Daly, Carroll John - The Hidden Hand (1928)

Daly's The Hidden Hand (1928) is at least as much a story sequence as a novel. It appeared as five short stories in Black Mask. Each tale is of novella length, around 50 pages. This is what Black Mask clearly considered as the ideal length for a short story. Each tale has a separate villain. The dividing lines between the stories is easily discerned in the book version. I do not have editions of the original Black Mask stories to compare, but my guess as to how chapters in the novel line up with the Black Mask stories: "The Hidden Hand": Chapters 1 - 8; "Wanted For Murder": Chapters 9 - 16; "Rough Stuff": Chapters 17 - 25; "The Last Chance": Chapters 26 - 34; "The Last Shot": Chapters 35 - 44; the dividing line between the last two stories is fuzzy, and 34/35 is just a guess. Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (1927) and The Dain Curse (1928) also are story sequences from Black Mask, and have a similar structure. The Hidden Hand was in fact serialized between these two works in Black Mask. Some of the later sections of The Hidden Hand show Daly at his dullest, grinding out routine tales that are simply all action. But the early parts of the book (Chapters 1 - 10) remind us how colorful Daly could be. The focus on master villains, and crime's ties to business, once again recalls Frank L. Packard, and his Crime Club.

Mike Grost

There is also a book with this title by Eden Phillpotts.