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Race Williams

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Carroll John Daly
(1889-1958)

“Sometimes… one hunk of lead is worth all the thought in the world”
— from “Not My Corpse”

“I have brains, I suppose.”
— from “The Snarl of the Beast”


New York City’s RACE WILLIAMS is oftenconsidered to be the first “private eye,” at least as we understand the term.

Actually, close but no cigar.

Race made his first appearance in the June 1, 1923 issue of The Black Mask, in a short story called “Knights of the Open Palm.” But he was predated by a month by Daly’s own Three Gun Terry who showed up in the May issue — a month earlier.

Doesn’t matter much, though — they’re more or less the same trigger-happy guy, and it was Race who went on to appear in countless short stories and novels over the next thirty years, and sowed the seeds for the likes of Mike Hammer and a slew of other shoot-first, sort-em-out later hard-boiled yeggs through the decades. His first appearance in book form, meanwhile, The Snarl of the Beast (1927), is generally acknowledged as the first hard-boiled private eye novel.

Answering to no law but his own, quick to kill, brutal, violent, hard-talking, yet loyal to a fault, Race will never be a thinking man’s detective. In fact, this pin-up boy for the NRA is almost defiantly illiterate, as though that’s a further sign of his toughness. As Robert Sampson, pulp expert, once wrote in Volume 4 of his Yesterday’s Faces: A Study of Series Characters in the Early Pulp Magazines,

“Race Williams is often credited with being the first hard-boiled detective. That strains the definition of detective. Williams is a hired adventurer who may occasionally detect if he blunders into a clue the size of a bathtub and painted bright pink. He has little use for clues, even less for chains of reasoning.”

He’s certainly not in it for the money. In fact, sometimes it seems Race doesn’t really care about anything except killing. He nonchalantly quotes his fee as “$25 an hour, plus $3.75 per man killed” but is willing to haggle. As he puts it in the 1947 short story “Not My Corpse”: “If you think that’s too high, why, mail me what you think it’s worth.”

Still, he seems to be doing well enough to pay the salary of his “boy”, Jerry, who serves as his faithful assistant and manservant.

And, of course, Race also has his friends and foes on the police force. Sergeant O’Rourke is a veteran cop who could have chucked it all in years ago, and become an inspector, but he’s stayed on the street, close to his men. Race and O’Rourke get along just swell. Not so with Inspector Nelson, a by-the-book kinda guy with a strong dislike of all private dicks in general, and Race in particular. He can also count on Foster of The Journal, who treats Race pretty well.

But the main character to challenge Race was The Flame, the so-called “Girl With The Criminal Mind.” If, as has often been repeated, Nero Wolfe is the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler, then it just may be, as Tony Sparafucile suggested in the 1978 preface to Murder From the East, that Mike Hammer is the bastard son of Race and The Flame.

If that’s the case, it would expain a lot. The dames, the guns, the obsessive behaviour, the New York setting, the shoot first, then shoot again mentality, etc., etc.

In 1930, then Black Mask editor “Cap” Shaw published the results of a poll on various writers’ popularity. His favorite, Dashiell Hammett, placed third, behind Erle Stanley Gardner. Number One with a Bullet (several, in fact) was Daly and his boy Williams. In fact, the appearance of Daly or Race’s name on the cover was generally considered enough to boost a pulp’s sales by anywhere from 5 to 20 percent. In 1934, Daly had an argument with the editors of Black Mask and he left to write for rival Dime Detective.

THE EVIDENCE

UNDER OATH

SHORT STORIES

 

NOVELS

COLLECTIONS

HATS OFF TO KRAJNAK

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

THE DICK OF THE DAY

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Original cover scan of Murder from the East courtesy of Mark Terry at Facsimile Dust Jackets.

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