If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.
You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

Daly, Carroll John

Page history last edited by PBworks 18 years ago

Source: Mike Grost

Carroll John Daly (1889-1958) was an American writer, born in New York and educated at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He married Margaret G Blakley in 1913 and operated theatres in Atlantic City.

Carroll John Daly is the pioneer writer of hard-boiled detective fiction. He is a little bit earlier in time (less than a year) than his fellow Black Mask writer Dashiell Hammett, who he almost certainly influenced. Daly must be considered the father of the tough private eye story.

Daly's most admired work tends to be his earliest. These tales of 1922 - 1923 are clearly pioneer works in pulp writing. They also tend to have some creative plotting, especially "The False Burton Combs" (1922). "Three Gun Terry" (1923) seems to be virtually the pioneer work of private eye fiction, one in which a tough, wise cracking, slang talking private eye fights off an underworld plot in a hail of bullets. This story is also the earliest known to me to contain the "pulp style of plotting"; this style is more fully discussed below under Baynard Kendrick, and in the article on Erle Stanley Gardner, as is the extension of that style by Gardner. "Terry" is still an enjoyable story. The constant use of slang by Terry seems to suggest both Robert Leslie Bellem and Forrest Rosaire. Not to mention how the wisecracks suggest Chandler's Philip Marlowe. The use of a loner private detective who narrates the story makes Daly's early Black Mask tales seem like the archetypal private eye tales.

There are antecedents; Cohen's private eye Jim Hanvey was already detecting in the Saturday Evening Post a year before, although his style tended to run more to con men and their sneaky rich victims. And the infiltrating of a house full of bad guys was already well established in Christopher Morley's The Haunted Bookshop (1919).

Themes

Many of Carroll John Daly's stories deal with men who are in constant danger of being killed. These detectives are either under contract by a mob leader, who wants them dead, or they are either infiltrating or muscling into a bad guy's stronghold (Daly's favorite plot), or they are having an encounter with a crooked cop, or they just happen to be interrogating someone who is deadly. When not under threats from strongmen themselves, the hero is in turn intimidating bad guys, usually threatening to kill some henchman. The hero often has allies, either women or young men - people who are much frailer and more vulnerable than the hero, courageous, but not someone of his achieved manhood.

The constant paranoia of Daly's stories clearly appealed to readers, who saw a very tough man coping with constant danger. Even by pulp standards, Daly's world was a tough place, and his detective is constantly proving his toughness. The world view of Daly's stories can also be related to Daly's personal life. Daly was a complete recluse, one who rarely stepped outside of his middle class suburban home, a man who apparently lived in constant fear of anything that was not his controlled environment.

There are some other recurrent themes in Daly. There is the smuggled, and then concealed, gun, suddenly extracted and then drawn by either the hero or the bad guy, to rapidly change the balance of power in a confrontation. There is the emphasis on social corruption, on the way a mob or other organized source of evil can infiltrate and obtain a strong position in both society and the political order. Daly achieved a definitive version of this in his early classic, "Knights of the Open Palm" (1923), his anti Ku Klux Klan story. Written when the KKK was at the height of its power, when the Indianapolis based KKK was well onto the road to legitimacy in American society and was becoming virtually a third political party, it pulls no punches in its look at a KKK dominated small town infiltrated and brought down by Daly's hero. Daly's tale is one of the landmarks of pulp writing: an important look at a social evil, and one of the very first hard boiled tales as well, with one of the earliest tough guy heroes, a model for much later pulp fiction.

Daly's work emphasizes some of the small pleasures of life. Both his heroes and bad guys love to eat, and restaurants are a common setting in his tales. There is also a love of both music and reading, especially detective stories. One of his heroes, Vee Brown, is a famous composer of popular songs in his other identity. It is rather if Batman's alter ego were Cole Porter. Speaking of Batman: Daly's tales seem very ancestral to Batman and other crime fighters of the comics. Historians emphasize Daly's ancestral relationship with the hard-boiled writing of the pulps, and I think there is a similar ancestral relation with the comics. Batman and other superheroes are always trying to infiltrate the bad guys' den, and are always having physical fights with the bad guy's henchmen. This stuff comes right out of Daly.

The relation of Daly's hero to women also shows some consistent approaches. Daly's heroines pursue the detective, not the other way around. For all his machismo, he is shy, virginal, and too tough to relate well to dames. Often times these women have "bad" characteristics. There is The Flame, beautiful leader of a band of underworld racketeers. She loves Race Williams, and wants to throw her underworld empire at his feet. His detective Satan Hall is similarly pursued by a society girl, a headstrong young woman who is now running with a gang of mobsters - whether for thrills, or as an undercover infiltrator, or what - Satan has a hard time deciding in "Mr. Sinister" (1944), a detective tale with some strong puzzle plot features. While these beautiful, aggressive women have underworld ties, none is marked as clearly evil, like his bad guys. All are rather ambiguous figures, whose deviations from the straight and narrow are balanced by some warm heartedness and emotional fire, and whose ties with the underworld make them very desirable to the hero.

Later Short Stories

By contrast, some of Daly's later writing was very thin, resembling the cliché of hacked out pulp writing with violent encounters and very little else. Like most pulp writers, there has been very little actual effort made to unearth and reprint Daly's best works.

"Not My Corpse" is a good story, with a very tangled publishing history. It was reprinted in Bill Pronzini and Martin Greenberg's The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories (1988), where I read it. It appeared under that title in the 1953 Top Detective Annual, a yearly pulp collection. But internal evidence shows that the events of the story are taking place around 1946, shortly after the end of World War II in 1945. The Annuals were full of reprint material, suggesting that this is a retitled version of a story Daly first published c1947. A good candidate is "Unremembered Murder" (1947), a tale from the March 1947 Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine. The title of "Unremembered Murder" fits the plot of the story. This Race Williams novella is a bit different in tone from some of his earlier works. It is more purely a detective story, with Williams solving a set of serial killings. Williams seems to be adapted a bit to the conventions of the Raymond Chandler private eye tale, then at the peak of its influence and popularity. There is no sign of the "pulp style of plotting" which Daly pioneered; instead, all the crimes turn out to be the work of a single villain, as in the classical detective tale. Daly's story evokes the plots of Hammett's "The Scorched Face" (1924) and Christie's The ABC Murders (1936), without stealing from either. Daly's novella keeps coming up with plot twists, developments that put a new perspective on the story. This unfolding plot is the back bone of the story, its central element. Daly has less emphasis on action here than in some of his earlier tales. Yet when it becomes time for Daly to unleash an action scene, the crowd at Grand Central Station, his mise-en-scène is among the best in pulp history.

By the time of "Not My Corpse" (1947), Daly had widened his view of the underworld to take in the elegant mobsters of the other hard-boiled writers. But it is still combined with many of the features of his original conception. The mobsters are still running a lot of secretive, lucrative businesses along the lines of burglary and fencing. And much of the underworld is still full of secretive, two bit figures.