Forgotten Books: The Adventures of Race Williams -- Carroll John Daly

Sometimes nothing will do but a real pulp story, so the other day I pulled this book off the shelf.  Everybody knows that Carroll John Daly's first Race Williams stories appeared in Black Mask.  In 1934 after a disagreement about money, Daly began selling Williams stories in Dime Detective, and that's where the five in this book appeared.  

I read the first one, "Some Die Hard," and it's very much like other stories in the series that I've read.  For one thing, you'll find more exclamation marks on one page than in the entire works of most current crime writers.  It begins when Race Williams goes to answer a mysterious letter he's received.  The letter contains $200 and a key.  It says: "If you don't come or don't get this letter  in time, keep the money. I'll be dead."  It's signed, "An unfortunate girl."   The girl's unfortunate, all right. She's dead when Williams arrives, and of course the cops want to pin the murder on him.  What follows is lots of action (and exclamation points) and a plot in which it's really true that things and people aren't what they seem to be.  

I'm sure that eventually I'll get around to reading the other four stories in this volume, as some of them feature The Flame, one of Daly's dandy femme fatales.  Apropos of nothing, I have no idea where I got or why it has that Canadian price tag.