Carroll John Daly

Carroll John Daly ( September 14, 1889 - January 16, 1958 ) was an American detective writer .

Life

Before becoming a writer, Daly worked briefly as an actor , then as an usher and projectionist, and eventually owned a number of cinemas temporarily .

Literary work

background

From the early 1920s onwards, short stories and novels appeared in the USA , which the hardboiled or hard-boiled private detective (English: private eye or PI , but also called private dick , shamus or gumshoe ) ) introduced them to literature and thus established a specifically American genre.

These archetypal figures signified a paradigm shift compared to the previously dominant detectives, who tended to reject violence and neither used the colloquial language that was now becoming typical nor the street jargon of the American metropolis, their field of activity. They were curt, with laconic wit and a dash of sarcasm and cynicism. Dashiell Hammett is unanimously regarded as the first mature representative of the new genre of so-called hardboiled detectives , but Carroll John Daly is considered to be his pioneer.

Own characters and stories

The first story with such a character was titled "Three-Gun Terry" [Mack] and was published by Daly in the May 15, 1923 issue of Pulp Fiction magazine "Black Mask". Race Williams, another of his PIs , put in "Snarl of the Beast" (1927) briefly and succinctly what has been part of the profile of these borderline characters ever since, when he says that his ethical principles are his private matter - not necessarily good, but not bad either - and that he didn't care what others thought of it. With this formula he claimed something new for himself, namely the freedom and the right to choose between good and bad (or less good) - without, however, completely opposing the law.

The narrator in Daly's "The False Burton Combs" (1922) calls himself a gentleman-adventurer who earns a living fighting criminals and who is neither a crook nor a police officer, but is somewhere in the middle between them. With this, Daly had staked out the field of force in which the classic hard-nosed PIs have been operating since then.

The callousness of Race Williams becomes clear when he speaks in “Snarl of the Beast” that everything in life is a matter of opinion. For example, the average man would talk about it for years if someone shot a hole in his hat at night. For him, that would only mean buying a new hat. Then nothing.

Related to Dashiell Hammett

Daly's literary output was twofold linked to Dashiell Hammett. Not only did her first two stories appear in "Black Mask" just a few months apart in 1922, but Hammett later stated that he probably contributed to Daly's decline as a writer because he himself had gained greater attention as the author of hardboiled stories . This should be true, because Daly's style did not change in the course of his active career, and the same is true of his central character, the boastful, rather one-dimensional and simple Race Williams, whereas other authors created increasingly interesting and complex detective characters over time.

literature

• Lee Server: Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers . Checkmark Books, New York 2002, ISBN 0-8160-4578-X .
• Rosemary Herbert (Ed.): The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing . Oxford University Press, New York / Oxford 1999, ISBN 0-19-507239-1 .
• Armin Jaemmrich: Hard-boiled stories and films noirs: Amoral, cynical, pessimistic? An analysis of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler , James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, WR Burnett and other authors, as well as relevant films noirs. Frankfurt 2011, ISBN 978-3-00-039216-0 .
• Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett (Eds.), Josephine Hammett Marshall (Introd.): Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett . Counterpoint, Washington, DC 2001, ISBN 1-58243-081-0 .

Web links

• Carroll John Daly in the Internet Movie Database (English)