Bob Toomey (btoomey@javanet.com)
Tue, 26 Oct 1999 00:32:30 -0400
> What led (Carroll John) Daly to start writing the
way he did? I don't
> know anything about his life or previous
stories.
I don't know much about him either. From what little I've
read, he was, like a lot of writers, a nice quiet fellow with
a violent imagination. I doubt he considered himself an
innovator. He was following in the tradition of dime novel
westerns, moving their vigilante and gunslinger heroes into
an urban setting and updating the slang. Hammett did the
same. What's _Red Harvest_ but a slightly urbanized western?
In fact, Hammett did a sly parody of the dude-goes-west tale
in "Corkscrew," even putting the Op briefly on the back of a
bucking bronco. It's a tradition that continues to this day,
as Bill Crider, Elmore Leonard, Bill Pronzini, Loren
Estleman, and many others can tell you. A good doctoral
thesis could probably be written on the cross-fertilization
of the western and the hardboiled mystery, if it hasn't
already been done to death.
BobT
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