Three Gun Terry
Created by Carroll John Daly

Here's the real deal! Carroll John Daly's THREE GUN TERRY is the very first hardboiled private eye. Of course, with any such statement, there are bound to be differences of opinion. A case could certainly be made for Octavius Roy Cohen's private eye Jim Hanvey, who was already detecting in the Saturday Evening Post at least a year earlier, although Cohen's style tended to run more to con men and their rich victims. Or John E. Bruce's Sadipe Okukenu, a black detective working for a large agency, who first appeared fifteen years earlier than that, in 1907! But the first "private eye," as we've come to understand the term, was indeed Three Gun Terry. There. I've said it. Deal with it!

Oh, sure, sometimes credit is given to Daly's much more popular Race Williams, but Terry actually made his eponymous debut in the seminal hardboiled pulp, Black Mask two whole weeks earlier than Race's "Knights of the Open Palm." Not that it matters much -- they're more or less the same guy -- quick to fight, quick to shoot, quick to use some questionable logic to justify rgeur actions.

William F. Nolan, in an intro to a reprint to the story in his essential 1985 anthology, The Black Mask Boys, had this to say:

"Three Gun Terry" represents a "major" first in the genre of crime fiction. It is the first tough detective story starring the world's first wise-cracking, hard-boiled private investigator...

Terry Mack is the prototype for ten thousand private eyes who have gunned, slugged, and wisecracked their way through ten thousand magazines, books, films and TV episodes.

In this early, raw pulp novelette, Daly produced what may be termed "instant clichés."

Example; "Something like a ton of bricks comes down and...after that...everything goes black."

Or: "I'm off dames; they don't go well with my business."

This pioneer private-eye tale is remarkable in that almost every cliché that was to plague the genre from the 1920's into the 1980's (when Nolan's piece was written) is evident...

But whatever faults this story possesses, it's the one that fathered Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer and Travis McGee and...

First is first."

Terry's turf, like Race's was the mean streets of New York City, and he adapted a similar cold, non-personal approach to his profession. "I aint interested unless I got to be." He charged fifty dollars a day, five hundred as a bonus when he "delivered the goods" and proudly stated that "for every man I croak--mind you, I ain't a killer, but sometimes a chap's got to turn a gun--I get two hundred dollars flat."

What could be fairer than that?

SHORT STORIES

• "Three Gun Terry" (May 15, 1923, Black Mask; also The Black Mask Boys)
• "Action! Action!" (January 1, 1924, Black Mask)

NOVELS

• The Man in the Shadows (1928)

RELATED LINKS

• Carroll John Daly Online!

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.