“The streets were dark with something more than night.” - Raymond Chandler
Erle Stanley Gardner once said of Carroll John Daly (1889-1958), the originator — even predating Dashiell Hammett by a few months in Black Mask magazine — of the hard-boiled detective story, that “Daly had never had the slightest experience with actual crime or criminals, much less with bullet wounds ... Daly himself wanted no part of the rough and tumble.”
So what if life in post-World War I times was a little on the rough-and-tumble side, murder finally taken out of the parlor and vicarage and put out on the mean streets where it belongs? And so what if Daly, a shy movie theater owner who lived quietly in White Plains, New York, poured on an overcompensating amount of kill-'em-quick creativity and a cathartic vigilantism into his hard-boiled hero? The brash violence constituted in his contention that the good guy sent the bad guy “crashing through the gates of hell with my bullet in his brain,” exemplified neither the ratiocination typical of the turn of the 20th century tradition, nor the 19th century influence, nor its embodiment in the always logical Holmesian detective.
Daly’s hero, the adventurous but rough-around-the-edges private eye Race Williams, made his first appearance in the June 1, 1923 issue of Black Mask, in a short story called "Knights of the Open Palm," but what’s in a name? Race was predated by a month by Daly's "Three Gun Terry," which, in protagonist P.I. Terry Mack, featured a groundbreaking prototype for Race (and many of the tough, wise-cracking detectives ever since). Though they're more or less the same character, it was Race who went on to appear in numerous short stories and novels over the next 30 years.
As Race takes his cue — a pretty sedentary one, at that — at the beginning of The Third Murderer, which was originally serialized in Black Mask (June to August 1931) as “The Flame” and Race Williams, it doesn’t take long for any trace evidence of goodwill and charm to sap from his being as he waits for a criminal lawyer acquaintance in a bar and engages another patron in conversation. “I didn’t like his face and I told him so,” snappishly starts the fist chapter, “A Threat to Kill,” as peril pervades the pages.
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