Re PA Bergin's comments below:
"Your info on Terry Mack is correct. "Three Gun Terry"
appeared in the May
15, 1923 issue of Black Mask, making Mack the first hard
boiled PI by two
weeks. "Knights of the Open Palm," featuring Race Williams
appeared in the
June 1, 1923 issue of Black Mask. The reason you hear more
about Williams
than Mack is because he was more popular with readers, so
Daly kept writing
Race Williams stories. He also had a character named Satan
Hall who I think
appeared in Dime Detective. It's hard to understand why Race
Williams was
so much more popular than either of Daly's other two PIs,
because Daly
really wasn't much of a writer and his characters are pretty
much
interchangeable in terms of attitude, armament and single
mindedness."
Good points. I demur only in pointing out that Satan Hall
wasn't a PI, but
an NYPD detective, sort of a precursor to the "Dirty Harry"
or "Popeye
Doyle" sort of character. Another of Daly's hard-boiled cop
characters was
Manhattan DA's Investigator Vee Brown, who, under the
pseudonym of "Vivian,"
supplemented his law enforcement income as a
song-writer.
"Three-Gun Terry" is reprinted in the anthology *The Black
Mask Boys* edited
by W.F. Nolan. Reading it back-to-back with "Knights of the
Open Palm"
(which is reprinted in *The Arbor House Treasury of Mystery
& Detective
Stories From the Great Pulps* edited by Bill Pronzini), you
realize that
Terry and Race are even more interchangeable than Daly's
other characters.
"Three Gun Terry" could have been reprinted as "Three Gun
Williams" (the same
way Carmady and Dalmas were recycled as Marlowe in Chandler's
*TSAM*) with
absolutely no glitches. - Jim Doherty
All three characters were preceded by an unnamed "soldier of
fortune" who
fit the Mack/Williams/Hall mold perfectly and probably
escaped nabbing the
"first" label by virtue of his choice of a label for his
profession. He
appeared in "The False Burton Combs" in a December, 1922 ish
of BM.
PB
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