Elizabeth Daly

• Born: October 15, 1878
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: September 2, 1967
• Place of death: Roslyn, New York

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; cozy

Principal Series: Henry Gamadge, 1940-1954

Contribution

Elizabeth Daly’s sixteen novels featuring Henry Gamadge, a New York gentleman of independent means whose interest in mysteries associated with old books and manuscripts frequently leads him into mysteries associated with crimes, follow the tradition established in Great Britain during the Golden Age of detective fiction. Working in the vein of Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie (who once named Daly as her favorite American author) , Daly superimposed on the geography of New York and New England the upper-class settings of these writers’ novels. Although Gamadge is American, his language and his social habits are British, to the point that individuals use “torches” instead of flashlights and cars “hoot” rather than honk. Despite these anomalies and sometimes awkward dialogue when working-class individuals are involved, Daly’s books are, for the most part, carefully crafted, reflecting her conviction that detective fiction is a high form of literary art.

Biography

Elizabeth Daly was born in New York City on October 15, 1878, the daughter of Joseph Francis Daly, a justice of the Supreme Court of New York County, and Emma Barker Daly. She was the niece of Augustin Daly, a famous playwright and producer of the 1890’s.

Daly was educated at Miss Baldwin’s School, Bryn Mawr College, and Columbia University. She received a bachelor of arts from Bryn Mawr in 1901 and a master of arts from Columbia in 1902. In 1902, she returned to Bryn Mawr College, where she was a reader in English and a tutor in French and English until 1906. She also coached and produced amateur plays and pageants.

At the age of sixteen, Daly had experimented with light verse and prose, some of which was published. Her primary interest during most of her life, however, was in amateur theatricals. From an early age, Daly had shown a fondness for games and puzzles, and this fondness resulted in a lifelong interest in detective fiction. She was particularly fond of the works of Wilkie Collins.

In the late 1930’s, Daly attempted to write detective stories. It was not until 1940, when she was sixty-two, however, that her first novel, Unexpected Night, was published. Fifteen more novels featuring the amateur sleuth Henry Gamadge and one novel of manners, The Street Has Changed (1941), followed during the next twelve years. Daly died in St. Francis Hospital, on Long Island, on September 2, 1967.

Analysis

After a false start in 1894, Elizabeth Daly began her career as a writer of detective fiction with the publication, in 1940, of Unexpected Night. Set in Maine, Unexpected Night introduces Henry Gamadge, a New York socialite and bibliophile who dabbles in criminal investigation. Fifteen Gamadge adventures followed, resulting in a series of novels that provide nostalgic glimpses of a vanishing era while chilling the reader’s blood with literate stories of sophisticated wickedness.

Daly’s interest in writing detective stories may be traced to her fondness for puzzles and games and to an early appreciation for the works of Wilkie Collins. She was not particularly concerned with the theory of detective fiction. Having devoted the previous thirty or so years of her life to reading, travel, and the production of amateur plays, Daly began to write because she found detective stories fascinating. Like her fictional creation, Henry Gamadge, who repeatedly becomes involved in criminal investigations simply because he loves a mystery and has no job to distract him, Daly wrote because she loved puzzles, enjoyed writing, and had the leisure to indulge herself. As a writer, her only objective appears to have been to baffle and entertain the reader with an ingeniously conceived and well-presented mystery.

Each of the sixteen Gamadge novels is a literate and ingenious exercise in logic that uses an assortment of stock characters as set pieces around which a mystery can be developed. The principal character, Henry Gamadge, is a kind of English gentleman disguised as one of New York’s aristocracy. Slightly resembling Dorothy L. Sayers’s Peter Wimsey—and sometimes displaying a sophistication even greater than Wimsey’s—Gamadge is, nevertheless, not a stereotypical dashing and attractive drawing room detective hero. Daly herself characterized him as “the semi-bookish type, but not pretentious . . . not good-looking, but eye-catching. He represents everything in a man eager to battle the forces of evil.”

Despite Daly’s characterization, the average reader will find Gamadge too sophisticated to be a convincing representative of a man eager to stand up against evil. After a careful search of the series, the reader may come to the conclusion that Gamadge’s involvement with criminal investigations, like Daly’s involvement with detective fiction, reflects his enjoyment of puzzles more than any moral passion.

Unexpected Night

Even though Daly had a rather lofty concept of Gamadge, she was careful to balance her descriptions, avoiding the creation of a kind of otherworldly superhero. Although his powers of detection are extraordinary, Gamadge is not perfect, as Daly makes clear in her initial, and typical, description of him in Unexpected Night:

Mr. Henry Gamadge . . . wore clothes of excellent material and cut; but he contrived, by sitting and walking in a careless and lopsided manner, to look presentable in nothing. He screwed his grey tweeds out of shape before he had worn them a week, he screwed his mouth to one side when he smiled, and he screwed his eyes up when he pondered. His eyes were greyish green, his features blunt, and his hair mouse-coloured. People as a rule considered him a well-mannered, restful kind of young man; but if somebody happened to say something unusually outrageous or inane, he was wont to gaze on the speaker in a wondering and somewhat disconcerting manner.

Because Gamadge is independently wealthy, he has the leisure to pursue his interest in old books and manuscripts and has established a reputation as an authority not only on the papers, inks, and handwriting of old books and manuscripts but also on the mysteries associated with them. It is his expertise in handwriting and ink that gets Gamadge involved in his first case, and his success in solving this and subsequent mysteries ensures that he will be drawn repeatedly, often unwillingly, into mysteries associated with the sordid world of crime.

In addition to Gamadge, Daly’s stock characters include Gamadge’s wife, Clara, and their son; his assistant, Harold Bantz; his cat, Mickey; and his aging manservant—along with a number of other characters who accumulate as the series develops. The development of these characters, whose individual characteristics are firmly established from their first introduction, is secondary to Daly’s primary objective, which is to provide clues to the puzzle facing Gamadge so that during his sometimes lengthy concluding explanation, Daly, through Gamadge, can in effect say to the dubious readers that they have had all the clues.

The style of these stories is literate without being patronizing or bookish. Nevertheless, Daly’s writing is somewhat flawed by her inability to develop an ear for the speech of individuals outside her and Gamadge’s social and cultural circles and by her insistence on using British spellings and terminology. Workmen with whom Gamadge comes in contact use the same kind of language Gamadge uses but drop their g’s (“goin’,” “comin’”) and interrupt long, articulate explanations with the wrong tense or convoluted syntax. “Color” becomes “colour,” and cars, equipped with “lamps” instead of headlights, “hoot” rather than honk.

There are other, more serious flaws, one of which might be said to stem from what is, in itself, one of Daly’s virtues as a writer. Daly was a careful crafter who took each manuscript through four revisions. She had the plot firmly in mind before beginning the writing, but once the actual writing began, by her account, “all kinds of things” turned up to influence the final outcome. This creative openmindedness is one of Daly’s virtues. Because she did not slavishly follow her preconceived plot, Daly was able not only to avoid the production of a series of formula-written clones of preceding Gamadge tales but to bring a certain freshness to each as well. Although for the most part this is a virtue with Daly, it can, and often does, result in a kind of literary clutter because of Daly’s reluctance to discard elements once they have been introduced. Characters, for example, have a way of staying on for the next novel. Gamadge rescues Clara Dawson, then marries her, eventually adding a dog and then a son to the Gamadge household. The household increases steadily as clients or individuals indirectly involved with clients are added to Gamadge’s staff. This tendency to save everything and everybody, as some people save string, often arrests the plot’s development, making heavy going for the reader.

Arrow Pointing Nowhere

Another characteristic that weakens Daly’s stories is her tendency to be too clever, so that the credulity of the reader is strained by Gamadge’s ultimate explanation. In Arrow Pointing Nowhere (1944), for example, wadded-up notes picked up by a postal carrier eventually reach Gamadge. The logic of this device is explained by Gamadge at the novel’s conclusion:

Clara’s face wore a slight frown. “Henry,” she said, “when Mrs. Grove threw that first paper ball out of the window she didn’t know a thing about you. The Fenways didn’t expect you to call, they can’t have talked about you much.”

“No, my angel, they can’t.”

“Then how could she know that you’d understand her message, and somehow get into the house? How did she know you’d care?”

Gamadge smiled at her. “Blake Fenway said he had my books. Perhaps she’d read them.”

“They wouldn’t tell her all that!”

“Something of an author is supposed to get in his books, though. Perhaps mine told her that I always answer my letters.”

After Gamadge decides to accept the case, other crumpled notes turn up, two of which are railroad timetables marked with arrows. The first points to the Rockville station on the Hudson River, indicating that the person who marked the timetable (whom Gamadge cannot identify but refers to as his client) wants Gamadge to visit Rockville. Later, a second timetable is marked with an arrow pointing away from the Rockville station (arrow pointing nowhere), and Gamadge knows that his client is urging him to get someone at Rockville away from there. In this instance, Gamadge’s remarkable ability to decipher the most obscure of clues is exceeded only by the perceptiveness of his unknown client, who understands that Gamadge has accepted the case when he appears on the scene carrying a book called Men Working. Other Daly works exhibit this same kind of excessive cleverness, provoking one reviewer to grumble, after reading The Wrong Way Down (1946), that although Gamadge was a nice change from the hard-as-nails characters featured in most detective fiction, his solution did put considerable strain on the reader’s credulity.

It cannot be denied that the strain is often there, but for those who are not inclined to demand plausibility, the works of Daly offer tantalizing puzzles in an engaging form.

Principal Series Character:

• Henry Gamadge , an author and consultant on old books, manuscripts, autographs, and inks, lives in the fashionable Murray Hill district of New York. Young and unmarried when he first appears, Gamadge marries in the course of the series and has a son. Because of his reputation as a writer on the subjects of literary and criminal detection, Gamadge is frequently called on to solve mysteries that have baffled professional investigators.

Bibliography

Barzun, Jacques, and Wendell Hertig Taylor. A Catalogue of Crime. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Massive, nearly one-thousand-page critical bibliography of mystery, detective, and spy stories. Provides context for understanding Daly. Includes an index.

Dubose, Martha Hailey, with Margaret Caldwell Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000. Although Daly is only mentioned, the Golden Age female writers of which she is a part are discussed at length.

Huang, Jim, ed. They Died in Vain: Overlooked, Underappreciated, and Forgotten Mystery Novels. Carmel, Ind.: Crum Creek Press, 2002. Daly is among the authors discussed in this book about mystery novels that never found the audience they deserved.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Contains a biocritical essay on Daly.

Rowland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Although Daly is not discussed in this work, it describes the work of Agatha Christie, who admired Daly’s writings.

Waldron, Ann. “The Golden Years of Elizabeth Daly.” Armchair Detective 7 (November, 1973): 25-28. Mystery writer Ann Waldron looks at the best writings of the creator of the Henry Gamadge series.