Although he is credited with the creation of the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction, Carroll John Daly is a largely forgotten writer. During his prime, however, the news that a particular pulp magazine carried one of Daly 's works could boost its circulation by as much as 20 percent. While Daly created other series heroes, Race Williams is his best known and most successful invention, a tough private eye, the literary father of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlow and the grandfather of contemporary hard-boiled literary detectives such as Robert B. Parker's Spenser and Sara Paretsky 's V. I. Warshawski.

Many who have written about Daly 's work are often dismissive of it. "Crude" and "sloppy" are two terms that most often appear in appraisals of his fiction. Others argue, however, that his work has been more influential than that of more accepted authors such as...