Mon 28 Mar 2022
A 1001 Midnights PI Review: CARROLL JOHN DALY – The Snarl of the Beast.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[6] Comments
by Bill Crider & Bill Pronzini
CARROLL JOHN DALY – The Snarl of the Beast. Edward J. Clode, hardcover, 1927. Gregg Press, hardcover, 1981. Perennial, paperback, 1992. Lead story in The Snarl of the Beast: Race Williams, Volume 2 (Altus Press, 2016).
Carroll John Daly was one of the fathers of the modern hard-boiled private eye, a primary influence on such later writers as Mickey Spillane. His style and plots seem dated today, but the presence of his name on the cover of Black Mask in the Twenties and Thirties could be counted on Lo raise sales of the magazine by fifteen percent.
Daly’s major contribution was Race Williams, the narrator of Snarl of the Beast and the first fully realized tough-guy detective (his first appearance, in the June 1, 1923, issue of Black Mask, preceded the debut of Hammett’s Continental Op by four months). Williams was a thoroughly hard-boiled individual. As he says of one criminal he dispatches, “He got what was coming to him. If ever a lad needed one good killing, he was the boy.” Williams doesn’t hesitate to dole out two-gun, vigilante justice.
The Snarl of the Beast has an uncomplicated plot: Williams is asked by the police to help track down a master criminal known as “the Beast” and reputed to be “the most feared, the cunningest and cruelest creature that stalks the city streets at night.” Williams is willing to take on the job and to give the police credit for ridding the city of this menace, just as long as he gets the reward.
Along the way he meets a masked woman prowler, a “girl of the night,” and of course the Beast himself. Daly is not known for literary niceties — his style can best be described as crude but effective — yet there is a certain fascination in his novels and his vigilante/detective. Characterization is minimal and action is everything. “Race Williams — Private Investigator — tells the whole story. Right! Let’s go.”
Race Williams also appears in The Hidden Hand (1929) and Murder from the East (1935), among others. Daly created two other series characters, both of them rough-and-tumble types, although not in the same class with Williams: Vee Brown, hero of Murder Won’t Wait (1933) and Emperor of Evil (1937); and Satan Hall, who stars in The Mystery of the Smoking Gun (1936) and Ready to Burn (1951), the latter title having been published only in England.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
March 28th, 2022 at 12:01 pm
I see that this book is available on the Kindle for two different prices and two different lengths. One is listed for $1.99 at 272 pages and the other at $4.99 at 197 pages. They also have two different covers. Does anyone know the reason for this.
March 29th, 2022 at 3:14 pm
I don’t know if the story is in the public domai or not, but there plenty of e-publishers who don’t care either way and try to skate by and make a few bucks. I’ve pretty much given up on sorting it all out.
March 28th, 2022 at 9:20 pm
I was surprised how much I enjoyed Daly when I first encountered him.
I agree with most of the criticisms of his work, and there is not a nuance or insight to be found in his output, but it is pure pulp action with tough heroes and bad villains and even a few fairly slinky dames vamping around the plot.
It is Private Eye 101, but too pioneering to ever feel generic, and if Daly doesn’t get or deserve a lot of respect, I’ve enjoyed everything of his I read whether this or the other William’s novels, the shorts, the Satan Hall stories (maybe his best work), the downright strange Vee Brown series (think Race Williams crossed with Philo Vance), or the handful of Three Gun Terry Mack stories that predate Race.
I reviewed his Western TWO GUN GERTA on here some time ago and had great fun with it.
Daly has tremendous energy as a writer in his prime and a kind of raw edge to his voice that comes through. The influence on Spillane’s tone and voice is obvious even to a casual reader though Daly never saw the day he could plot or write as well as Mickey.
Of course, Daly couldn’t hold a candle to Hammett, Chandler, Nebel, Whitfield, Gardner, or even lesser names like Cain, Butler, Sale, Adams, and Davis which is why he eventually ended up unable to find even an American publisher and was virtually forgotten and dismissed until curious readers wanted to see what all the fuss had once been about.
Thankfully a lot of Daly is available today. You can get to know his work fairly cheaply and enjoy his few virtues as a pulp writer.
His praises may remain unsung, but you ought to at least hear the tune if you like the genre he helped pioneer. You could argue that Daly is to the hardboiled eye what James Fenimore Cooper was to the Western.
I have no evidence of this, so I am opening it to any scholars with better resources, but I have to wonder if Daly ever read Gordon Young’s Don Everhard stories in ADVENTURE. Young is a much better writer, but he can sound a bit like Race Williams at times and I would argue might be the real father of the genre, certainly a voice more familiar to readers of BLACK MASK and other hardboiled pulps.
March 29th, 2022 at 3:09 pm
I haven’t read all that much of Daly’s work, but of the stories I’ve read, I’ve always been able to say something positive about it.
Take for example, my review of “Not My Corpse,”which I posted here not too long ago:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=77749
which I ended by saying
“A mixed bag, in other words, but while Carroll John Daly is often given a bad rap today as a lousy writer, he wasn’t.”
The detective pulps from the 1920s on up are filled with lousy stories written by lousy writers well forgotten today. Nobody ever talks abut them because who cares? Daly’s work is still in print.
April 1st, 2022 at 1:24 pm
Daly wrote a lot of sloppy Race Williams stories for BLACK MASK; obviously purchased by Cap Shaw due to the character’s consistent popularity. My own feeling is that the Williams yarns improved dramatically when Daly left MASK for DIME DETECTIVE. Now, was that because DD editor Ken White pushed him harder? Or was it because White assigned sub-editors to clean up his copy after it had been purchased? Dunno. But I find those 1935 to 1938 (or thereabouts) Williams novelettes more satisfying than much of the BLACK MASK stuff. The quality slips toward decade’s end and it becomes plain that Race is a relic of the past. And I don’t like any of Daly’s Forties stuff written for Ned Pines’ pulp line.
April 1st, 2022 at 3:45 pm
Agreed, Ed, one hundred percent. Except for one small tweak: Daly’s stuff for Pines may not have been good, but it was better than 99% of the stories they published there.