Newbie/lurker jumping into the fray here...
Full disclosure: I'm a grad student working on Daly
(and others) right now, so I've got some investment in Daly's
reputation.
While I'm not sure I'd say that Daly is a good writer, I do
think he's undervalued. From what I've read, his stories are
much better than his novels - he seems to tone down the slang
in the novels (perhaps this was in their revision for
hardcover) and he has trouble creating a convincing and
compelling novel-length narrative. The Hidden Hand is a great
case in point - if you can't figure out who the Hidden Hand
is in the first 10 pages, you should probably check you
pulse. Hence, the climactic discovery of the Hidden Hand's
identity is, well, ho-hum.
That said, his early stories are really fascinating in both
their style and subject. "The False Burton Combs" and
"Knights of the Open Palm" are two that are definitely worth
reading ("FBC" was reprinted in Ruhm's The Hard-Boiled
Detective and "KOTOP" in Kittredge and Krauzer's The Great
American Detective).
And I'd agree with Grandmaster Flash as quoted in another
post. Gertrude Stein, devotee of detective fiction and huge
fan of Dashiell Hammett, said something similar about
creating new art: "when you make a thing, it is so
complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those
that do it after you they don't have to worry about making it
and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it
when the others make it." This is not to say that Daly is on
par with Stein (or Picasso, who she claims to be quoting),
but to expect Daly to have the aesthetic sense of Hammett or
the polish of Chandler is unfair.
Brooks
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