There seem to be some mitigating factors that explain the bullying tactics of Race’s riotous provocations. “Maybe I’m not so hot at repartee,” he reflects, after a further and better attempt at banter gets out of hand, “but talking around this lad was like talking around a clothing store dummy. I knew him, of course. Eddie Gorgon, who had more than once beaten the rap for murder.”
Then things get femme fatalistic. When Gorgon mentions the little moll “called The Flame - Florence Drummond, The Girl with the Criminal Mind,” things get hellfire contentious, eye-for-an-eye, he-man out of hand, and we’re not just talking fisticuffs-fluff. Certain other themes and motifs that creep up throughout Daly’s writing career — traps, clichés, predictabilities, and dependencies he never escaped to advance his career — are conspicuous by their cheek-by-jowl nearness in the first chapter of The Murderer. The pre-Mickey Spillane stuff (Spillane an admitted Daly disciple), the over-the-top tall tales that come — well, everywhere — but especially as Race punches Gorgon down to the floor, claiming a further vigilante-driven desire to stand up to any man and pull a rod because "That's my living," has the flavor of timeless folklore run amok.
And when big brother Joe Gorgon comes to save the day from his fallen brother Eddie, a legendary, almost anachronistic outlaw element — fittingly, almost mythic — surrounds the “feared and fastest drawing gunmen in the county’s greatest city - or out of it, for that matter.” But if anyone was expecting rising tensions and a climax and cliffhanger at the end of this serialized chapter (of 32 chapters) — and you should expect them — you’d be sorely disappointed. Any wild, wild, western-style Wyatt Earp/Natty Bumppo rugged individualistic thrills are depleted when the aforementioned lawyer acquaintance pulls Race away: “‘Come, come,’ - said a soft persuasive voice.’ “‘Don’t be mixing yourself up in some common brawl that don’t concern you. We don’t want to be over-inconspicuous.’”
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