On Wed, 23 May 2001, George Upper wrote:
> Here I definitely have to disagree. Daly as part
of
> the canon?
The canon of the history of the hardboiled private eye
literature. It's acknowledged everywhere that he wrote the
first hardboiled private eye story.
> Daly's
> about as far out of it as you can be.
No, he isn't. His precedents and many of his contemporaries
are far more out of it. What I meant with canon was the canon
of the hardboiled literature itself. I didn't mean the canon
of Dostoyevsky and Marcel Proust. There are different canons
and Daly sure is there in the hardboiled one. Not as a liked
and respected writer, but as an inventor. And that's the view
I'd like to oppose.
As for the canons, I think the most important reason for Daly
having made it up in the canon is the fact that he published
in Black Mask and Dime Detective. Had he published in
Speed-Fire Detective or Feds or any other not-so-well-known
pulp magazine, we wouldn't know he existed. And that's why he
gets all the fame, because he wrote for the canonical pulp
magazines. (In fact, by the way, there were at least a dozen
of boxing pulp magazines.)
> He is NOT regarded as the first PI writer. He
is
> regarded as the first HB PI writer, and generally
as
> the first HB writer.
That's what I was talking about. If I forgot to mention the
word
"hardboiled", that was a mistake. I tried to point out that
there were hardboiled private eye type figures before Daly
came in.
Juri
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