I will not disagree that Hammett is much better than Daly,
but Daly was such presence in early hardboiled fiction it
would have hard for Hammett not to be aware of him (and I
mean `really' aware). And yes, yes, there is plenty of
violence in the early stories, but Hammett does seem to kick
it up a notch in the Red Harvest and, this is probably just
my take, react to it on a more personal level. All that said,
I will not try to compete with your knowledge of both
writers. It has been a good 15 years since I've read either
and I have a bad habit of never re-read stuff so I will
probably not improve on my insight.
Thanks, again, for the comments, Jim. I am going to hit the
road, since today is Free Comic Book Day, which is actually a
holiday in my book.
--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, JIM DOHERTY
<jimdohertyjr@y...> wrote:
> George,
>
> Re your comment below:
>
> > You missed my point. I didn't say Hammett
was
> > imitating Daly or trying
> > to be Daly, but I did feel he was reacting to
Daly.
> > When I read Red
> > Harvest it was my gut reaction that Hammett was
try
> > to show the Black
> > Mask audience how a Race Williams,
> > fight-fire-with-fire style plot
> > should be handled or how it would have been
handled
> > with the Continental Op at the helm.
>
> But that kidn of fast-action, whiz-bang,
> fight-fire-with-fire plot was a feature of the
Op
> series almost from the very beginning.
"Corkscrew,"
> sort of a short story dry run for RED
HARVEST,
> predates HARVEST by some three years, for
example.
>
> "The Gutting of Couffignal," at one level, is
nothing
> but one long sustained shoot-out closing with a
dress
> rehearsal for FALCON's renunciation
scene.
>
> "One Hour," as its title suggests, is a story of
the
> Op getting involved in a fast-moving criminal
plot
> that he has to resolve in 60 minutes, and the
action
> never flags.
>
> Hammett didn't include fast-action simply to
compete
> with Daly. I'm not sure he was even that aware
of
> Daly. He was writing the kind of stories he wanted
to
> write and that he felt particularly qualified
to
> write. If there was an outside influence
moving
> Hammett to include action scenes (and,
occasionally,
> it could get excessive in a Daly-like way; see
BLOOD
> MONEY), it was, as you also suggested, the
editorial
> hand, first of Phil Cody then of Cap
Shaw.
>
> Finally, Hammett was so much better at the
action
> scenes than Daly, that if anyone influenced ANYONE,
it
> was Hammett influencing Daly.
>
> Indeed, Daly's Williams seems to continually be
trying
> to one-up the Op in derring-do. If the Op shoots
the
> gun out of the bad guy's hand and shrugs it off as
not
> that much of a trick for anyone who's a fairly
good
> shot, Williams will outdraw a man who's already
got
> the drop on him and shoot him five times before
the
> bad guy gets a shot off, or fires simultaneously
from
> his matched set of .44's, both slugs making a
single
> hole in the bad guy's head.
>
> And that points up why Hammett was so much better
at
> that stuff than Daly. Hammett wrote scenes you
could
> believe, and he wrote them with the air of
someone
> who'd been there, done that, and bought the
t-shirt.
> The improbable feats of Daly's heroes were the work
of
> someone overcompensating.
>
> JIM DOHERTY
>
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources
site!
> http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
--------------------~--> In low income neighborhoods, 84%
do not own computers. At Network for Good, help bridge the
Digital Divide!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/S.QlOD/3MnJAA/Zx0JAA/kqIolB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rara-avis-l/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email
to:
rara-avis-l-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 07 May 2005 EDT