Race Williams
Created by Carroll John Daly

New York's RACE WILLIAMS is generally considered to be the first "private eye," at least as we understand the term. Actually, close but no cigar.

Race made his first appearance in the June 1, 1923 issue of Black Mask, in a short story called Knights of the Open Palm, but he was predated by a month by Daly's own Three Gun Terry who showed up in the May issue. Doesn't matter much, they're more or less the same guy, and it was Race who went on to appear in countless short stories and novels over the next thirty years, and sowed the seeds for the likes of Mike Hammer and a slew of other shoot-first, sort-em-out later PI's through the decades.

Answering to no law but his own, quick to kill, brutal, violent, hard-talking, yet loyal to a fault, Race will never be a thinking man's detective. In fact, Race is almost defiantly illiterate, as though that's a further sign of his toughness. As Robert Sampson, pulps expert, once wrote in Volume4 of his Yesterday's Faces: A Study of Series Characters in the Early Pulp Magazines, "Race Williams is often credited with being the first hard-boiled detective. That strains the definition of detective. Williams is a hired adventurer who may occasionally detect if he blunders into a clue the size of a bathtub and painted bright pink. He has little use for clues, even less for chains of reasoning."

He's certainly not in it for the money. In fact, sometimes it seems Race doesn't really care about anything except killing. He non-chalantly quotes his fee as "$25 an hour, plus $3.75 per man killed" but is willing to haggle: "If you think that's too high, why, mail me what you think it's worth." (Not My Corpse)

Still, he seems to be doing well enough to pay the salary of his "boy", Jerry, who serves as his faithful assistant and manservant.

And, of course, Race also has his friends and foes on the police force. Sergeant O'Rourke is a veteran cop who could have chucked it all in years ago, and become an inspector, but he's stayed on the street, close to his men. Race and O'Rourke get along just swell. Not so with Inspector Nelson, a by-the-book kinda guy with a strong dislike of all private dicks in general, and Race in particular. He can also count on Foster of "The Journal," who treats Race pretty well.

But the main character to challenge Race was The Flame, the Girl With The Criminal Mind. If, as has often been repeated, Nero Wolfe is the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler, then it just may be, as Tony Sparafucile suggested in the 1978 preface to Muder From the East, that Mike Hammer is the bastard son of Race and The Flame.

If that's the case, it would expain a lot. The dames, the guns, the obsessive behaviour, the New York setting, the shoot first, then shoot again mentality, etc., etc.

In 1930, then Black Mask editor Cap Shaw published the results of a poll on various writers' popularity. His favorite, Dashiell Hammett, placed third, behind Earl stanley Gardener. Number One with a Bullet (several, in fact) was Carroll John Daly and his boy, Race Williams. In fact, the appearance of daly or Race's name on the cover was generally considered enough to boost a pulp's sales by anywhere from 5 to 20 percent. In 1934, Daly han an argument with the editors of Black Mask and he left to write for the rival Dime Detective. He penned several (at least five) Race Williams stories for them. Five were collected in the 1989 collection, The Adventures of Race Williams.

THE EVIDENCE

• "I ain't afraid of nothing... providing there's enough jack in it."
  
  
• "I shot him five times. Five times in the stomach before he could even squeeze the trigger." Surprised? He was amazed."

SHORT STORIES

• "Knights of the Open Palm" (June 1923, Black Mask)
• "Three Thousand to the Good" (July 15, 1923, Black Mask)
• "The Red Peril" (June 1924, Black Mask)
• "Them That Lives By Their Guns" (August 1924, Black Mask)
• "Devil Cat" (November 1924, Black Mask)
• The Face Behind the Mask" (February 1925, Black Mask)
• "Conceited, Maybe" (April 1925, Black Mask)
• "Say It With Lead" (June 1925, Black Mask)
• "I'll Tell the World" (August 1925, Black Mask)
• "Alias Buttercup" (October 1925, Black Mask)
• "Under Cover" (Part 1) (December 1925, Black Mask)
• "Under Cover" (Part 2) (January 1926, Black Mask)
• "South Sea Steel" (May 1926, Black Mask)
• "The False Clara Burkhart" (July 1926, Black Mask)
• "The Super Devil" (August 1926, Black Mask)
• "Half-Breed" (November 1926, Black Mask)
• "Blind Alleys" (April 1927, Black Mask)
• "The Snarl of the Beast" (Part 1) (June 1927, Black Mask)*
• "The Snarl of the Beast" (Part 2) (July 1927, Black Mask)*
• "The Snarl of the Beast" (Part 3) (August 1927, Black Mask)*
• "The Snarl of the Beast" (Part 4) (September 1927, Black Mask)*
  *later collected as The Snarl of the Beast
• "The Egyptian Lure" (March 1928, Black Mask)
• "The Hidden Hand -- Creeping Death" (June 1928, Black Mask)*
• "The Hidden Hand -- Wanted For Murder" (July 1928, Black Mask)*
• "The Hidden Hand -- Rough Stuff" (August 1928, Black Mask)*
• "The Hidden Hand -- The Last Chance" (September 1928, Black Mask)*
• "The Last Shot" (October 1928, Black Mask)*
  * Later collected as The Hidden Hand
• "Tags of Death" (March 1929, Black Mask)
• "A Pretty Bit of Shooting" (April 1929, Black Mask)
• "Get Race Williams" (May 1929, Black Mask)
• "Race Williams Never Bluffs" (June 1929, Black Mask)
• "The Silver Eagle" (October 1929, Black Mask)
• "The Death Trap" (November 1929, Black Mask)
• "Tainted Power" (June 1930, Black Mask)
• "Framed" (July 1930, Black Mask)
• "The Final Shot" (August 1930, Black Mask)
• "Shooting Out of Turn" (October 1930, Black Mask)
• "Murder By Mail" (March 1931, Black Mask)
• "The Flame and Race Williams" (Part 1) (June 1931, Black Mask)
• "The Flame and Race Williams" (Part 2) (July 1931, Black Mask)
• "The Flame and Race Williams" (Part 3) (August 1931, Black Mask)
• "Death for Two" (September 1931, Black Mask)
• "The Amateur Murder" (Part 1) (April 1932, Black Mask)
• "The Amateur Murder" (Part 2) (May 1932, Black Mask)
• "The Amateur Murder" (Part 3) (June 1932, Black Mask)
• "The Amateur Murder" (Part 4) (July 1932, Black Mask)
• "Merger With Death" (December 1932, Black Mask)
• "The Death Drop" (May 1933, Black Mask)
• "If Death Is Respectable" (July 1933, Black Mask)
• "Murder In The Open" (October, Black Mask)
• "Six Have Died" (May 1934, Black Mask)
• "Flaming Death" (June 1934, Black Mask)
• "Murder Book" (August 1934, Black Mask)
• "The Eyes Have It" (November 1934, Black Mask)
• "Some Die Hard" (September 1935, Dime Detective; also in The Adventures of Race Williams)
• "Dead Hands Reaching" (November 1935, Dime Detective; also in The Adventures of Race Williams)
• "Corpse & Co. (February 1936, Dime Detective; also in The Adventures of Race Williams)
• "Just Another Stiff" (April 1936, Dime Detective; also in The Adventures of Race Williams)
• "City of Blood" (October 1936, Dime Detective; also in The Adventures of Race Williams)
• "Not My Corpse" (June 1948, Thrilling Detective-British edition; also in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories)
• "The Wrong Corspe" (October, Thrilling Detective, British Edition)
• "Hell With The Lid Lifted" (May, Dime Detective)
• "The Morgue Is Our Home" (Dime Detective)

NOVELS

• The Snarl of the Beast (1927) ...Buy this book
• The Hidden Hand (1929) ...Buy this book
• The Tag Murders (1930)
• Tainted Power (1931)
• The Third Murderer (1931)
• The Amateur Murderer (1933)
• Murder From the East (1935) ..Buy this book
• Better Corpses (1940)

COLLECTIONS

• The Adventures of Race Williams (1989) ..Buy this book

RELATED LINKS

• The Vintage Library: Carroll John Daly
  A brief bio and a collection of links to downloadable pdf stories and novels featuring Race Williams.

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Original cover scan of Murder from the East courtesy of Mark Terry at Facsimile Dust Jackets.