--- JIM DOHERTY <
jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Isn't the fact that Terry specifically
identifies
> himself as "Terrence Mack, Private Investigator"
(as
> opposed to "Teresa" Mack, for example) in the
first
> story to feature him a pretty strong
argument
> against
> the position that he's gender-neutral?
The short answer to that is yes, obviously. For brevity's
sake in the post, I didn't go into my whole argument, which
is more complex than "Terry Mack is gender neutal." In fact,
I've not yet finished the paper, so I'm not even sure on all
the details of my argument yet. I'm not going to argue that
Daly tried to portray Mack as a character that looks male but
really turns out to be female, or anything like that. I'm
saying something more along the lines of "Daly infused a
bunch o' typically feminine qualities into the men of his
tough-guy writing." (I probably won't phrase the thesis
statement exacly like that.) I am arguing, in fact, that Daly
is more complex than he generally receives credit for,
because the type of reading (gendered, etc.) that would
discover this complexity didn't really exist until after he
was out of vogue.
It's much more than Terry Mack--Daly has a pattern of playing
with names. In one story, for instance, he has a young girl
named Edna whom everyone calls Eddie; the bad guy is named
Ed. He has another with a P.I. named Tracey Young. For that
matter, Race isn't exactly a gender-specific name. (I love
that Terry and Tracey were created by a man named Carroll,
also.)
The bad guy in the Tracey Young story is a clear
pre-cursor to Daly's Satan Hall character, and is described
in literally dozens of "feminine" ways: for instance, Daly
says in one place that he has a voice
"low like a woman's;" in another, it's "high like a woman's."
(Most of these examples, by the way, are from lost Daly
stories that I have recovered.)
These are just examples; Daly's work is full of this kind of
thing, too much for it to be coincidence, in my opinion. (It
may not be exactly conscious, either, but I don't think it's
coincidence.) What I haven't decided yet is why Daly did all
this. We all know about Hammett's "gunsel" practical joke on
Cap Shaw; maybe this was Daly's way of getting something else
by his editors, particularly an editor who was proud of
having a stable of male writers who were at least six feet
tall. (I mean, thank God for Cap and what he did in BLACK
MASK, but that is a pretty ridiculous thing to be concerned
about; wouldn't you want to tweak him?)
One last thing to keep in mind--I'm not married to any of my
positions on Daly yet, and I'm open to someone saying "No, he
wasn't doing that; he was doing this." I'm pretty sure that
he was doing SOMETHING, though.
Now...aren't you sorry you asked?
G.
===== George C. Upper III, Editor The Lightning Bell Poetry
Journal http://www.lightningbell.org/
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