Carroll John Daly

• Born: September 14, 1889
• Birthplace: Yonkers, New York
• Died: January 16, 1958
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Types of Plot: Hard-boiled; private investigator

Principal Series: Race Williams, 1923-1955; Vee Brown, 1933-1936; Satan Hall, 1935-1951

Contribution

Usually credited with creating the hard-boiled detective, Carroll John Daly began his writing career in 1922, and between that year and his death he published more than a dozen novels and 250 short stories. Daly was a pathfinder whose writing skills were unpolished but whose sense of audience in the 1920’s and early 1930’s was unerring. Race Williams, the protagonist in eight novels and a number of the short stories, became the prototype out of which Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer developed. Not a gifted writer, Daly focused on providing his readers with violent physical action and uncomplicated plots. Race Williams uses his handguns and his fists in a direct assault on evildoers. He is always his own man. The novels and tales are heavily laden with racial and sexual stereotyping; their popularity in the decades before World War II attests that Daly understood the popular mind.

Biography

Carroll John Daly was born in Yonkers, New York, on September 14, 1889. The son of Joseph F. Daly and Mary Brennan Daly, he was educated at Yonkers High School and, subsequently, at De La Salle Institute and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Daly was married in 1913. Abandoning pursuit of a career on the stage, he became a projectionist and then the owner and operator of theaters in Yonkers and Averne, New York, and Atlantic City and Asbury Park, New Jersey.

Daly’s writing career was launched in October, 1922, with the publication in Black Mask of a tale entitled “Dolly.” He followed that success with another story for Black Mask, “Roarin’ Jack,” published in December under the pseudonym John D. Carroll. Now a published author, Daly moved his wife and their only child, John Russell Daly, to White Plains, New York, where the family lived until he retired in 1953. A man of many idiosyncrasies, Daly is alleged to have never left home during winter and to have insisted on a highly organized household. His success as a writer and his income from theaters he owned or operated allowed him to live comfortably, though not luxuriously.

In 1953, Daly and his wife moved to Montrose, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Their son, John, had found employment as a screen actor and occasional performer on television on the West Coast. Made an honorary member of a writers’ club in Santa Monica, Daly lived in a modest apartment and continued writing for a few more years, publishing his last story in mid-1955. His health failing, he and his wife moved to Coachella, a desert area. Daly spent the last three years of his life in and out of hospitals; he died on January 16, 1958, in the Los Angeles County General Hospital.

Analysis

The novels and tales of Carroll John Daly reveal a world constantly beset by a variety of criminals bent on shaping their surroundings to fit their desires for money and the power that it brings. For the most part, Daly’s characters are not well developed and represent a very traditional view of the way in which the seven deadly sins corrupt humankind. Yet Daly was able to create in the fictional detectives Race Williams, Vee Brown, and Satan Hall men who were often as avaricious as the criminals they faced and as willing to go beyond the pale of law in bringing their prey to earth.

Race Williams first appeared in the story “Knights of the Open Palm” in Black Mask in June, 1923. He is described as being five feet, eleven and one-half inches tall, having black eyes and dark brown hair, and weighing 183 pounds. The reader is thus made aware of the fact that Williams is a physically powerful man to whom fear is probably a stranger. For some time before Daly’s work appeared in Black Mask, the magazine had been accepting detective stories and Western fiction; the detective stories, however, were usually of the “amateur sleuth” variety, and the Westerns conformed to the conventions that had characterized dime novels for several decades. What made Williams, the forerunner of Sam Spade and the Continental Op, different was that he was not an agency detective or an arm of the police authority. His fists and his gun were for hire, and he was generally not very particular about the character of his employer. He acted according to a simple code: Never kill anybody who does not deserve it.

The Snarl of the Beast

With Williams as a first-person narrator and characterized by sequential plotting, Daly’s stories quickly became a fixture in Black Mask in the 1920’s and early 1930’s. Daly’s second novel—and the first to feature Race Williams—was The Snarl of the Beast (1927). In it, Williams’s help is sought by the police in their attempt to capture a fiendish criminal known as the Beast. This master, who seems impervious to bullets, stalks the streets of the city, and the police are powerless to stop him. Williams agrees to hunt down the Beast if he is allowed to collect the reward money. Already a popular figure with readers of Black Mask, Williams attracted an even wider audience to Daly’s fiction, and Daly went on to produce seven more Race Williams novels.

The appeal of the two-fisted, often two-gun, tough-talking hero is not difficult to fathom. In the United States, the hard-riding, straight-shooting Western hero had been well established by the 1920’s. Appearing on the frontier in an age of lawlessness, the Western hero had come to represent truth, justice, and fair play. These “riders of the plains” were more than a match for a variety of evildoers bent on poisoning the well of a fledgling nation. Yet with the passing of the nineteenth century and the disillusionment arising from the ashes of World War I, American audiences seemed less and less interested in the romances of the American West. Even though the 1920’s has been romanticized as the Jazz Age, the fact is that the vast majority of Americans were struggling to make ends meet and dreaming of the day “their ships would come in.” Fair play, hard work, and honesty had not made them rich or famous. Although they certainly had freedom to do as they pleased, many felt powerless to change the conditions of their existence. Given this growing disenchantment with the American Dream, then, there certainly must have been a yearning to be able to control one’s destiny, to exercise power, to be an individual unfettered by rules. Daly’s conception of Race Williams provided his readers with a vicarious means of fulfilling that desire.

In story after story, novel after novel, Williams confronts a wide array of malefactors: petty thieves, corrupt politicians, gangland bosses, sinister foreigners, conniving women, and master criminals bent on taking over the nation or the world. Yet no matter what the magnitude of the threat these criminals pose, Williams is their master. He litters the urban streets with their corpses, and he is well paid for his efforts. When Raymond Chandler created Philip Marlowe in the 1930’s, he made him a kind of knight-errant who sallied forth into the mean streets to do battle with evil. Williams, although he was the crude prototype from which detectives such as Marlowe developed, is not a crusader. His allegiance is to himself; he does not labor for king and country. Daly’s hero, then, whether he is called Race Williams, Vee (short for Vivian) Brown, or Satan Hall, is a man who has power, who has control, who can to some extent shape his world.

The genesis of Daly’s hard-boiled private investigator can be traced to “The False Burton Combs,” a story that he published in the December, 1922, issue of Black Mask. The unnamed first-person narrator of this tale describes himself at the outset:

I ain’t a crook; just a gentleman adventurer and make my living working against the law breakers. Not that I work with the police—no, not me. I’m no knight-errant, either. It just came to me that the simplest people in the world are crooks. They are so set on their own plans to fleece others that they never imagine that they are the simplest sort to do.

Classifying himself as a kind of “fellow in the center—not a crook and not a policeman,” this nameless adventurer expresses his willingness to help anybody if the price is right. The protagonist of “The False Burton Combs” is an Eastern version of the bounty hunter figure of the nineteenth century American West. A nameless, faceless, ruthless individual less concerned with the guilt or innocence of an individual than with the price society had placed on his head, the bounty hunter of the frontier was replaced in the twentieth century by the hard-boiled private investigator.

Magazines such as Black Mask built their readership by providing stories heavy on action but light on characterization. When “Knights of the Open Palm” appeared in the June, 1923, issue of Black Mask, perceptive readers must have recognized in the character of Race Williams (who first appears in that story) the nameless adventurer of “The False Burton Combs.” In this story, Williams takes on the Ku Klux Klan, but his motive is not predicated on moral superiority. The Klan is involved in graft and corruption, but its activities with respect to minority groups are of no particular concern to Williams. “I’m just a halfway house between the law and crime,” he states, but “I never bumped off a guy who didn’t need it.” Like many fictional private investigators, Williams often gives grudging respect to some of his adversaries, particularly those who display the same kind of toughness and machismo that he does.

Murder from the East

On occasion, Williams shows gentler emotions. He is very much taken with a beautiful female underworld figure nicknamed the Flame, who first appears in The Tag Murders (1930). In Murder from the East (1935) Williams involves himself in a case because a twelve-year-old girl has been kidnapped. These flashes of passion and compassion represent Daly’s attempts to give Williams some depth of character, but it is the protagonists’ belief in rigid justice that dominates all Daly’s detective fiction. Cunning and guile are weapons of the weak; Williams uses fists and bullets, emerging sometimes bloody but always victorious.

The Third Murderer

The Third Murderer (1931) pits Williams against the three Gorgon brothers, powerful gangsters. Williams, as first-person narrator, alludes to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s use of the Gorgon myth in a short story. Here, as occasionally elsewhere, Daly gives the reader a picture of Williams as a man with some formal education. Also in this novel, Williams continues his relationship with the Flame, offering a brief psychological description of her:

Certainly, if she was built to do great wrong, she might just as well be built to do great good. You see, the dual personality doesn’t fit in with my practical nature. I always sort of look on it as synonymous with “two-faced.” That is that it’s an outward change, and doesn’t really take place in the individual—but only in the mind of some one who knows the individual. In plain words, there were times when I thought The Flame was all bad, and the good—that youthful, innocent sparkle—was put on to fool others. But fair is fair. There were times also when I felt that The Flame was really all good, and the hard, cruel face—that went with the woman of the night—was put on to hide the real good in her.

The give and take between these two lovers in The Third Murderer eventually results in a scene mirroring the confrontation between Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Sam Spade near the end of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1929-1930). Yet, unlike Hammett, Daly has Williams let the Flame go, even after telling her, “I’ve got to turn you in. It isn’t you I’m going to live with. It isn’t your eyes I’m going to look into the rest of my life. It’s myself I’ve got to live with. It’s myself I’ve got to face in the glass each morning.”

Daly’s plotlines were not particularly clever nor was he skilled at creating dialogue that had the flavor of genuine human discourse. Still, he had a good sense of pace and moved the narrative along briskly. For the most part, his characters were essentially two-dimensional figures who, by the 1930’s, were familiar to a generation quickly growing accustomed to the “cops and robbers” versions of good and evil emanating from Hollywood.

Although the literary reputations of Hammett and Chandler place them in the front rank of writers of detective fiction, a modern reader should understand that it was the work of Carroll John Daly that whetted the popular audience’s appetite for the hard-boiled detective.

Principal Series Character:

• Race Williams , a hard-boiled private investigator, first appeared in the June 1, 1923, issue of Black Mask. A tough-talking, no-nonsense thirty-year-old, Williams makes his living hunting down criminals for his clients. His credo: “I ain’t afraid of nothing providing there’s enough jack in it.” He also asserts, “My ethics are my own.”

Bibliography

Anderson, George Parker, and Julie B. Anderson, eds. American Hard-Boiled Crime Writers. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Daly is one of about thirty authors covered in this survey of the genre.

Barson, Michael S. “’There’s No Sex in Crime’: The Two-Fisted Homilies of Race Williams.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 2 (Fall/Winter, 1981): 103-112. Examines the character of Race Williams created by Daly.

Geherin, David. “Birth of a Hero.” In The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction. New York: F. Ungar, 1985. Credits Daly with the creation of the hard-boiled detective figure.

Haining, Peter. The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000. Looks at Daly’s contribution to the pulps and the relationship of pulp fiction to its more respectable literary cousins.

Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Scholarly, theoretically informed study of the thriller genre. Includes readings of Daly’s The Snarl of the Beast and The Adventures of Satan Hall.

Moore, Lewis D. Cracking the Hard-Boiled Detective: A Critical History from the 1920’s to the Present. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Detailed study of hard-boiled detective fiction tracing its origins and subsequent evolution. Contains a discussion of Daly. Bibliographic references and index.