WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THREE-GUN T

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THREE-GUN TERRY?

An analysis of Carroll John Daly’s seminal crime novelette Three-Gun Terry and why Daly, the acknowledged father of hard-boiled crime fiction, has been eclipsed by Dashiell Hammett in the annals of crime fiction.

Historical Commentary

Bruce Stirling

BRUCE STIRLING'S poetry and prose appear in number of literary journals including Out Of The Gutter, and Thieves Jargon. His crime story "Woman Want" was co-winner of the 2007 Fish-Knife Award for Short Crime Fiction. He's also published fiction in Debris, Eclectica, Pen Pricks, Bewildering Stories, Opium, and Sensorotica.

1923 was a busy year. In America, Prohibition was swinging to the rhythms of jazz, a new style of music one commentator said “was the first step toward hell.” That hell was what F. Scott Fitzgerald called the Jazz Age. The carnage of World War One had convinced Americans that “all Gods were dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” It was time to rebel, to forget the past and, as the song said, “In the meantime, in between time, ain’t we got fun.”

1923 was a very busy year. In Europe, Hitler tried to seize Munich’s city government while in Paris, Hemingway and Joyce and other expat writers were creating a revolution in literature that would come to be known as modernism. Stateside, in Manhattan, another literary revolution was taking place, not in the garrets of Greenwich Village but in a 128-page illustrated pulp fiction magazine called The Black Mask.

The Black Mask had been in circulation since 1920. Like all pulp magazines, The Black Mask was “was about three things: action, adventure, and sex, not necessarily in that order.” In an era when literacy had never been higher, when the stock market was booming, when tabloid journalism was just taking off, the pulps, as they were called, were eagerly read every month. With their “provocative titles, lurid covers and racy illustrations,” they were “a cradle of sensationalism.”

But then in May, 1923, a story appeared in The Black Mask that would forever change pulp fiction and, I would argue, American culture as a whole. That story was Carroll John Daly’s crime novelette Three-Gun Terry. In the annals of detective fiction, Three-Gun Terry is indeed a first. Terry Mack, the eponymous protagonist, is, as one critic says, “the world’s first wisecracking, hard-boiled private investigator, the father of ten thousand private-eyes who have gunned, slugged and wisecracked through way through ten thousand magazines, books, films and TV episodes.”

With the publication of Three-Gun Terry, subscriptions to The Black Mask soared. Terry Mack was a hit. At the height of the Jazz Age, Terry Mack, a character one critic describes as a “swaggering illiterate with the emotional instability of a gun-crazed vigilante” was a piece of literary anarchy in a world in which anarchy reigned supreme. But the revolution wasn’t over yet.

In October, 1923, six months after the publication of Three-Gun Terry, The Black Mask published a detective story by Peter Collinson. The title was Arson Plus. The hero was a nameless private-eye who worked for the Continental Detective Agency. In time, the hero of Arson Plus would come to be known as the Continental Operative or simply “the Op.” Once again, the average Joe just couldn’t get enough of this new style of private-eye, this hard-boiled dick. Arson Plus was so popular Peter Collinson decided he’d put his real name on subsequent stories. That name was Dashiell Hammett, a name that would, over time, relegate Carroll John Daly and Three-Gun Terry to the annals of literary obscurity. Therein lies the question: Whatever happened to Three-Gun Terry? Moreover, why has Carroll John Daly, a writer whom critics acknowledge as being the originator of an American literary icon - the hard-boiled private-eye - why has his name fallen off the map while Dashiell Hammett went on to receive all the credit for creating a new genre called hard-boiled crime fiction?

Those are the questions I will seek to answer. As I do, please remember: This is pulp fiction, the seven-by-ten inch magazines the average Joe read over his blue plate special back in 1923. And, yes, I realize that the mere mention of pulp fiction is enough to send many for the exit. Nevertheless, it’s important to remember what Raymond Chandler said in his essay Introduction to the Simple Art of Murder:

“Pulp [fiction] never dreamed of posterity...It takes a very open mind to look beyond the gaudy covers and trashy titles and recognize the authentic power of a kind of writing that, even at it most mannered and artificial, made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of luke-warm consommé at a spinsterish tearoom.”

* * * * *

Carroll John Daly was born in Yonkers, New York in 1889. He went to high school then to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. In May, 1923, when The Black Mask published Three-Gun Terry, he was thirty-three and living as a recluse in White Plains, a city close to New York. Why was Daly a recluse? Nobody knows. But this we do know: Rarely, if ever, did he venture into Manhattan, the setting for his stories. Once, however, Daly did make a trip into the city. When he returned home, so the story goes, he couldn’t find his house. A neighbor had to point it out to him. Once, for the sake of research, Daly decided that maybe he should get to know what it was like to handle a gun. Daly, leaving his temperature-controlled home, went and bought a gun only to be arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. As one friend observed, “That was the end of Carroll John Daly’s research.”

Who then is Carroll John Daly? Think Walter Mitty, the James Thurber character. In life, Walter Mitty is an just average Joe. In his dreams, however, he sees himself transformed. He is a romantic hero, battling bad guys and winning the day in the good old American way. Daly even admitted that at night, when he wrote, he became Terry Mack, his alter ego. For Carroll John Daly, that real life alter ego could very well have Dashiell Hammett, for in life Hammett was everything Daly was not.

Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born in 1894. At fourteen, guided by “a rebellious temperature” he dropped out of school and went to work for the railroad. In 1915, at 21, he joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency. As a Pinkerton operative or Op, Hammett was involved “in the widest possible range of police work from “petty theft to murder.”

In 1918, Hammett left Pinkerton’s, joined the army and contracted influenza. Soon after he developed tuberculosis. He left the army and went back to Pinkerton’s but poor health forced him to resign. In 1922, weakened by disease and in need of work, Hammett, encouraged by a friend, turned to writing. “He experimented with verse and short satiric pieces, selling one to H. L. Mencken, editor of The Smart Set,” the same high brow “slick” magazine which “launched Fitzgerald’s professional career.” It was Mencken, many believe, who suggested that Hammett send work off to The Black Mask, a magazine Mencken had originally started yet sold. That story was Arson Plus.

As aspiring crime writers, Daly and Hammmett couldn’t have been more different. By 1923, Hammett had been around the block and then some whereas Daly rarely left home. Therein lies an intriguing irony: It wasn’t Hammett but Daly who wrote Three-Gun Terry, a shocking crime novelette that introduced Terry Mack, the world’s first hard-boiled private-eye. Terry Mack might’ve have been “a swaggering illiterate with the emotional instability of a gun-crazed vigilante” but back in 1923, the paying public just couldn’t get enough. As one female reader said:

“Terry Mack appeals to me. If anything makes me tired, it is the milk-and-water blood of the modern hero as depicted by writers who are scared to admit that blood is red. You get me?”

Obviously, she wasn’t a big Sherwood Anderson fan. Nevertheless, one fact is beyond dispute: In May, 1923, Carroll John Daly introduced a new character to the world of detective fiction. Daly is even credited with writing in 1927 the first hard-boiled crime novel, The Snarl of the Beast.

All this raises another question: If Daly had no experience of crime and cops, if his own shadow scared him silly, where did his stories come from? Was he such an inventive genius that he didn’t need to leave home to create a new literary form that transcended the need to draw from experience? I would argue not. The inspiration for Daly’s Three-Gun Terry did not come from an inherent artistic genius that thrived on seclusion. It came from what he’d read, specifically, late 19th century dime novels and pulp magazines. Daly’s inspiration didn’t come from “being broke on the edge of the Sahara” as his bio claimed. His stories came from the news stand, the library, from boyhood memories, and arguably, from the movies, for in 1923, the most popular movies were romances and westerns. The first “modern” gangster movie (Underworld by Josef von Sternberg) didn’t appear until 1927, four years after Three-Gun Terry was published.

There is no third party evidence to prove what I have just asserted. Like I said Daly has been all but ignored by critics. Why? One reason might be that Daly nailed Terry Mack to a plot lifted straight out of any number of late 19th century dime novels and early cowboy movies, a plot with roots firmly planted in the captivity narrative, a genre made popular by New England Puritans. Such an assertion raises the issue of experience and how it shapes a writer’s work, and who the hell am I to be taking pot shots at the origins of some guy’s art? Still, if you read any number of 19th century dime novels, in particular Deadwood Dick, the most serialized cowboy hero after Buffalo Bill Cody, you will soon realize where Terry Mack is coming from, namely, the bedrock of the cowboy cliché, one of many such clichés which, when added up, have doomed Three-Gun Terry to obscurity. Yet beneath all the clichés there is a brand new man who blew the doors off the detective genre, a character whose influence is still felt today.

As a novelette, Three-Gun Terry is about fifteen-thousand words. The first thing you notice is the title. It establishes an important fact: This story is not about a crime, i.e., The Case of the Mutilated Foot, Corpse in a Cab, Body on a Slab, or where a crime took place ( Murder in the Rue Morgue, Murder Goes to College). Before 1923, such title hooks were the hallmark of the detective story, circa 1870 to 1923. The title of Three-Gun Terry, while not the first time a private-eye’s name appears in the marquee, nevertheless reinforces what is new about Three-Gun Terry: This story is all about character.

Character. That is what sets hard-boiled crime fiction apart from all other genres, mystery, detective or otherwise, now and in May, 1923. Contrary to popular belief, hard-boiled crime fiction is not about crime. Instead, hard-boiled crime fiction breaks the classic detective formula, one in which a detective, through deduction, follows a series of clues to a climatic scene in which the crook gets his and justice prevails. In hard-boiled crime fiction, “crime, or the threat of a crime, [is] of secondary importance.” What’s important in hard-boiled crime fiction is character. Bill Pronzini in Hard-boiled: An Anthology of Crime Fiction describes just such a character.

“The typical hard-boiled character is often a loner, a social misfit. He has a jaundiced view of government, power and the world. If he is on the side of the angels, he likely to be a cynical idealist: he believes that society is corrupt, but he also believes in justice and will make it his business to do whatever is necessary to see that justice is done. If he walks on the other side of the mean streets, he walks them at night; he is likely a predator, as morally bankrupt as any human being can be.”

“A predator as morally bankrupt as any human can be.” That is Terry Mack all over. In the evolution of detective fiction, Terry Mack is considered the prototype, the original Terminator. Before Terry Mack, gumshoes such as Vidocq, Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, and Nick Carter always came down on the side of the law, their actions an extension of a civilizing process, a return to order with good conquering evil. Not so Terry Mack. The man is anarchy run amuck, his most pronounced character trait a chillingly cavalier my-ethics-are-my-own attitude stamped onto a myopic worship of gun play that sees violence as a means of solving any and all problems. In fact, Terry Mack is so addicted to gun play, he spends more time bragging about his shooting prowess than he does solving the crime, namely, the kidnapping and subsequent rescue of “a virgin.”

Despite Terry Mack’s love of testosterone, he was, in May, 1923 a seminal American literary moment. In the opening paragraph, Terry Mack stakes out his territory loud and clear, the first person narrator another hallmark of hard-boiled crime fiction established by Three-Gun Terry.

“My life is my own, and the opinions of others don’t interest me; so don’t form any, or if you do, keep them to yourself. If you want to sneer at my tactics, why go ahead, but do it behind the pages, you’ll find that healthier. So for my line. I have a little office that says TERRY MACK, Private Investigator on the door, which means whatever you wish to think. I ain’t a crook and I ain’t a dick; I play the game on the level, in my own way.

Notice how the story doesn’t open with a plot hook, a body or a crisis of some kind, all hallmarks of the detective story before May, 1923. Instead, Three-Gun Terry opens with Terry Mack threatening his reader if the reader dare question Terry Mack’s ethics. Sherlock Holmes would never stoop so low. But Terry Mack? Hell, he’ll kill you just as soon as look at you. Therein lies the revolution: The detective story is no longer about solving a crime and seeing justice prevail. It is a question of ethics, of character.

Despite such a seminal pedigree, Terry Mack, however, still has one foot planted deep in the past, the most obvious clue to his literary origins being his arsenal. As the title illustrates, Terry Mack carries three guns. Where he hides them I have no idea. (Freudians, I’m sure, would have a field day). Nevertheless, who in the annals of American fiction struts around packing so much iron? The cowboy; more specifically, the gunfighter, the loner with a pistol riding each hip and one up the sleeve just in case. This then is the image upon which Daly has modeled Terry Mack. And the best gunfighters are, as Terry Mack tells us, “the fastest on the draw.” This is not the mean streets of Manhattan. No. This is Dodge City.

Once you’ve got Terry Mack’s armament figured out you’ve pretty much got the man figured out as well. Like all gunfighters, he is a rebel who follows his own moral code. The plot and the dialogue of Three-Gun Terry each go along way in supporting this cowboy-as-cop metaphor. First the plot.

If you’ve seen Star Wars, The Searchers, or Mission Impossible III, you know the plot of Three-Gun Terry. If you’ve read Le Morte d’Arthur, you know it. If you’ve read any Nick Carter Detective Stories or Deadwood Dick or Seth Jones dime novels you know it. As far as plots go, it is as American as apple pie. I am talking about “the captivity narrative,” a New England Puritan creation, circa 1680. (The first bestseller in America was, in fact, a captivity narrative by Mary Rowlandson).

Simply put, the captivity narrative pits good (civilized god-fearing whites) against evil (godless devils called Indians) with the white guys always coming out on top. This same plot is the hook upon which Three-Gun Terry hangs. A virgin, straight out of the convent, is kidnapped by gangsters (Indians always travel in packs). The bad guys hustle the virgin back to their hideout (Indian camp) where the virgin (bravely resisting) is threatened with “red hot pokers” (standard implements of Indian torture) if she does not reveal “the secret formula” (that will destroy the world). By chance, Terry Mack witnesses the virgin’s kidnapping, tracks the gang down, single-handedly storms the crooks in their lair, and saves the virgin. The rescued virgin worships her savior to no end but Terry Mack, in another seminal hard-boiled moment, claims he is, quote, “off dames. They don’t go well with my business.”

Terry Mack’s misogyny is another first in detective fiction. Like all future hard-boiled dicks, Terry Mack wants nothing to do with dames. All they offer is love and stability, and if Terry Mack the loner-gunfighter fears anything, it’s being tied down. Why? Because he trusts no one but himself. This is another first in Three-Gun Terry, the big city private-eye riding a wave of unrelenting cynicism. It is theme that will echo all down the line, in Hammmett’s Arson Plus and The Maltese Falcon, in Chandler’s The Big Sleep, in James Cains’ Double Indemnity, in Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury, all classics of hard-boiled crime fiction.

While these moments combined did indeed conspire to come between the average Joe and his blue plate special, it is Terry Mack’s coal black core that really turned the genre’s on its head.

“A fellow don’t have to take a shot at me to rouse my interest; you don’t have to give me a good moral reason to shoot. Show me the man, and if he’s drawing on me and needs a good killing, why, I’m the boy to do it.”

One line bears repeating: “You don’t have to give me a good moral reason to shoot.” Pretty tame stuff, especially in this day and age. But viewed from a historical perspective, Terry Mack, a private-eye in name only, has just put a bullet between the eyes of all his gumshoe forefathers. And he’s just warming up.

“I ain’t a crook and I ain’t a dick. I play the game on the level, in my own way. I’m in the center of the triangle; between the crook, the police and the victim.”

This is not James Joyce carving epiphanies or Virginia Woolf aiming for the lighthouse. What we are witnessing in Terry Mack is the birth of hard-boiled crime fiction, and hard-boiled crime fiction, it bears repeating, is a study not in crime but in character. In Terry Mack, that character is a cynical, self-serving moralist establishing a new archetype: the private-eye as judge, jury and executioner all wrapped up into one. Suspicious, alienated, cynical, gun-crazed, Terry Mack indeed has all the markings of a truly modern man. Yet, as evidenced by the plot, he still has one foot firmly rooted in the past, his cowboy twang framing his literary pedigree.

“Now the city’s big, and that ain’t meant for no outburst of personal wisdom. It’s a fact. Sometimes things is slow and I go out looking for business.”

You can almost see the straw in his hair. Yet despite the giddy up dialogue, Terry Mack is once again doing something brand new: He is looking for business. In detective fiction of the day, the crime to be solved was literally in the first paragraph. Moreover, the cops or relatives of the victim often enlisted a detective of superior sleuthing skills to see the case solved. In Three-Gun Terry, however, such a scenario does not start the plot rolling. Instead, Terry Mack stumbles upon “a situation,” namely, the kidnapping of the virgin. Once involved, Terry Mack does something else startling new. He doesn’t investigate a series of clues as was the formula. Instead, he threatens his underworld connections with blackmail if they don’t cough up info about the virgin’s kidnappers. In other words, Terry Mack is using brawn over brains to solve a crime. Raymond Chandler called this threat of violence “the smell of fear.” Such a charged atmosphere is the hallmark of hard-boiled crime fiction, and Terry Mack, love him or hate him, started it all. More importantly, the private-eye, once the symbol of good, is now not only oozing menace, but he is also breaking the law to serve his own selfish needs, for Terry Mack sees in the virgin’s rescue a sizable profit to be made from her adoring uncle. Best of all, the virgin knows the police chief who, in the end, exonerates Terry Mack for blowing all the bad guys away. Terry Mack is not only “a gun-crazed vigilante,” but he’s also as lucky as an inside straight. Once again, pretty tame stuff. But remember: This is May, 1923. With Terry Mack, Carroll John Daly has just turned the detective formula on its head. Suddenly, the private-eye, the hero, the erstwhile symbol of law and order, is now an anti-hero, a predator in search of profit, a “swaggering illiterate” who will kill anyone who stands in his way. Yet despite such seminal moments, there remains something quirkily inconsistent about Three-Gun Terry. Case in point: Before Terry Mack witnesses the virgin’s kidnapping, he can’t find any street action.

“So it comes that things is slow. Along about one-thirty [a.m.] I start for home. I got a car but I ain’t using it. The subway is my ticket tonight.”

Sorry, but try as I might, I can’t see Terry Mack, “a swaggering illiterate with the mentality of a gun-crazed vigilante” waiting in line to buy subway tokens, especially when he’s got a car and the streets are probably dead empty, it being after midnight. But it doesn’t end there. The virgin Terry Mack rescues is from Italy, yet Terry Mack persists in calling her “senorita.” Spanish not Italian. Here’s another. Terry Mack has, of all things, a chauffer-side-kick called “Bud.” Now, you’ve got to wonder: If Terry Mack has a chauffer-side-kick, why is he riding the subway so late at night?

Three-Gun Terry is full of such incongruities. I call them Dalyisms. Why? Number one because craft wise this is just sloppy writing and two because a real private-eye, a Continental Op, would not have a chauffeur-side kick and, if he did have a chauffer-side kick, he sure as hell wouldn’t be riding the subway.

It’s pretty obvious what is happening here. Daly the formula writer is remembering what Daly the reader read, and what Daly read said that a hero must have a side kick, after all, Sherlock Holmes had Watson, Nick Carter had Patsy and Scrubby, and Hawkeye had Chingachgook. That was the formula and Daly, despite creating an archetype in Terry Mack, was, at the end of the day, a formula writer. He wasn’t writing about the mean streets. He was superimposing the wild west over Manhattan, and the wild west, according to the literature of the time, was full of bad guys who kidnapped and tortured virginal senoritas. In other words, Daly was giving the public exactly what they wanted: something tried-and-true, and something new. Love him or hate him, Terry Mack is the undisputed father of Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, Lew Archer, Little Caesar, Mike Hammer, Dirty Harry, Don Corleone, Rambo, the Terminator, and, I assert, today’s video game in which slaughter is celebrated and death has no consequence, a particularly ugly aspect of American culture sold all over the globe by Hollywood. Modern American culture has indeed cashed in on Carroll John Daly’s creation, the “swaggering illiterate” called Terry Mack, a character time has all but erased. Why? More specifically, why has Carroll John Daly, the acknowledged father of hard-boiled crime fiction, been all but forgotten while Dashiell Hammmett went on to be regarded as the originator of this new American genre?

To understand why Carroll John Daly has been eclipsed by Dashiell Hammett, we must turn to the work of Hammett, a writer Dorothy Parker once said was “so hard-boiled, you could roll him on the White House lawn.”

When Hammett started writing in the early twenties, one critic said:

“[Hammett] was not a writer learning about private detectives, he was a private detective learning about writing.”

Reading Hammett’s Arson Plus and later stories, particularly The Maltese Falcon, proves this point beyond a doubt. But first Arson Plus.

Arson Plus was first published in The Black Mask in October, 1923, six months after Daly’s Three-Gun Terry. Being published in the same magazine so close in time you’d think that Arson Plus would bear some resemblance to Three-Gun Terry. After all, The Black Mask was all about money, and money meant formula writing. And yes, on the formula front, Arson Plus does indeed end with a shootout much like Three-Gun Terry. But other than that, these two seminal crime stories are world’s apart.

Like Three-Gun Terry, Arson Plus introduces a new character into the world of detective fiction: a private-eye called the Continental Op. The Op investigates an insurance company’s claim that “a client torched a house.” Unlike Terry Mack, the Op doesn’t stumble upon “a situation.” The Op, instead, is all business. From the get go, he knows exactly where he is going and, with help from the police, he moves assiduously from suspect to suspect until the arsonist gets his. By today’s standards, pretty routine stuff. Hammett was definitely following the formula, definitely writing for the market. So where, you ask, is the revolution?

First off, let’s look at character because, as we know, hard-boiled fiction is all about character. In Three-Gun Terry, Terry Mack continually lets us know that he is bad news, and proud of it. However, in Arson Plus, the Op does the exact opposite: He plays his cards close to his chest. He is not a braggart or a self-serving moralist who enforces his own code of ethics at the point of a gun. We’re not even sure if the Op even carries a gun. Not only that but we don’t know what he looks like until half way through the story. When the Op interviews a suspect, a beautiful young seductress who has kept him waiting, the Op feels a momentary attraction only to admit:

“I was a busy middle-aged detective who was fuming over having his time wasted. I was a lot more interested in finding the bird who struck the match than I was in finding feminine beauty. But I smothered my grouch and got down to business.”

A busy middle-aged detective. That’s all we get. What does it imply? It implies, as Dorothy Parker says, that “Hammett [is doing] his readers the infinite courtesy of allowing them to supply descriptions and analyses for themselves.” In other words, Hammett is letting us create our own image of the Op. And that image is everything Terry Mack is not. Where Terry Mack is young and gunning, the Op is older, slower. Probably smokes too much and needs a drink bad. Don’t we all.

One thing is certain though: The Op’s character is described by action. Terry Mack’s character is also defined by action but it is more fantasy than real. Simply put, he is the same old cavalry storming the same old Indian village to save the same old virgin in the same old hail of bullets, whereas the Op, pegged to Hammett’s concise prose, races us through a realistic world full of stuttering witnesses and mundane police procedure all based around, curiously enough, a victimless crime. In Arson Plus, we are not tagging along with the Op as we are with Terry Mack. Because the Op is nameless and faceless, we are the Op. We have created him in our own likeness by filling in the blanks of his character. Having done so, Hammett has allowed us to place ourselves on the frontline of a stark new realism in detective fiction.

Like Terry Mack, the Op too harbors a healthy degree of cynicism. However, Terry Mack’s cynicism is what I call narcissistic cynicism. His distrust of the world seems sincere enough, yet by damning both good and bad, he is not so much commenting on the world at large but rather massaging his own romantic view of himself. Moreover, Terry Mack might be “a swaggering illiterate” who follows his own moral code but in rescuing the virgin, the symbol of good, he remains an optimist, an Arthurian knight who, underneath all the tough guy talk, believes that justice will out in the end, which is exactly what happens. Order is preserved. In other words, Terry Mack is not half as new as he seems, for at heart he still bears the stripe of our Puritan forefathers, an intolerant lot who, like Terry Mack, had their own code of justice, one in which they too stood judge, jury and executioner over what they perceived to be evil, namely, the Indian. And what did the Puritans do to the Indian? They committed genocide, for the Indian was the bad guy and the bad guy, in the Puritan mind and in Terry Mack’s, had to be eliminated with extreme prejudice. In other words, might makes right. Think “Axis of Evil.” That tidy triangulation of countries has Terry Mack splashed all over it, the president who coined the phrase not only a transplanted New England cowboy, but also, many would argue, a swaggering illiterate in his own right. As you can see, Terry Mack’s roots run long and deep.

Compared to Terry Mack, the Op’s brand of cynicism is something quite different. As far as crime goes, the Op, much like Hammett in real life, has been there done that more times than he cares to recall. In this light, he is jaded to the core. Working the mean streets has turned him into a cynic, a man who brushes beauty aside not because he hates dames but because he has seen through the game of life and, more mundanely, he has a job to do. He is not a coked-out intellectual in a deerstalker cap. He is not a cowboy packing three irons, an over-inflated ego, and a Puritan my-way-or-the-highway ethic. Instead, the Op is an everyman. He is on the side of the law not because he wants to do good but because he is being paid to do a job, to find facts and right a wrong. In his search for the truth, romance is sacrificed at the alter of expediency. Therein lies the revolution. In Arson Plus, the Op represents the death of romanticism in detective fiction. He is the sword rammed straight through the hearts of all the shining knights, the Vidocqs, the Sherlock Holmes, the Nick Carters, even Terry Mack himself.

In Arson Plus, as in all Hammett’s work, death is serious business not grounds for romantic boasting. Not so for Daly. Why did Daly pen such a cavalier approach to life and death? First off, as a formula writer, Daly knew what his audience wanted, and he delivered. However, I assert that Daly, safe within his temperature-controlled suburban home, toyed with death because, unlike Hammett, he’d never stared death, mean street death, in the face. Daly’s bio proves he had no experience of what it meant to be a working cop. In short, he lacked Hammett’s real-world perspective on what it meant to investigate a murder.

Some would argue that to judge what experiences shaped Daly’s work is pure speculation and no basis for an argument. And I would agree if we were talking about a bona fide reclusive genius. But there’s the rub: Daly wasn’t a genius. Far from it. At his best, he was a formula hack who, drawing on a lifetime of influences, created a character, a crude prototype other writer’s would, in time, refine and transform into the archetype. Meanwhile, Three-Gun Terry, burdened by its predictable plot shot from the Puritan point of view - a narrative style found in almost every late 19th century dime novel (and in any number of Hollywood films) - has failed to stand the test of time. Suffice it to say, reading Daly’s Three-Gun Terry and his later work is like watching reruns of The Terminator. Great eye candy. Not much for the mind. Such an approach did make Daly a fast buck in his time, but it did not breed great and lasting art.

Hammmett, on the other hand, because he worked the streets, because he was an Op, presents us with a more realistic picture of police procedure starting with Arson Plus. Hammett doesn’t need to tart things up with cowboy slang. He doesn’t need to lean on a Puritan plot to get from A to Z. Moreover, his brand of cynicism has been forged on the frontline of experience. No big deal today, but back in 1923, the Op was a seminal breeze squeezing the last ounce of romance out of the detective genre. He was, and still is, truly hard-boiled, a popular jazz-age phrase that means “without sentiment.” More importantly, the Op was real.

Stylistically, Arson Plus is so straight forward, so stripped of pretense it rivals Hemingway for clarity and simplicity. Read early Hammett and early Hemingway, and you’ll wonder who influenced whom. In short, Hammett, in Arson Plus, reveals an aspiring writer’s intuitive command of formalist elements, all of which frame a compelling new character called the Op. That, in my estimation, is one reason why Hammett has eclipsed Daly and is now regarded as the father of hard-boiled crime fiction.

But there is another more salient reason why Hammett is considered the master of hard-boiled crime fiction. While Daly’s later work repeated the same cycle of plot and character clichés, Hammett was steadily evolving his craft. In time, he came to use the crime story as a vehicle through which he, as a writer, could comment on life itself. We catch an awakening of this in Arson Plus, a moment in which Hammett is struggling to do more than just entertain. When the Op visits the torched house, he says:

“[I] poked around in the ashes for a few minutes, not that [I] expected to find anything but because it is man’s nature to poke around in ruins.”

“It is man’s nature to poke around in ruins.” This is no longer pulp fiction. This is a writer rising above the limitations of his genre, an artist commenting, however brief, on the nature of man who, by poking around in death, might find the key to the mystery called life. All that from an aspiring writer first published in H. L. Mencken’s The Smart Set, Mencken being the same editor who first published F. Scott Fitzgerald; Mencken, the same critic who had previously rejected stories from James Joyce’s Dubliners and early work from Hemingway while publishing work from an unknown named Sam Hammett.

“It is man’s nature to poke around in ruins.” Six years later, in 1929, this same line will describe private-eye Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Spade, like the Op, is poking around not in the ruins of a torched house but in a world of failed dreams.

Plot wise, The Maltese Falcon follows Sam Spade, hired by a femme fatale seeking protection from a gang of miscreants. It turns out, however, that the femme fatale and the miscreants are in cahoots as they search the world over for a priceless statuette called the Maltese Falcon. The illusive falcon, if found, will make the gang fabulously rich. Metaphorically, the falcon is the grail story and all it implies. Yet the miscreants, like Arthur’s knights, fail to find immortality. Frustrated, their dreams in ruins, the miscreants turn on each other. Therein lies the genius of Dashiell Hammett.

By analogizing the Maltese Falcon to the grail quest, Hammett is using a mythological context to comment upon the deluding nature of man’s dreams, for the falcon, like the grail, will never be found. It will always remain, as Spade tells us in the end, “The stuff dreams are made of.” This same theme is echoed in James Joyce’s Araby, a short story many consider one of the greatest ever written. At the end of Araby, the boy-hero, having failed to find love at the fair, realizes the deluding nature of his dreams thus the deluding nature of romanticism itself. Joyce brings us to this epiphany - another seminal moment in writing - by using the same mythological, grail-quest context that Hammett employs in The Maltese Falcon.

The Maltese Falcon is considered the masterpiece of hard-boiled crime fiction. True to form, it packs a lot of tough talk and gun play. More importantly, it focuses on character, a jaded anti-hero named Spade who comes to realize that the falcon is shielding the miscreants from a ruinous truth, the fact that life and the dreams upon which it are built, are an illusion of one’s own making. Such a comment elevates The Maltese Falcon into the realm of existentialist inquiry, the miscreants and their quest a metaphor that asks the age-old question: What is the meaning of life?

Great literature is a study in character. Great literature transcends genre. For Hammett, that transcendence started in Arson Plus and was achieved in The Maltese Falcon. The arc of Hammett’s art is clear, whereas Daly never broke free of the mold. Read any number of his later works and this will become abundantly clear. The closest Daly came to turning a phrase is this from Three-Gun Terry. Waiting for the bad guys, Terry Mack says:

“When I look out the window, that street is as deserted as a poetry graveyard.”

A poetry graveyard. Not a poet’s graveyard, mind you, but “a poetry graveyard.” A place poems go to die, or so it seems.

It’s easy to poke fun at Daly, too easy, but this awkward metaphor is, nevertheless, just another in a long list of Dalyisms that, when added up, conspire to defeat Daly’s literary claim to fame: the creation of Terry Mack, the world’s first hard-boiled private-eye.

Time indeed has been cruel to Carroll John Daly. However, the clerk at the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan assures me that recently many people have been asking about Carroll John Daly.

It’s true.

She can’t explain it.

Neither can I.

The End