Carroll John Daly (1889–1958) was a writer of crime fiction. One of the earliest writers of hard-boiled fiction, he is best known for his detective character Race Williams, who appeared in a number of stories for Black Mask magazine in the 1920s.
Early life
Daly was born on September 14, 1889, in Yonkers, New York. He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. Before turning to writing, he was an usher, projectionist, and an actor, and opened the first movie theater in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Unlike Hammett, who had actually worked as a Pinkerton detective before writing about similar if exaggerated fictional detectives, Daly was anything but a hardboiled antihero in real life. He was 33 years old before his first crime story was published, and up to that point lived quietly in the suburb of White Plains, New York. As Lee Server, author of the Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers, put it: "He was afraid of cold weather and dentists. His violent, tough-talking detective stories were a fantasy outlet for the mild-mannered man."
Career
Daly is generally considered vital to the history of the hardboiled crime genre, less for the quality of his writing than the fact that he was the first writer to combine all the elements of the style and form that we now recognize as the dark, violent hardboiled story. Enormously popular in his time, Carroll's no-nonsense tough-guy detective stories have gone on to influence not only contemporaries such as Dashiell Hammett, but Mickey Spillane and dozens of other writers. Daly's popularity was high enough that his name appearing on the cover of a magazine was enough to boost sales by 15 percent. A Black Mask readers' poll once showed Daly as the most popular writer in the magazine, ahead of Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner. Today, his writing is often considered "something between quaint and camp", in the words of genre historian William L. DeAndrea. Lee Server has noted, however, that comparing Daly with his better-remembered successors may be unfair, and that Daly's most crucial influence on the genre was his rejection of what was mainstream detective fiction during Daly's own time—instead of the mannered, aristocratic sleuths of drawing-room mysteries, Daly was influenced by the avenging vigilantes of Westerns, such as Wyatt Earp and James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, who were more likely to solve a case with their fists than a magnifying glass.
Daly has been credited with creating the first hard-boiled story, "The False Burton Combs", published in Black Mask magazine in December 1922, followed closely by "It's All in the Game" (Black Mask, April 1923) and the PI story "Three Gun Terry" (Black Mask, May 1923). DeAndrea has noted that Daly's stories were less concerned with updating Victorian-era drawing room mysteries than Wild West stories, and that his tough, urban heroes were most similar to the gunslingers of Westerns than detectives or sleuths of earlier works, calling them "two-gun kids riding an urban range, delivering death and justice via the same hot lead route as the gunfighters of dime novels". By virtue of being first (along with Hammett), Daly set the rules of the hardboiled genre that would be adhered to, or broken, by future writers.
Race Williams
Daly's private detective Race Williams was his most successful creation, appearing in about 70 stories and eight novels. Lee Server has called the character "the single most popular private eye in the history of the pulps." Although Black Mask editor Joseph Shaw did not like the Race Williams stories, they were so popular with readers that he asked Daly to continue writing them. Thus, Race Williams became the first hardboiled detective to have his own series.
He first appeared in "Knights of the Open Palm", an anti-Ku Klux Klan story. "Knights of the Open Palm" was published June 1, 1923, in Black Mask, predating the October 1923 debut of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op character.