Daly's The Snarl of the Beast (1927) is episodic. It was serialized in Black Mask in four parts, and the book falls naturally into a series of episodes: 1) The first encounter with the Beast: Chapters 1 - 3; 2) the meeting with Daniel Davidson: Chapters 4 - 10; 3) the encounter at Race Williams' home: Chapters 10 - 15; 4) the events at the lawyer's office: Chapters 16 - 24; 5) the interrogations and the solution of the mystery plot: Chapters 25 - 28; 6) the final encounter: Chapters 29 - 35. One could argue that episodes 1 and 2 are one long, continuous episode. The novel appeared in Black Mask between Hammett's The Big Knockover (1927) and Red Harvest (1927). Most of Hammett's Continental Op short stories had appeared by this time. Black Mask had also published a large number of Erle Stanley Gardner short stories, including the often sophisticatedly plotted short stories collected in Dead Man's Letters. So this was not exactly early in hard-boiled history. The Snarl of the Beast is almost pure action, with very little mystery or detection. Race Williams defines the detective's role as one of trying to stay alive, while hunting down and killing criminals. Race Williams depicts every scene as a direct threat to his life; and details his survival strategies to the reader at great length. The book is in some ways a classic of paranoia: what it would mean to live such a hunted life. Both the story's paranoia, with one isolated hero hunted by all the crooks and police in New York City, and its depiction of mean streets, recall Frank L. Packard's The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1914 - 1915). So does its focus on women intervening in the criminal world, with powerful personalities and mysterious identities and pasts.
Daly's vision of the underworld in The Snarl of the Beast is much different from later hard-boiled writers. Many later hard-boiled pulp authors depict such "public" underworld activities as: running night clubs and casinos; getting involved with urban politics, usually corrupt; police corruption; phony cult groups; the vice trade. These are all activities in which prominent underworld mobsters interface with the general public. These mobsters are famous Broadway figures, and dress in tailored tuxedos, hosting the fashionable night clubs they run. By contrast, the underworld in Daly is restricted to secret activities, mainly performed at night, such as murder, burglary and blackmail, combined with the "big criminal scheme", such as counterfeiting or fraud. This is also the sort of crime that shows up in Frank L. Packard. The denizens of the Daly-Packard underworld are mainly known, petty crooks. They have names like Larry the Bat, and dress in cheap workingman's clothes. They are people who engage full time in burglary, fencing, or murder for hire. They hang out exclusively in cheap underworld dives and flop houses, and shy away from all public haunts. The Daly-Packard tradition also seems to have persisted in some hero pulp writers, who were directly influenced by Packard, such as Walter Gibson and his Shadow stories.
Race Williams explains his theories of detection throughout The Snarl of the Beast. This is in a very ancient mystery tradition: one can find similar explanations of their views on detection in the stories of Poe and the Casebook writers. Such disquisitions have persisted from Poe onward, to the present day. In Chapter 27, Williams explicitly disassociates himself from being the sort of detective that finds clues and interprets them.
There is also much in Daly's The Snarl of the Beast about Race Williams' personal code of morality. Oppenheim's heroes also had their own individual moral code before this. The discussions of morality here are very elaborate, and are at the start of an immense "private eye with his own code of morals" tradition, one that continues in private eye writers to this day. Raymond Chandler immediately comes to mind here, as do many of his successors. See William L. DeAndrea's Killed in Paradise (1988) and The Werewolf Murders (1992) for a funny satire on this.
Dreams and Visions
The lack of mystery makes The Snarl of the Beast very thin throughout. But the book does have a visionary quality. Everything in it is very precisely imagined. The book is like a fever dream. Much of the action takes place at night. The book depends on a stream of strange things that Race Williams sees. This is similar to the procession of imagery in a dream. The way the villain of the story seems to have animal qualities is dream like. So is the way that actions keep getting postponed, such as the unmasking of the heroine, or Williams' constantly delayed plans to get involved in Chapter 7. The pathetically defenseless and cringing Daniel Davidson embodies the naked, powerless selves that we sometimes experience in dreams. So does the strange architecture of Race Williams' house, and all the strange events that keep taking place in it. Such distorting events in one's home are a common feature of dreams. Race Williams keeps encountering policemen in the dark; one can interpret this in all sorts of ways. All the people trying to kill Race Williams also seem similar to the unmotivated menaces and sense of paranoia found in dreams.
Even the very gratuitousness of the plotting, hardly a virtue from a mystery point of view, can contribute to the dream like atmosphere. One theory of dreams is that the brain generates a stream of possibly random, or at least non-rational, imagery, and then other, reasoning parts of the brain try to interpret these images, to link them up into a rational piece of storytelling. There is perhaps something of this same effect in The Snarl of the Beast. Williams is always being surprised by strange events which occur, often dimly illuminated in the dark. He then tries to "interpret" these events, to figure out what they mean. For example, in Chapter 15, he first hears a sound, then decides there is a man in the room behind him. He then tries to decide, through reasoning, what kind of man it is, and concludes that it is most likely a policeman. This is similar to the theory that dreams consist of imagery rationally "interpreted" after the fact. Daly's later puzzle plot tales, such as "Not My Corpse" (1947), also depend on interpretation. New events in the story constantly cause the events of the story to be reinterpreted. Trying to find the right understanding of what is going on, forms the main detective element of the story. The reader and the detective are walked through many different approaches to interpreting what is going on in the plot.
When Race Williams reaches a conclusion in The Snarl of the Beast, it is accompanied by emotion: he hopes it is a policeman, for then he can deal with him, but is afraid it is another assassin, who could kill him. This is also similar to the emotions of dreams: many events in them seems to be accompanied by some feeling, describing the emotional attitude the dreaming brain is taking towards the events. The narration of The Snarl of the Beast is first person, and we are always strongly within Race Williams' consciousness; this is also similar to dreams.
The Snarl of the Beast is lacking in any "objective" reality against which Race Williams can check his perceptions. Race has neither a Watson, nor police partners with whom he can share his ideas. He is completely alone. Williams keeps stressing his personal isolation, and lack of friends, loved ones, family or other emotional ties. The police are depicted in the book as remote and limited; only Race has any understanding of the crime. Nor do the media ever develop any realistic perception of the case. Race lives in a completely solipsistic universe. This also contributes to the dream like quality of the book: the dreaming brain is also an isolated figure wandering through the world of dream events.
The visionary quality of The Snarl of the Beast is not only restricted to the sense of sight. Sounds and hearing play a major role too, as well as the sense of temperature - Race is very sensitive to cold and heat - and occasionally scent as well. Daly's elaborate, vividly described nocturnal visions remind one of William Hope Hodgson. So does the monstrous, animal like nature of his villain. The visionary quality reaches its peak with the episode at the lawyer's office (Chapters 16 - 24). If the earlier episodes seem more dream like, this is a full fledged visionary work with a Hodgson like power. These scenes are the best in the novel.
Mike Grost
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