The Snarl Of The Beast

Who is the criminal known only as “The Beast?” Too baffling for the police to solve, it becomes a manhunt in which detective Race Williams must track down “the most feared, the cunningest and cruelest creature that stalks the city streets at night.” But it will soon become Race's most dangerous case as he tries to stay alive. One of the longest and best of the dozens of Race Williams adventures. Story #17 in the Race Williams series. Carroll John Daly (1889–1958) was the creator of the first hard-boiled private eye story, predating Dashiell Hammett's first Continental Op story by several months. Daly's classic character, Race Williams, was one of the most popular fiction characters of the pulps, and the direct inspiration for Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer.

Before Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, Before Dashiell Hammett's The Red Harvest, there was Carroll John Daly's The Snarl of the Beast, the first true hard-boiled detective novel. Featuring Race Williams, a private detective afraid of no man, it is a complex story of murder and inheritance in which Williams must outwit not only the police and a beautiful blonde cat burglar, but a homicidal maniac reputed to be bullet proof. Will his ready fists and forty-four revolvers be up to the task of confronting his foes against the background of deceit, double-crossing, and gunplay? And ultimately will he silence . . . The Snarl of the Beast?

Race Williams returns! Originally appearing in the pages of Black Mask Magazine, author Carroll John Daly pioneered the hard-boiled detective P.I. story and perfected the genre with his classic character, Race Williams. Apart from the novel-length Race Williams stories, these classic hard-boiled thrillers have rarely been reprinted, if ever.Volume 2 contains the next batch of Race Williams stories, all from 1927?29 as Daly broke the mold of Black Mask by running serialized novels in the pages of that important magazine. Included here are ?The Snarl of the Beast,? ?The Egyptian Lure,? ?The Hidden Hand,? and ?The Tag Murders.'Additional editorial pieces are also included: Daly's own ?Putting Over a Detective Novel? was written to explain his working process while writing ?The Snarl of the Beast. And it's prefaced by an all-new, scholarly introduction by Professor Brooks E. Hefner of James Madison University.The Snarl of the Beast: The Collected Hard-Boiled Stories of Race Williams Volume 2 continues this most important series published in years on the history of the Hard-Boiled Detective story.

"With its forays into ecocriticism and cultural studies and the welcome inclusion of Western genre writing in a serious study of American literary history, Traces of Gold will appeal to students and scholars of American literature, American studies, and western history."--BOOK JACKET.

The first hard-boiled detective Race Williams, runs up against the Klan in his premiere adventure, which leads him to fast and tragic action. Plus two other early Daly hard-boiled classics: "The False Burton Combs" and "Dolly." Story #1 in the Race Williams series. Carroll John Daly (1889–1958) was the creator of the first hard-boiled private eye story, predating Dashiell Hammett's first Continental Op story by several months. Daly's classic character, Race Williams, was one of the most popular fiction characters of the pulps, and the direct inspiration for Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer.

The hard-boiled private detective is among the most recognizable characters in popular fiction since the 1920s--a tough product of a violent world, in which police forces are inadequate and people with money can choose private help when facing threatening circumstances. Though a relatively recent arrival, the hard-boiled detective has undergone steady development and assumed diverse forms. This critical study analyzes the character of the hard-boiled detective, from literary antecedents through the early 21st century. It follows change in the novels through three main periods: the Early (roughly 1927-1955), during which the character was defined by such writers as Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler; the Transitional, evident by 1964 in the works of John D. MacDonald and Michael Collins, and continuing to around 1977 via Joseph Hansen, Bill Pronzini and others; and the Modern, since the late 1970s, during which such writers as Loren D. Estleman, Liza Cody, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton and many others have expanded the genre and the detective character. Themes such as violence, love and sexuality, friendship, space and place, and work are examined throughout the text. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

From the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett to the novels of Claude McKay, The Word on the Streets examines a group of writers whose experimentation with the vernacular argues for a rethinking of American modernism—one that cuts across traditional boundaries of class, race, and ethnicity. The dawn of the modernist era witnessed a transformation of popular writing that demonstrated an experimental practice rooted in the language of the streets. Emerging alongside more recognized strands of literary modernism, the vernacular modernism these writers exhibited lays bare the aesthetic experiments inherent in American working-class and ethnic language, forging an alternative pathway for American modernist practice. Brooks Hefner shows how writers across a variety of popular genres—from Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner to humorist Anita Loos and ethnic memoirist Anzia Yezierska—employed street slang to mount their own critique of genteel realism and its classist emphasis on dialect hierarchies, the result of which was a form of American experimental writing that resonated powerfully across the American cultural landscape of the 1910s and 1920s.

This carefully edited ebook is a hand-picked collection of world's most admired Westerns in one volume: Riders of the Purple Sage (Zane Grey) The Rainbow Trail The Spirit of the Border The Untamed (Max Brand) The Night Horseman The Seventh Man The Virginian (Owen Wister) The Last of the Mohicans (James F. Cooper) The Prairie Chip, of the Flying U (B. M. Bower) The Flying U Ranch The Flying U's Last Stand Cabin Fever Rimrock Trail (J. Allan Dunn) The 'Breckinridge Elkins' Series (Robert E. Howard) The Last of the Plainsmen (Zane Grey) The Outcasts of Poker Flat (Bret Harte) The Wolf Hunters (James Oliver Curwood) The Gold Hunters The Border Legion The Country Beyond (Curwood) The Lone Star Ranger (Grey) Riders of the Silences (Brand) The Call of the Wild (Jack London) Heart of the West (O. Henry) White Fang (London) The Lure of the Dim Trails (Bower) The Luck of Roaring Camp (Harte) The Rustlers of Pecos County (Grey) O Pioneers! (Willa Cather) My Ántonia Roughing It (Mark Twain) The Log of a Cowboy (Andy Adams) The Two-Gun Man (Charles Alden Seltzer) The Law of the Land (Emerson Hough) The Short Cut (Jackson Gregory) Astoria (Washington Irving) The Valley of Silent Men (James Oliver Curwood) "Drag" Harlan (Charles Alden Seltzer) Whispering Smith (Frank H. Spearman) The Outlet (Andy Adams) Reed Anthony, Cowman A Texas Cow Boy (Charles Siringo) The Boss of the Lazy Y (Charles Alden Seltzer) The Golden Dream (R.M. Ballantyne) The Blue Hotel (Stephen Crane) The Long Shadow (B. M. Bower) The Girl from Montana (Grace Livingston Hill) The Hidden Children (Robert W. Chambers) The Way of an Indian (Frederic Remington) The Bridge of the Gods (Frederic Homer Balch) Where the Trail Divides (Will Lillibridge) The Desert Trail (Dane Coolidge) The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky (Stephen Crane) That Girl Montana (Marah Ellis Ryan) The Long Dim Trail (Forrestine C. Hooker) Hidden Water (Dane Coolidge) A Voice in the Wilderness (Grace Livingston Hill) ...