Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Gordon Young's Everhard stories

Here's a short post I posted to the Rara-Avis e-mail group earlier today, about who was the first hardboiled crime writer:

Stephen Mertz writes in this article:

"It is recorded fact that Carroll John Daly, in the pages of Black Mask in 1923, produced the first hardboiled private eye story, predating Hammett's first Continental Op tale by a number of months."

Isn't it always a bit dangerous to claim someone or something was the first one? There certainly were hardboiled stories before that and there certainly were private eye stories before that. I've read Gordon Young's story about Everhard, who was a private-eyeish hero who likes to shoot and doesn't even shake hands with anyone. I seem to remember that he was more hardboiled than Daly's Race Williams, who likes to show off, which Everhard never did.

Gordon Young had lots of Everhard stories in the Adventure pulp magazine from 1917 to 1921 - so they stopped a year before Daly wrote his first story in Black Mask!

2 comments:

Pulpchips said...

Young's Everhard tales ran until 1936 in ADVENTURE. One laso appeared in the July 25th 1939 issue of the pulp SHORT STORIES.

Juri said...

Thanks, Pulpchips! I don't remember anymore where I got the info on the Everhard run. It would be interesting to read them and check out whether all the early ones are as hardboiled as the ones I've read - which were presumably from a later date.