Carroll John Daly

[1] One of the earliest writers of hard-boiled fiction, he is best known for his detective character Race Williams, who appeared in a number of stories for Black Mask magazine in the 1920s.

As Lee Server, author of the Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers, put it: "He was afraid of cold weather and dentists.

Enormously popular in his time, Carroll's no-nonsense tough-guy detective stories have gone on to influence not only contemporaries such as Dashiell Hammett, but Mickey Spillane and dozens of other writers.

A Black Mask readers' poll once showed Daly as the most popular writer in the magazine, ahead of Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner.

[6][7] DeAndrea has noted that Daly's stories were less concerned with updating Victorian-era drawing room mysteries than Wild West stories, and that his tough, urban heroes were most similar to the gunslingers of Westerns than detectives or sleuths of earlier works, calling them "two-gun kids riding an urban range, delivering death and justice via the same hot lead route as the gunfighters of dime novels".

"[3] Although Black Mask editor Joseph Shaw did not like the Race Williams stories, they were so popular with readers that he asked Daly to continue writing them.

[1] "Knights of the Open Palm" was published June 1, 1923, in Black Mask, predating the October 1923 debut of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op character.

Race Williams' hards-as-nails, unsubtle characterization was in many ways a model for the taciturn, violent and hypermasculine hardboiled private eye.

Williams exemplified the hardboiled P.I., from his generally antagonistic relationship with the police, to his (largely) aloof, even Victorian attitude toward women, to his disinterest in financial reward as much as the thrill of the hunt.