a fan letter saying that Race Williams was the model for his own Mike Hammer. The story goes (at least as far as Spillane told it) that when Daly’s agent at the time saw the letter, she instituted a plagiarism suit. Whereupon Daly canned her because he hadn’t gotten a fan letter in years and he wouldn't sue anybody who had taken the time to write one. [3]

Daly's papers are archived in the Department of Special Collections at the UCLA Library. [15]

Death

Daly died on January 16, 1958, in Los Angeles, California.

Novels

Precursor to Race Williams

Race Williams Stories

All published in Black Mask magazine, thru ‘The Eyes Have It’ (Nov 1934) The Altus Press aka Steeger Books has re-published all the Black Mask stories in a six-volume set.

http://davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com/2013/01/forgotten-and-free-stories-race.html

http://davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com/search/label/Race%20Williams%20stories

http://davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com/search/label/Race%20Williams%20stories

http://davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com/search/label/Race%20Williams%20stories

http://davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com/search/label/Race%20Williams%20stories

http://davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com/search/label/Race%20Williams%20stories

http://davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com/search/label/Race%20Williams%20stories

http://davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com/search/label/Race%20Williams%20stories

http://davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com/search/label/Race%20Williams%20stories

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Server, Lee (1993). Danger Is My Business: an illustrated history of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. pp. 62–65. ISBN   978-0-8118-0112-6.
  2. 1 2 3 Penzler, Otto; Deutsch, Keith Alan, eds. (2012). The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN   978-0-307-80825-7 . Retrieved June 7, 2023.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Server, Lee (2014). Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers. Facts on File library of American literature. Facts On File, Incorporated. ISBN   978-1-4381-0912-1 . Retrieved June 8, 2023.
  4. 1 2 3 4 DeAndrea, William L (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa: a comprehensive guide to the art of detection in print, film, radio, and television . New York: Prentice Hall General Reference. p.  83. ISBN   0-671-85025-3.
  5. ↑ Penzler, Otto, ed. (2008). The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age--The '20s, '30s & '40s. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN   978-0-307-49416-0 . Retrieved June 7, 2023.
  6. ↑ Gruesser, John Cullen (2010). A Century of Detection: Twenty Great Mystery Stories, 1841-1940. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. p. 297. ISBN   9780786446506.
  7. ↑ Panek, Leroy Lad (1990). Probable Cause: Crime Fiction in America. Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press. p.  120. ISBN   9780879724856.
  8. 1 2 Moore, Lawrence D. (2015). Cracking the Hard-Boiled Detective: A Critical History from the 1920s to the Present. McFarland, Incorporated, Publishers. ISBN   978-0-7864-8239-9 . Retrieved June 8, 2023.
  9. ↑ Nolan, William F. (1985). The Black Mask Boys: Masters in the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction . William Morrow & Company. pp.  273. ISBN   0-688-03966-9.
  10. ↑ Mertz, Stephen (September 6, 2017). "In Defense of Carroll John Daly". Black Mask Online.
  11. ↑ Barson, Michael S. (Fall–Winter 1981). "'There's No Sex in Crime': The Two-Fisted Homilies of Race Williams". Clues: A Journal of Detection. 2 (2): 103–12.
  12. ↑ Hulse, Ed (2007). The Blood 'N' Thunder Guide to collecting pulps. Morris Plains, NJ: Murania Press. pp. 111, 117. ISBN   978-0-9795955-0-9.
  13. ↑ Smith, Kevin Burton (February 16, 2020). "Clay Holt". Thrilling Detective. Retrieved June 7, 2023.
  14. ↑ Herbert Ruhm, "Introduction", in Herbert Ruhm (1977), ed., The Hard-boiled Detective: Stories from "Black Mask" Magazine (1920-1951), New York: Vintage, p. xviii.
  15. ↑ "Finding Aid for the Carroll John Daly Papers, 1930-1958". UCLA Library, Department of Special Collections. Retrieved June 7, 2023.

Other resources

Daly, Carroll John (1947). "The Ambulating Lady" [essay on his writing style]. Writer's Digest April 1947. Repr. Clues: A Journal of Detection 2.2 (1981): 113-15.

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