SOURCE: Geherin, David. “Birth of a Hero.” In The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction, pp. 1-25. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985.

Although it is an American writer, Edgar Allan Poe, who is generally credited with inventing the detective story in 1841 with the publication of his tale, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” it was eighty years before another American writer—actually a pair of American writers, Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett—created the first authentic American detective hero, the private eye. Poe's detective, C. Auguste Dupin, significantly a Frenchman, not an American, appeared in only three stories—the others being “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” in 1842 and “The Purloined Letter” in 1844—but his influence was profound for he provided the model for the world's most famous detective, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

Like Dupin, Holmes was gifted with an extraordinary mind, one capable of discerning volumes of information from the tiniest bits of detail. In A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first Holmes story, his friend and biographer Dr. Watson quotes from an article Holmes wrote in which he set forth his belief in the value of careful observation and logical deduction:

From a drop of water … a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it. Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study. … By a man's finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs—by each of these things a man's calling is plainly revealed.¹

For the next forty years, Doyle continued to write stories that delighted millions of readers with Holmes's uncanny ability to solve virtually any crime presented to him by applying the rules of careful observation and simple deductive logic. To Holmes and his successors, detection was nothing less than an exact science, an application of scientific principles to human affairs.

Sherlock Holmes became the prototype for virtually all detective heroes created during the next few decades, and the Holmesian tale became the model for the formal detective story, or whodunit, that remains popular even today. Frequently eccentric in habit (Holmes played the violin and injected cocaine), dilettantish in his interests (Holmes wrote learned monographs on subjects ranging from tattoos to the 114 varieties of tobacco ash), and haughty in attitude toward those less intellectually gifted than he, the Great Detective is usually attracted to a case by the challenge and excitement it offers. Usually an amateur rather than a professional, he successfully solves crimes that baffle the best minds on the police force. His compensation comes in the sense of satisfaction he gets in demonstrating once again his superior intellectual skills rather than in any form of monetary reward.

Following Holmes there came a veritable army of amateur sleuths, some more foppish and irritating in manner than Holmes but all sharing to some degree his reliance on careful observation and logical methodology to solve crimes. In England there was E. C. Bentley's Philip Trent, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot (with his faith in his “little grey cells” as a way of solving crime), Ernest Bramah's Max Carrados (whose blindness was no obstacle to puzzling out solutions to crimes), H. C. Bailey's Reginald Fortune, R. Austin Freeman's Dr. John Thorndyke, Philip MacDonald's Colonel Anthony Gethryn, A. A. Milne's Antony Gillingham, Anthony Berkeley's Roger Sheringham, and Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey—to name only some of the brilliant sleuths created between 1907 and 1926. Despite the strongly British flavor to the genre, there were even some American cousins of Sherlock Holmes: Arthur Reeve's Craig Kennedy (called “The American Sherlock Holmes”), Jacques Futrelle's Professor S. F. X. Van Dusen (known as “The Thinking Machine,” he once defeated a world chess champion only hours after having the rules of the game explained to him) and S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance. Despite their individual eccentricities and methods, each of these detectives was portrayed as an intellectual giant whose problem-solving skills represented a celebration of the scientific method and a constant rebuke to evildoers.

As the mystery story developed, especially after the publication of E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case in 1913, it began to incorporate more and more features of the traditional English comedy of manners. Such conventions as stereotyped aristocratic characters, cozy country settings, a rigidly defined hierarchical society, and what can perhaps best be described as an English country-house style were borrowed from the same literary tradition that produced such nineteenth-century English masters of the novel as George Eliot, Jane Austen, George Meredith, and Anthony Trollope. Even when, as in the case of The Thinking Machine or Philo Vance or even the early Ellery Queen, the Holmesian detective was transplanted to America, he remained as aristocratic in attitude and as eccentric in habit as the stuffiest of his British counterparts.

But as George Grella reminds us in his excellent essay, “Murder and Manners: The Formal Detective Novel,” “the whodunit assumes a benevolent and knowable universe,”² a world of cause and effect that, the sleuth is confident, can be forced to surrender a solution to any mystery if one diligently applies the laws of logic. A series of shattering events—social, political, and economic—began to occur, however, which would produce a radical disruption in the mystery story. The outbreak of World War I in 1914, for example, seriously challenged a number of widely held beliefs and comforting assumptions about man's ability to shape, by reason, his own destiny, about the inevitable progress of the human race, and about the inviolability of civilization itself. The reality of the war forced many thoughtful individuals to consider the very real possibility that the world was neither as benevolent nor as rationally ordered as had been previously assumed. This general disillusionment was exacerbated in the United States by the institution of Prohibition in 1920, which had the effect of suddenly transforming millions of law-abiding citizens into conspirators in illegal activities each time they took a sip of bootleg whiskey. Worse, because of the enormous profits to be made from bootlegging, American cities, large and small, soon came under the control of gangsters. Crime seemed to be everywhere. The final blow would come at the end of the decade, when the stock market crash of 1929 ushered in the economic suffering of the Great Depression. Social and economic disorder thus combined with philosophical disillusionment to produce what Raymond Chandler described as a “world gone wrong.”

One of the most notable results of the general upheaval in society was a loss of confidence in reason as the solution to all man's problems. If the world was no longer perceived as rational but arbitrary and capricious, then man's intellect, no matter how fully developed, could not be depended upon to puzzle out all the answers. The Holmesian approach to crime-solving rests upon the belief that everything in the universe obeys the laws of logic and is therefore knowable. In a fundamentally irrational universe, however, reason becomes far less effective. One could no longer confidently solve a puzzle if he felt that some important pieces were missing, or if he were asked to put it together in the dark. Dashiell Hammett likens the confusion of the private eye to the actions of a “blind man in a dark room hunting for the black hat that wasn't there.”³

The world of the classical whodunit also assumes a stable society, one in which crime is viewed as an aberration, a deviation from the norm that can be exorcised by the efforts of the detective, whose success in first identifying and then eliminating the criminal element makes possible the return to normalcy at the end of the story. But if crime and disorder are the rule rather than the exception, as they seemed to be in America in the 1920s, then no individual, no matter how brilliant, could be expected to restore order merely by discovering the identity of the criminal. The combination of these two elements—the displacement in the minds of many of a rationally ordered universe by one which seemed capricious and arbitrary; and the growing suspicion that crime was no longer a simple isolated phenomenon but rather an integral part of the very fabric of society—produced a profound change in the direction of mystery fiction. The emergence of the private eye is not, as some contend, “an imitation detective story which is based on a misunderstanding of the genre,”⁴ nor is it, as Edmund Wilson said about The Maltese Falcon, simply an infusion of “the old formula of Sherlock Holmes with a certain cold underworld brutality” designed to give readers a “new shudder.”⁵ Rather it represents a fundamental recordation of perceptions and it produced, among other things, a radically new kind of hero, one far better equipped than the brilliant logician to cope with violence and disorder. Even though he was often unable to deduce solutions from bits of evidence or rid the world of evil at the end of the story, he did his best to combat it wherever he could by relying upon his fists rather than his wits, his brawn instead of only his brains.

The lack of verisimilitude in the formal detective story was also becoming more noticeable, especially in the light of recent world events. In his classic essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler complained about the arid formulas of the classical whodunits, observing that in order to fit the artificial patterns of the puzzle plot, which became the highest priority in such mysteries, characters were often little more than “puppets and cardboard lovers and papier mâché villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility.”⁶ Too often, in Chandler's view, the crime in question, which he described as being typically “how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poignard just as she flatted on the top note of the Bell Song from Lakmé in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests,”⁷ had no relevance to the world in which the readers actually lived. Many individuals, especially in the light of the war just ended, felt that death was too important to be treated as nothing more than an excuse for a puzzle. The times demanded verisimilitude, a leading proponent of which was Dashiell Hammett, whom Chandler honored for giving murder “back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.”⁸ Readers who preferred their murders “scented with magnolia blossoms” might have been put off by the realism of the new detective story, but those readers who understood that they did not inhabit a “very fragrant world” were drawn to the gritty and sometimes violent world that was being depicted in the tradition-shattering tales of writers like Daly and Hammett.

The formal detective story certainly did not disappear from sight as a result of the tribulations of the age; in fact, it entered what is called its Golden Age at about the same time as the upheaval began. Its new popularity can be seen less as evidence of the willful blindness of its readers and more as a tribute to the persistence of its strong nostalgic appeal, for the neat logical conclusions to most such mysteries continued to celebrate the “cozy tea-and-crumpety-sense of God's-in-His-heaven-all's-right-with-the-world”⁹ assurance that was noticeably missing from real life. What happened, however, was that as the turmoil increased, the contrived situations and cardboard characters that figured in such books were forced to share the stage with mysteries that more realistically reflected the anxieties of the age and that featured heroes who were rough, tough, and frequently violent.

The effects of post-World War I disillusionment were not, of course, limited exclusively to the detective story. The philosophical disturbances also produced such poetic statements of disillusionment as William Butler Yeats's “The Second Coming” (1921) and T. S. Eliot's “The Waste Land” (1922), as well as the early stories of Ernest Hemingway, which helped bring about a shift in style and attitude that revolutionized American prose in the twentieth century. But the change can perhaps be detected more readily in the mystery novel because, for one thing, it represented such an abrupt departure from what was the dominant (one is tempted to say sole) form of the mystery story at the time. Also, the shift can be clearly attributed to the combined efforts of two writers, Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett, who almost simultaneously were creating the private-eye hero in stories that began appearing in the pages of the most important and influential of all the outlets for this new type of writing, Black Mask.

It would be an exaggeration to say that either Daly or Hammett set out deliberately to precipitate a revolution in the detective story. Like many other writers at the time, they were merely responding to the changes in values, or perhaps more accurately to the loss of previously held values, and were thus drawn to a kind of writing that would allow them to reflect as realistically as possible a world which seemed to them marked by disorder, uncertainty, and violence. In order to portray such a world, the first thing each had to do was find a new hero, one who was more at home in this world than the infallible and omniscient sleuth, one better equipped to meet its severe demands.

Where did they find this new hero? His immediate predecessors were the popular heroes of the dime novels, such detectives as Nick Carter and The Old Sleuth and such Western stars as Buffalo Bill and Deadwood Dick, but in his essential characteristics his ancestry can be traced back even further, to such legendary nineteenth-century figures as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett and to the frontier hero of James Fenimore Cooper's Leather-Stocking Tales, Natty Bumppo. The prototypical Western hero was a brave, resourceful individual who often found himself torn between society's dictates and those of his own conscience. Strictly speaking not a lawman, he nevertheless on his own initiative and for his own private reasons worked for the pursuit of justice, fairness, and dignity. As the United States was being transformed from a predominantly agricultural society into a predominantly industrial one in the early decades of the twentieth century, it was inevitable that the frontier hero would also soon become urbanized. What Daly and Hammett were able to do (albeit in significantly different ways) was to transplant this most authentic American hero from the plains to the city streets, giving new life to the Western hero in the form of the modern private eye.

RACE WILLIAMS (CARROLL JOHN DALY)

The initial step in the revolution occurred in the December 1922 issue of Black Mask when Carroll John Daly published a story entitled “The False Burton Combs,” which featured an unnamed, self-styled “soldier of fortune” who was to become the prototype for the first private eye. Willing to accept any job, no matter how dangerous, provided the price is right—“I don't mind the risk, but I must be paid accordingly”—he agrees to spend the night keeping company with a frightened young man for a hundred dollars. The man, Burton Combs, confesses that he fears for his life and offers Daly's hero a tidy sum if he will agree to impersonate him for the rest of the summer on Nantucket Island. He agrees. Eventually he finds himself in a confrontation with three men who have come gunning for the real Burton Combs, but in a bloody shoot-out he manages to kill all three gunmen.

Daly's hero describes himself as “just a gentleman adventurer” who makes his living “working against the law breakers,” not because of any commitment to justice but simply because in his experience they have proven to be the simplest sort to fleece. As fearless and as tough as any of the criminals he encounters—“I could shoot as good as any bootlegger that ever robbed a church. They're hard guys, yes, but then I ain't exactly a cake-eater myself”—he adopts whatever methods are necessary, including killing, in order to survive in his violent world. Although the local authorities are disturbed by his gunplay, he is acquitted in the killing of the three gunmen after his lawyer, defending his actions, convinces the jury that, “if that isn't self-defense and good American pluck I'd like to ask you what in heaven's name is?” In the end, the hero accepts an offer of a steady job from Burton Combs's father, and elects to settle down, get married, and retire from his dangerous profession.

Although Daly thus forsakes his soldier of fortune, he doesn't entirely abandon his basic character. He resurrects him, gives him the name Terry Mack and features him in “Three Gun Terry” in the May 15, 1923, issue of Black Mask. Like the unnamed hero in Daly's earlier story, Terry Mack occupies a shadowy area somewhere between the law and the criminal. “I ain't a crook, and I ain't a dick. I play the game … my own way.” Like his predecessor, he is tough, fearless, and a bit trigger-happy. He carries three guns: two.45s and a.25 caliber pistol. Unlike his predecessor, however, he is by profession a private investigator who charges a flat rate rather than whatever the danger commands. He gets fifty dollars a day, plus a two-hundred-dollar bonus for each enemy corpse he produces.

But it was Race Williams, introduced in “Knights of the Open Palm” in the June 1, 1923, issue of Black Mask, who was to become Daly's most popular creation. Sales of Black Mask reportedly jumped 15 percent whenever a Race Williams story was featured. He became the true progenitor of the American private eye. Like Three-Gun Terry Mack, Williams is a fearless private investigator who will take any job, whether it be infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan (“Knights of the Open Palm”), ridding New York of the infamous Gorgon brothers, the most ruthless and powerful gangsters in the city (The Third Murderer [1931]), working to discover the identity of The Hidden Hand, the crime genius who is terrorizing all of Florida (The Hidden Hand [1929]), or trying to thwart a nefarious plot to plunge the United States into war (Murder from the East [1935]), as long as the price is right. “I ain't afraid of nothing,” he boasts, “providing there's enough jack in it.” Unlike Holmes and his descendants who were amateur sleuths drawn to a case by the intellectual challenge it offered, Williams is a professional who makes his living by chasing criminals, and he demands to be well paid for his efforts.

Williams isn't motivated by any noble desire to eradicate crime from the world; that would be bad for business. “I'm not a preacher against crime. I've made too much money out of criminals. They're my bread and butter.” He is willing to sell his services to the highest bidder, although he draws the line at becoming involved in illegal activities. But despite all the talk about the financial angles of a case, it is the thrill of the hunt and the dangers of his profession that he finds equally rewarding. “If I couldn't still feel the lure of the man-hunt,” he confesses, “I wouldn't be in the game.” And, although he is reluctant to admit it for it would damage his image as a hard-hearted businessman, he occasionally becomes interested in a case for purely personal reasons. In both The Tag Murders (1930) and Murder from the East, for example, it is the kidnapping of a twelve-year-old girl that prompts his involvement.

Like his motives, Williams's methods are also radically different from those of the intellectual sleuths. He is a man of action, not thought, a man schooled in the laws of survival rather than the laws of logic. “Thoughts never got me any place. If ever a lad can figure things out wrong, I'm that lad. What I want is action—and what I get is action.” His knowledge comes for the rough and violent streets of the city, not from dusty tomes. “Right and wrong are not written on the statutes for me, nor do I find my code of morals in the essays of long-winded professors,” he declares. “My ethics are my own.”¹⁰ Unlike his Holmesian counterparts, he has little faith in the careful collection of clues as a method of solving crimes. Sherlock Holmes may have been an expert on the 114 varieties of tobacco ash, but to Williams “a burnt cigar ash only tells me that someone has smoked a cigar, and nothing more.” His goal is not deducing the identity of the culprit or puzzling out a challenging problem; he is simply interested in bringing criminals to justice, which he often administers on the spot in his favorite way—by putting a bullet between the evildoer's eyes.

What Race Williams does share with Sherlock Holmes and others of his ilk is a confidence bordering on arrogance; so self-assured is he that he never doubts his abilities nor questions his frequently rash actions. “I'm not a lad who won't admit a thing is wrong, just because he did it,” he declares in The Third Murderer. But then he adds, “If it was wrong it was just too damn bad. … Nothing I could do then would take a forty-four bullet and shove it back into my gun again. Why cry over it?” If he finds himself in a situation that calls for a bit of gunplay, he shoots without hesitation and with no apologies. If his violent actions happen to disturb his readers, that's too bad; “Truth is truth,” he declares. “Call it murder if you like—a disregard for human life. I don't care. I'll run my business—you run yours.”

Williams's swagger can be attributed to his fearlessness and his confidence in his marksmanship, neither of which he tires of trumpeting. When he learns that a ＄100,000 contract has been put out to “Get Race Williams,” he meets the threat with his own challenge: “Come and Get Him.” As a man who lives in a rough and violent world, he knows he must be tough enough to meet its challenges and he prides himself on his reputation for he-man heroics. It not only puts fear into the hearts of the underworld, it's also good for business. On the day after an account of an incident in which he held off twelve men gunning for him appears in the newspaper, he receives twelve job offers. Williams's bold methods and fearless nature have kept him alive in a violent world that would quickly devour those effete eccentrics whose approach to crime is largely limited to poking about in ashtrays and deducing motives from actions whose significance is hidden from all but the most perceptive observer.

Although when it comes to criminals Williams's ethics are uncomplicated, boasting as he does, “My conscience is clear. I never bumped off a guy what didn't need it,” it would be incorrect to conclude that he has no principles at all. While it seldom gives him pause to shoot a criminal in the back if the situation demands it, he will have nothing to do with a crooked racket, nor will he sell out a client to a higher bidder. Nor, even though it contains information that might be helpful, will he betray a client's confidence by reading a document he has been entrusted with in The Snarl of the Beast.

Nor, despite his generally hard-boiled attitude toward things in general—“I've seen so much that my heart is petrified to a granitelike hardness”—is he devoid of feelings. Moved by a client's story in The Snarl of the Beast, he reaches out and grasps his wrist in a gesture of sympathy. Although he's not what you would call chivalrous in his attitude toward the female sex, since he doesn't hesitate to bash a woman in the head with his gun in Murder from the East because “she had it coming to her,” he does have a soft spot in his heart for certain women. Despite his claim that he wouldn't hang from a precipice in order to get her a rare flower, he is prepared to risk his life to save the beautiful Tina Sears in The Hidden Hand because she had earlier saved his life. But the woman who provokes most of his gentler feelings is Florence Drummond, known as “The Girl with the Criminal Mind” for her underworld activities and “The Flame” for her power over men. Williams first meets her in The Tag Murders, where she earns his gratitude for shooting a man who is about to gun him down. She turns up in several of the subsequent books, although Williams is never certain whether she has gone straight, as she claims, or whether she has reverted to her previous life of crime, as it appears. Williams's relationship with The Flame represents a crude attempt on Daly's part to introduce a romantic element into the series, thereby adding a much-needed human dimension to his two-fisted, trigger-happy hero.

It is obvious that Race Williams does not trace his ancestry to the Holmesian sleuth but to the rough-and-ready hero of the Wild West, to the daring gunfighter who relied on a quick eye and a steady trigger finger in his campaign to bring justice to a troubled frontier. In fact, an exchange in the very first Race Williams story sounds as if it might even have come from a dime-novel Western. Western elements were not inappropriate in Black Mask, which for many years advertised on its cover that it featured “Detective, Western, Stories of Action.” Warned by a Ku Klux Klansman that he has twenty-four hours to get out of town, Williams tells him that he and his two henchmen have exactly twenty-four seconds to get out of his room. Nobody can push Race Williams around, just as no one dared to push the tough cowboy hero around either. The popularity of Race Williams demonstrated that the brave frontier hero could effectively be transplanted to the streets of New York without any loss of daring or courage. Or audience.

Daly was an unlikely candidate as the pioneer of what came to be known as the hard-boiled school of detective fiction and an unlikely creator of such a rough and violent character as Race Williams. As a youth, he attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, later worked as an usher and projectionist, and eventually owned and operated the first movie theater on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. When he subsequently turned to writing in his early thirties, he moved to White Plains, New York, and, unlike his brave hero, settled into an unadventurous, highly regulated life, never venturing out of the house during the winter. Daly's home environment was so rigidly controlled that he never even allowed the temperature of the house to vary more than two degrees. Nor did he share his hero's fearlessness, reportedly refusing his wife's entreaties to have his teeth fixed because of his fear of dentists. Daly saved all his heroics for his writing, to which he devoted himself each night during the quiet, lonely hours between midnight and dawn.

Nobody ever accused Daly of being much of a writer and readers looking for elegance of phrasing or subtlety of characterization will be disappointed. Daly had no ear for dialogue and his plots are threadbare, especially in the novels, which are little more than story sequences loosely patched together. The Hidden Hand is a typical example: in order to get to “The Hidden Hand,” a notorious crime genius, Williams first has to confront each of his four associates, which he does in mechanical order one after the other. So much for plot development. Daly's idea of creating suspense is either to fill the page with dashes, aiming for a breathless quality that the action fails to generate, or else to have a character die just as he is about to reveal some crucial bit of information. Rather than developing characters in any detail, he relies on colorful sobriquets like “The Beast,” “The Head Tag,” “The Hidden Hand,” “The Girl with the Criminal Mind,” and “The Angel of the Underworld” to do all the work of characterization for him. Finally, the action in the stories is heavily melodramatic and overly repetitious. When Daly finds a scene to his liking, he uses it in novel after novel. Also, he seldom employs action as a way of revealing Williams's toughness, preferring instead to have his hero tell the reader how tough he is. The result is that the stories become little more than extended monologues in which Williams strikes he-man poses and brags endlessly about his courage and fearlessness.

Even though, as Michael Barson charges, Daly may have been a “third-rate word-spinner” who featured his “second-rate protagonist” in “fourth-rate productions,”¹¹ it isn't difficult to account for the enormous popularity of his work in the twenties. Race Williams represented a fresh new face, a new kind of hero who in his rugged individualism touched a responsive chord in his audience. In an essay on Daly's contribution to the development of the private eye, G. A. Finch argues that one reason for Williams's popularity was that in his brash new hero Daly managed to “translate the wishes of the non-thinking reader into action: the desire to overpower enemies without scruple or fear of retaliation; and to live in a world in which there are no obstacles to the quick elimination of chosen lawbreakers.”¹² A hero like Race Williams was admired because his readers saw him as an ordinary man “who had what no ordinary man had and every common man wanted to some degree: autonomy of action—to do what was necessary to punish enemies without fear of reprisal.”¹³ While there can certainly be no denying that Williams's shoot-first-ask-questions-later philosophy pandered to the baser instincts of his audience, there are other equally important reasons for his quick acceptance. For one thing, the time was ripe for a new hero. It was Ogden Nash who once quipped that “Philo Vance needs a kick in the pance,” but it was Race Williams who was the first to deliver a telling blow to the priggish intellectual sleuths like Philo Vance who dominated mystery fiction in the 1920s.

Between 1923 and 1934, Daly published some thirty-five Race Williams stories in Black Mask, including in one brief flurry between 1927 and 1932 six multi-part story sequences, all of which were subsequently published in hardcover as Race Williams novels. The first of these, The Snarl of the Beast, published in 1927, has the distinction of being the first private-eye novel ever published. After leaving Black Mask, Daly continued to turn out Race Williams stories for a number of other pulps (including a total of twenty-three for Dime Detective) and also created several other heroes (Vee Brown, Clay Holt, Satan Hall), none of whom ever caught on the way Williams did.

Daly never developed as a writer, however, and as more believable private eyes began to appear in the pulps in the early 1930s Race Williams's popularity waned. Although he continued to write for the pulps until their demise in the 1950s—the final Race Williams story didn't appear until 1955—Daly was never able to regain his audience. Despite the fact that Race Williams is remembered today largely for his historical significance, Daly's contribution to the development of the new mystery hero cannot be ignored for it was Race Williams who first set the example that an entire army of private eyes was to follow.

THE CONTINENTAL OP (DASHIELL HAMMETT)

The revolution that altered the shape of the mystery story in the 1920s involved more than the simple substitution of a new hero for an established one. Among other things it also resulted in a distinctly new atmosphere of realism and a powerful new style. Erle Stanley Gardner, commenting on the origins of the private-eye story, credited Carroll John Daly with developing the new type of mystery tale, but it was Dashiell Hammett whom he honored as the true originator of the hard-boiled style that was to become a trademark of the new detective fiction. Daly was a clumsy writer who relied on melodramatic devices and often wildly implausible situations for effect. Hammett adopted a much more realistic approach in his stories, employing a hardboiled style that was not only an effective vehicle for embodying the toughness of his hero but also for capturing in grim detail the criminal milieu of urban America in the 1920s. By matching style to character Hammett demonstrated the possibilities for artistic development that eluded Daly.

Just four months after Daly introduced Race Williams, Hammett (writing under the pseudonym “Peter Collinson”) published a story entitled “Arson Plus” in the October 1, 1923, issue of Black Mask in which he introduced a short, overweight, unnamed detective employed by the San Francisco branch of the Continental Detective Agency. The Continental Op, as he became known, eventually appeared in thirty-six stories between 1923 and 1930, all but two of them in Black Mask (included in this number are two four-part story sequences which were later published in hard-cover form as Red Harvest [1929] and The Dain Curse [1929]). A hard-working, dedicated professional investigator, the Op offered a realistic alternative to the brash, swaggering Race Williams as the embryonic private-eye hero was beginning to take shape in the early 1920s.

Race Williams was little more than a fantasy figure created out of Daly's imagination, influenced by the popularity of the gunfighter hero of the Old West and colored by the violent tenor of the times. Hammett, on the other hand, spent many years himself as a private investigator for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Two of his more celebrated assignments involved gangster Nicky Arnstein and film star Fatty Arbuckle. He drew upon his own experiences as material for his stories. Although he acknowledged that the Op was modeled on James Wright, assistant superintendent of the Pinkerton Baltimore office for whom he once worked, Hammett also confessed that the reason the Op was never given a name was that he actually represented a number of private detectives he really knew: “He's more or less of a type: the private detective who oftenest is successful: neither the derby-hatted and broad-toed blockhead of one school of fiction, nor the all-knowing, infallible genius of another. I've worked with several of him.”¹⁴ Unquestionably, the verisimilitude that characterizes Hammett's stories—a quality noticeably lacking in Daly's—was due to his ability to draw upon his personal experience for his fiction.

Like Race Williams, the Op is a professional rather than an amateur detective, but unlike Williams, who is motivated by the love of thrills and the love of money, the Op is dedicated to his work. Forty years old in the later stories, he has been a loyal employee of the Continental Agency since the age of twenty, about the same age Hammett was when he joined the Pinkertons. He is not a free-lance operator like Williams but a “hired man” bound by the strict regulations and policies of his agency. He entertains no notion as Race Williams does that there is anything heroic about his job: “The idea in this detective business,” he proclaims, “is to catch crooks, not to put on heroics.” He is a detective for a simple reason: “I happen to like the work.” Maybe he could make more money in some other line of work, but as he candidly admits, “I don't know anything else, don't enjoy anything else, don't want to know or enjoy anything else.” It isn't the money or the thrill of the encounter that gives him pleasure; his satisfaction comes from “catching crooks and solving riddles” and from doing his job as well as he can. Even when he is fired from a job by a client, he continues on the case until the end of the day since the client will have to pay for his services for the full day anyway.

His methods also differ dramatically from those of Race Williams, who prefers violent confrontation with the criminal as a way of solving his cases. To the Op, “Ninety-nine percent of detective work is a patient collecting of details,” and what success he has is usually the fruit of “patience, industry, and unimaginative plugging, helped out now and then, maybe, by a little luck.” The Op is completely convincing in his methods of detection. In “The Whosis Kid,” for example, he stakes out a house for nine hours simply because he is suspicious about someone he saw enter it. In “Zigzags of Treachery” he spends endless hours shadowing suspects, including one for an uninterrupted fifteen-hour stretch. In “The Scorched Face” he spends four days painstakingly compiling and then checking out a list of every woman in San Francisco who was recently murdered, committed suicide, or disappeared. In “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” he combs the newspaper files to learn which days during the past month were rainy, then checks the records of the three largest cab companies in town until he finds the address a woman suspect visited on a wet evening. So plausible and convincing are the Op's methods that Joe Gores, a private detective before becoming a writer, praised Hammett's stories for providing “a sort of condensed course in the techniques of detection.”¹⁵

When the situation demands it, however, the Op can be as violent as Race Williams. He kills when necessary (he even shoots a woman who ignores his warning to stop), although he doesn't feel compelled to plug his opponents between the eyes to prove his toughness. In his view, “the proper place for guns is after talk has failed.” No adherent of Race Williams's shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later philosophy, he believes that “you can't shoot a man just because he refuses to obey an order—even if he is a criminal.” Hammett did not “glorify toughness,” as William Nolan notes, “he honestly portrayed it.”¹⁶ The Op doesn't hesitate to call in the police or some of his fellow ops when the job demands it; the whole idea is to be successful in your operation, not pile up bodies unnecessarily in order to prove your heroism or live up to a reputation as a he-man.

There is also a greater complexity to the character of the Op, a sense of depth beneath the surface that is lacking in the portrayal of Race Williams. Of his private life we know little other than that he is fond of poker. When he says, as he does repeatedly in the stories, “I went home to bed,” we do not follow him. His personality is defined almost exclusively in terms of his work, but within these limitations Hammett manages to convey some interesting shadings of character, most notably with respect to the Op's attitude towards violence. In several of his later works, the Op finds himself more and more attracted to brutality. Although he never seems to take the kind of sadistic pleasure in shooting a man that Race Williams does, he nevertheless finds himself in situations in which he begins to experience pleasure in savagery. In this description of a fight from “The Big Knockover”—“Swing right, swing left, kick, swing right, swing left, kick. Don't hesitate, don't look for targets. God will see that there's always a mug there for your gun or blackjack to sock, a belly for your foot”—he even begins to sound like Williams himself.

Such moments of pleasure, however, are offset by a fear that he is enjoying violence too much. He realizes that his many years in the crime business have begun to take their toll. “I've got hard skin all over what's left of my soul, and after twenty years of messing around with crime I can look at any sort of a murder without seeing anything in it but my bread and butter, the day's work.”¹⁷ But because he has sensitivity enough to worry about going “blood-simple” like the rest of the citizens of violent “Poisonville,” he has not yet become totally inured to brutality. That he is sensitive to his dilemma is a good sign, for it suggests that he has not yet reached the stage of moral numbness represented by his boss, known only as the Old Man, whom he describes as a man with gentle eyes and a mild smile which hide the fact that “fifty years of sleuthing had left him without any feelings at all on any subject.”

Hammett portrays the Op as a man capable of actions which reveal that he has not—at least not yet—become an unfeeling machine of justice. In “The Scorched Face,” for example, he persuades the policeman he has been working with to destroy incriminating photographs of young women who have been lured into a blackmail trap in order to protect their reputations against needless exposure. What he doesn't reveal is that one of the pictures he saw was that of the policeman's wife. In “The Main Death” he refuses to inform a client about his wife's infidelity, arguing that no purpose would be served by it since her actions had nothing to do with the crime he was hired to investigate. He is able to sympathize with the plight of a man whose daughter has been kidnapped in “The Gatewood Caper,” even though he has every reason to dislike the man personally. Despite such incidents as these, however, Hammett is careful not to allow feelings to get the better of the Op, who confesses on one occasion that “emotions are nuisances during business hours.” In “The Scorched Face,” for example, the Op admits to feeling bad about having to question a young man whose wife has just killed herself, but “apart from that, I had work to do. I tightened the screws.” And in “The Whosis Kid” he refuses to intervene as two men begin to undress a woman in order to search for jewels they suspect she has hidden on her person: “I'm no Galahad. This woman had picked her playmates, and was largely responsible for this angle of their game. If they played rough, she'd have to make the best of it.”

His previous statement notwithstanding, the Op does act as a Galahad figure in The Dain Curse, a change in attitude which may have contributed to his termination as a character. In that novel, he devotes his efforts to helping the beautiful young Gabrielle Leggett kick her morphine addiction and overcome her fears that she is suffering from “the Dain curse.” He is evasive about his motive, but the clear impression is that he is acting out of affection, perhaps even love, for the young woman. For the first time, a woman has been able to penetrate his hard shell. The conception of the private eye as a knight figure would be effectively developed by many later writers (notably Raymond Chandler), but it appears that Hammett wanted no part of it, for the Op would appear in only three more stories after The Dain Curse before being retired permanently.

Philip Durham suggests that having gone “soft beyond redemption,” the Op was ready for discard.¹⁸ Perhaps it was simply that Hammett realized that he had taken the Op as far as he could. Whatever the reason, Hammett soon turned his attention to a new private eye, Sam Spade, who made his initial appearance in Black Mask in September, 1929, seven months after The Dain Curse appeared in the magazine. Spade, who has all the toughness but none of the sentimentality that was beginning to leak out of the Op's tough shell, enabled Hammett to stick to the tough-guy image he intended for the Op. In the minds of many (thanks in no small degree to Humphrey Bogart's portrayal of him in the 1941 film version of The Maltese Falcon), Sam Spade is the personification of the American private eye. While there can be no denying the importance of The Maltese Falcon and no overestimating the influence of Sam Spade, without the Op there would probably have been no Spade. In the three dozen stories featuring the tough and dedicated Op, Hammett gave shape to the first believable detective hero in American fiction and led the revolution into realism that had its rudimentary beginning with Daly.

Hammett's contribution to the development of the new mystery story involved style and technique as well as character. Whereas Daly's ungainly prose relied upon an uneven mixture of exaggeration, brash overstatement, and a variety of crude rhetorical flourishes, Hammett's is a prime example of what became known as the “hard-boiled” style, a carefully controlled blend of colorful colloquialisms, terse understatement, objective descriptions, all narrated in a detached tone. Even descriptions of the most violent incidents are reported in a matter-of-fact manner. In Hammett's stories there is no need for boasting about one's toughness or fearlessness; the understated prose effectively communicates that. Where Race Williams would boast for a page and a half about how tough he is, all the Op has to do to convince the reader of his toughness is shake his head and say “Better get help” to a man who has been ordered to throw him out of a room. Hammett's tight-lipped prose is also effective in conveying a sense that emotions are being held in check. A prime example of this comes in Red Harvest, where the Op awakens to find his hand wrapped around an ice pick which is buried in the chest of the woman lying dead next to him. In his narrative the Op concentrates exclusively on his careful and deliberate cleaning up of the scene, thus revealing through action his emotional control. Hammett aimed at accomplishing in the mystery story what Hemingway was attempting to do in his fiction: use a cool, understated style as a vehicle for embodying in a convincing way essential toughness of character.

Hammett is also far more successful than Daly in capturing the sense of confusion and uncertainty that characterized the times. Race Williams largely inhabits a good-guy-versus-bad-guy world. The Op's world is less clearly defined and reflects the kind of cockeyed world Hammett describes in his autobiographical “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective,” published in 1923, the same year he introduced the Op. Among other things, Hammett recalls an incident in which, as he describes it, “I was once falsely accused of perjury and had to perjure myself to escape arrest,” and another where “a man whom I was shadowing went out into the country for a walk one Sunday and lost his bearings completely. I had to direct him back to the city.”¹⁹ Such experiences attest to his own personal encounter with absurdity.

Nowhere is this perception better expressed in Hammett's work than in the famous Flitcraft story Sam Spade tells Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. Flitcraft was a Tacoma, Washington, real-estate dealer who led a quiet, orderly, uneventful life until one day a large beam from a building fell and narrowly missed killing him. So shattered is he by his sudden confrontation with the capriciousness of life—“He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works”—that he abandons his wife and family and moves away. The parable embodies Hammett's view that life is ruled not by logic but by randomness, caprice, chance, what the existentialists call “the absurd.” It was this perception of the world that led Hammett and many of his contemporaries to reject the neatly defined universe of the classical mystery story in favor of the new realistic mystery tale.

Despite their differences, Race Williams and the Continental Op both must share credit for precipitating the new look in the detective story, for here were detectives who relied on their toughness and their wits instead of their brains to solve crimes. Instead of puzzling out solutions from a lofty distance, both were actively, almost aggressively, engaged in the pursuit of criminals, relying on trial-and-error methods rather than the strict laws of deductive logic. No longer portrayed as men of Olympian abilities, both were capable of mistakes and, especially in the case of the Op, susceptible to doubts. Both men resorted to violence when necessary, for both lived in violent worlds; the laws of logic might have been appropriate tools in a universe of reason, but in the dangerous streets of New York and San Francisco, Race Williams and the Op were called upon to dirty and sometimes bloody their hands if they hoped to succeed. The cultured mannerisms of the Great Detective and the graceful style of the formal whodunit gave way to the tough-talking vernacular of the new hard-boiled mystery. In a significant departure from the past, these new mystery tales were narrated by the detective himself, and in his own words. No longer was there required a Boswell-like intermediary to record and deify the exploits of the master crime-solver. There was a new immediacy to these first-person narratives as the reader shared with the detective his successes and failures, doubts and determination.

Perhaps most important, both Race Williams and the Op were portrayed as ordinary men simply going about their business with courage and dedication. The private eye was no gentleman sleuth solving crimes in his spare time; he was a man whose whole life was dedicated to catching criminals because that was his job, which was reason enough for doing it as well as he could. “Liking work,” explained the Op, “makes you want to do it as well as you can. Otherwise there'd be no sense to it.” In a time of uncertainty and confused values, as the decade after World War I certainly was, there was at least one solid reality one could hang on to, even if one's ideals were in tatters: one could still remain committed to a task, no matter how difficult. Prior to Daly and Hammett, mystery readers were invited to admire from afar the lofty accomplishments of the Great Detective, whose success was always a reminder to the reader of his own intellectual shortcomings. Now, thanks to Race Williams and the Op, readers could identify with rather than merely admire the accomplishments of the hero. And although the readers were safe from many of the dangers the private-eye hero faced, they were no strangers to the feeling of being battered and buffeted about by powerful forces, to the sense that violence was everywhere, to the suspicion that there was no longer any logic to the scheme of things. Readers could share in the private eye's successes for they recognized that they represented not the triumph of reason and logic but rather that of courage, self-reliance, and above all a willingness to stick to his guns (both literally and figuratively) in the face of sometimes overwhelming odds. For the first time since his creation by Poe, the detective was portrayed as a hero for the common man, and he has remained so ever since.

Notes

1. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Garden City: Doubleday, 1930), 23.

2. George Grella, “Murder and Manners: The Formal Detective Novel,” in Detective Fiction, ed. Robin W. Winks (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 101.

3. Dashiell Hammett, “The Black Hat That Wasn't There,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, June 1951, 140.

4. John McAleer, “The Game's Afoot: Detective Fiction in the Present Day,” Kansas Quarterly 10 (Fall 1978): 30.

5. Edmund Wilson, “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?”, in Classics and Commercials (New York: Vintage, 1962), 235.

6. Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), 232.

7. Ibid., 230.

8. Ibid., 234.

9. Elaine Bander, “Dorothy L. Sayers and the Apotheosis of Detective Fiction,” The Armchair Detective 10 (October 1977): 363.

10. Carroll John Daly, The Snarl of the Beast (New York: Edward J. Clode, 1927), 12.

11. Michael S. Barson, “‘There's No Sex in Crime’: The Two-Fisted Homilies of Race Williams,” Clues 2:2 (Fall/Winter 1981): 110.

12. G. A. Finch, “A Fatal Attraction,” The Armchair Detective 13 (Spring 1980): 112.

13. Ibid., 123.

14. Quoted in Richard Layman, Shadow Man; The Life of Dashiell Hammett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 46.

15. Joe Gores, “Hammett the Writer,” Xenophile, no. 38 (1978), 9.

16. William F. Nolan, Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook (Santa Barbara: McNally & Loftin, 1969), 7.

17. Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (New York: Vintage, 1972), 145.

18. Philip Durham, “The Black Mask School,” in Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, ed. David Madden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1968), 69.

19. Dashiell Hammett, “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective,” in Haycraft, Art of the Mystery Story, 417-18.