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Carroll John Daly

kevinburtonsmith

Pseudonyms include John D. Carroll
(1889–1958)

“(Throughout his career) Daly remained an artificial, awkward, self-conscious pulpster, endlessly repetitious, hopelessly melodramatic. He had absolutely no ability for three dimensional characterization, nor did he posess a feel for language or mood. Additionally, he was cursed with a tin ear. His dialogue was impossibly stilted… and totally lacked the rhythm and bite of such gifted contemporaries as Hammett and Chandler… Yet, despite all this, Carroll John Daly stands, historically, as the father of the hard-boiled private eye.”
— William F. Nolan, Black Mask Boys (1985)

“I am a sucker for Daly. He is crude to the edge of literacy but he is also funny, some of it intentionally. And whether the story was written in 1924 or 1944, the style didn’t change.”
— Richard Moore, Rara-Avis

“My life is my own, and the opinions of others don’t interest me…”
— Carroll John Daly

Poor CARROLL JOHN DALY. One of the most pivotal figures in the development of the private eye sub-genre, but even now, all these years later, he still can’t get no respect. Hell, some people even blame him for Mickey Spillane, another critical “darling.”

Sure, in some circles (very small circles, admittedly) he’s credited with being the father of the hard-boiled private eye. Or the tough detective story. Or a “pioneer” of the whole genre.

But far more often often he’s totally slagged for being a horrible writer, an unimaginative hack with the artistic reach of an earthworm–in short, of not being Dashiell Hammett, who he was (and is) invariably compared to.

And the audacity! How dare he muddy the waters of detective fiction at exactly the same time as Hammett, but to do it in the very same pages of Black Mask where Saint Dash’s first efforts were also being published?

So who created the first hard-boiled private eye? Daly or Hammett?

It all boils down to a handful of stories in a handful of issues of The Black Mask, all appearing within a few months of each other. Daly’s story, “The False Burton Combs,” which appeared in the December 1922 issue, is often credited with being the first to feature such a protagonist, although the nameless hero identifies himself as more of an “adventurer” than a detective.

Another school of thought posits that Hammett’s “The Road Home” was the first hard-boiled detective story, which appeared in the exact same December 1922 issue. Although the hero of that yarn doesn’t call himself as a detective either, but rather as a manhunter. Reading the two stories back-to-back (and that’s exactly how they appeared) it’s obvious the detective genre is going through a monumental shift. Almost all the tropes of a new sub-genre are present or suggested in one or both stories.

Granted, it’s true that Daly was no Hammett. But then, who was?

Or is?

* * * * *

Daly was born in Yonkers, New York in 1889 and was the kind of kid who was probably bullied a lot. He was almost certainly a little peculiar–allegedly quite shy, and suffered throughout his life from agoraphobia and odontophobia (the fear of dentists).

He was educated at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and managed theatres in Atlantic City, and got married to Margaret G. Blakley in 1913. But what he really wanted to do was write.

Fortunately, he had a kindly (and wealthy) uncle who encouraged his early literary efforts. And so Daly kept plugging away, and by the early twenties, when Daly was in his early thirties, he had sold a few stories to various nickel and dime pulps. But his first significant sale (at the age of 33) was to a then-new pulp, The Black Mask, which was then still struggling to find an audience. The story was the afore-mentioned “The False Burton Combs.”

Make no mistake — Hammett was the better writer. Daly’s characterizations were pretty crude, and his plotting was shaky at best, swimming in cheesy melodrama, although he sure knew how to pack in the action. And attract readers.

Inspired by the story’s reception, he set about creating a series character in the same vein, and came up with Three Gun Terry, whom most consider the first hard-boiled private eye.

Unfortunately, Terry didn’t quite do it for readers, but Daly’s next attempt, essentially the same character with a different monicker, caught on in a big way. Race Williams was the prototypical hard-boiled, tough-talking detective made of equal doses of single-minded fury and quick thinking action, armed with twin forty-fives.  In Race’s world, he was the Hammer and anything in his way–man, woman or child– was a nail. And yet somehow, Williams always managed to escape impossible situations, usually by shooting his way out, and his aim was always true. 

The public loved Race, and he went on to appear in over fifty stories. In one poll, Daly was named Black Mask‘s most popular writer by readers (Erle Stanley Gardner came in second; Hammett third), and it was said that Daly’s name on the cover could jack up sales by a whopping fifteen percent.

No fool he, Daly would play the Race card again and again. Almost all of his other trigger-happy heroes–no matter their occupation–were cut from the same cloth, with minor alterations. Somehow, they almost always shot first (and, of course, never missed), and no matter who they shot and killed, the targets deserved it. Who needed judge or jury, when Race or one of his facsimiles was around?

Subtle? Not by a long shot.

Satan Hall was another one of Daly’s other popular characters. He was a New York homicide dick who bore a striking facial resemblance to ol’ Beezlebub himself, and had a knack for shooting his victims right between the eyes while they were “resisting arrest” — at least according to the police reports. By the way, Satan appeared a couple of years after Hammett’s similarly visaged Sam Spade.

Vee Brown, also known as “The Crime Machine,” was another of Daly’s longer-running characters. He may have seemed like a mild-mannered musician, but that was just a cover for his real gig as a special op for the Manhattan District Attorney, almost as gun crazy and prone to brutal, bloody violence as Race and Satan. He appeared in a couple of novels and several short stories, and his real first name was Vivian.

Meanwhile, down-and-out former millionaire Marty Day becomes a lead-spitting avenger of sorts after he hooks up with the mysterious Reckoner in a handful of stories that were published between 1933 and 34 in the pages of Dime Detective. Then there’s Doc Fay, whom Evan Lewis refers to as Daly’s “Christ figure;” Clay Holt, a Race-like private eye who appeared in several stories and accounts for Daly’s sole screen credit, bodyguard Pete Hines and fast-shooting vigilante Mr. Strang.

* * * * *

Daly was soon a regular contributor to Black Mask. There was always be a market for his fast-paced, action packed stories and colourful storytelling. His plots may not have always made much sense, and his style often bordered on melodramatic bombast, but he sure kept the pages turning. The editors may have sneered, but they knew how popular Daly’s stories were.

And then Black Mask hired a new, ambitious editor, Joseph “Cap” Shaw, in 1926, who had ideas of his own about what type of writing he wanted– and it wasn’t the type Daly was offering. Shaw held his nose, and kept buying stories from him, but–inspired by Hammett–he was also building up a shadow roster of better, more dimensional writers who better evoked what he saw as the Black Mask style; writers like Raymond Chandler, Raoul Whitfield, John K. Butler and Norbert Davis.

More and more often, Daly’s stories started appearing in other pulps, while back at Black Mask, Daly and Shaw squabbled on a regular basis about writing, money and Lord knows what else. Eventually Daly stormed out in late 1934, and his fiction wouldn’t return to Black Mask until Shaw himself was let go in 1936.

Through most of his career, Daly lived quietly in White Plains, New York, regularly selling to the pulps. Unfortunately, by the late forties, his slam-bang style (“crude to the edge of literacy,” as one “fan” put it)  was losing its popularity. Daly moved out to California, with visions of Hollywood perhaps dancing in his head, but it didn’t pan out.

He died on January 16, 1958 in Los Angeles. He was 68 years old, almost completely forgotten and unappreciated  by the genre he largely helped create–even as Mickey Spillane was riding the bestseller lists with Mike Hammer, a character very much in the Race Williams mold.

But as much as anyone, with Three Gun Terry and especially Race Williams, laid the foundation for what we now think of as the classic hard-boiled American private eye, while his The Snarl of the Beast (1927) gets the credit for being the first private eye novel ever published–at least as we understand the term.

UNDER OATH

SHORT STORIES

Incomplete. I doubt even Daly could have provided a complete list.

 

COLLECTIONS

NOVELS

FILMS

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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