Crime Author Robert Daley Dies at 96

Kirkus offers a look back at the late crime author Robert Daley

Robert Daley, the author whose novels and works of nonfiction spanned a wide field of subjects, has died at 96, the New York Times reports.

Daley, a Manhattan native, was educated at Fordham University and served one year in the U.S. Air Force before taking a job as a publicist for the New York Giants. He worked for the NFL team for six years before becoming a reporter for the Times, covering news and sports in Europe and North Africa.

In 1971, he was appointed deputy commissioner for public affairs for the New York Police Department. Daley was controversial in the role, carrying a gun and seeming to relish his spot in the limelight.

He published his first book, The World Beneath the City, about underground New York, in 1959. He would go on to write several more nonfiction titles, including Cars at Speed, Target Blue, and, most famously, Prince of the City, a book about a New York police officer who exposes corrupt colleagues. The book was adapted into a 1981 film directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Treat Williams and Jerry Orbach.

Daley also wrote more than a dozen crime novels, including The Whole Truth, To Kill a Cop, Year of the Dragon, Wall of Brass, and The Innocents Within.

In a 2021 interview with New York radio station WFUV, Daley was asked if he’s ever able to be satisfied by his work.

“The drive forward was curiosity, finding out about this stuff, and then finding out ways to use it, to sell it, which I had to do anyway if I wanted to make a living and go on learning,” he said. “All of this is interwoven. It’s not as complex as it sounds. That’s the way the world works, and that’s the way I worked it.”

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer. 

I enjoyed particularly his two true crime classics, Target Blue and The Prince of the City, as well as his crime novels. I spoke to him briefly some years ago about his last book.

I also spoke to Robert Leuci, the subject of The Prince of the City.  

You can read my posts via the links below:

Paul Davis On Crime: Robert Daley's "Writing From The Edge" Now Offered As Trade Paperback 

Paul Davis On Crime: Once A Prince Of The City: A Look Back At Robert Leuci, Crime Writer & Former NYPD Detective  

                                                                                          

Robert Daley's "Writing From The Edge" Now Offered As Trade Paperback

Robert Daley sent me and others an email announcing that his book Writing On the Edge is now available on Amazon as a trade paperback.

Writing On the Edge is now a trade paperback, and as of yesterday is on sale at Amazon. Order it and you can have it in your hands in two days. Supposedly, it's on sale in other places too, including book stores, though I doubt if any have stocked it. Unless your name is Hillary, or Bill, or Rudy, or you have committed some dastardly act, memoirs (if that's what this book is) do not sell, I have been told by my multiple editors over the years. So I did not look far for a publisher. With the business having changed so much since I came of age I went to the octopus itself, Amazon (apologies to my colleagues in the literary game), here operating under the name of one of its subsidiaries.  My only stricture was that I would not pay to get the book published. Putting the book into the acceptable format was onerous, but my daughter Leslie took care of that, God bless her.

So what's the book about?

Writing On the Edge is a trip through the various worlds I have moved in: pro football, grand prix racing, Bordeaux wine, bullfighting, The New York Times, tenors, NY police headquarters, Hollywood, France of course. All those worlds are portrayed in some depth, together with certain of the major players with whom I became involved. So it's a memoir certainly. But it's also, I realized when it was finished, almost a primer for freelance writers: how to make a living at a tough trade, how I did it anyway, so I gave it a subtitle: The Ups and Downs of a Freelance Career.  I had many successes but many downs too. It wasn't all big fees and fancy places. Not nearly.

 

You can read the below piece from Amazon:

 

From the introduction to Robert Daley's memoir Writing On The Edge - The Ups and Downs of a Freelance Career

"I was a freelance writer. So were Hemingway, Shakespeare and many others. I lived wholly from my writing. I wrote magazine articles and stories. I wrote 28 books. Always I demanded the highest fees I could get, becoming in the end what counts as a rich writer, and further on in this memoir I talk a good deal about contracts, advances, money. Most writers spend most of their lives locked in small rooms typing, and they don't get paid very much. I refused to live like that. Throughout I have tried to manage my career in a different way, call it my way, if you like. I know no other professional writer who can say this. Year after year I chose to plunge down every road that opened before me, often heedlessly. I started my adult life as the Football Giants' press agent, the first they had ever had and the first job I had ever had, six seasons--at the same time writing many stories and two novels no one would publish. Later, after I at last broke through, I wrote a novel based on the Giants and on players I had known, which, in 2002, Sports Illustrated called "one of the top sports books of all time." I was six years a New York Times foreign correspondent in Europe, and later wrote a novel about that. Much later I served as an NYPD Deputy Commissioner, ducking under the yellow tape to get as close to the crime scenes as possible, and on that experience I based a number of the novels that were to come. I wrote also about bullfighting, opera, grand prix racing, France, wine, treasure diving, for I plunged into all those worlds as well, plunged all the way to the end if possible, where I stood around gawking for a time, then wrote as accurately as I could, whether in fiction or non-fiction about what I had found. There is a price exacted of those who ignore traffic signs. I paid it in fear, defeat, humiliation, even in lawsuits. But other times I reaped an incredible profusion of excitement and delight--and also made a good living. To keep my enthusiasm high, I had to keep discovering new worlds, new people, for otherwise writing is hard, hard, hard, sometimes impossible. There were so many strange doors out there, all of them strangely ajar, at least to a writer. One had only to lean a little and they would open and whatever was behind them would be revealed. It's all in this book. This is my story."

You can purchase the book at Amazon via the below link:

http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Edge-Downs-Freelance-Career/dp/1495496856/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1393775857&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=Robert+Daley+Writing+From+the+edge

And you can visit Robert Daley's web page at www.robertdaleyauthor.com.

Note: I read Writing on the Edge and I thought it was an interesting book. I've enjoyed reading Robert Daley's true crime and crime fiction for many years. In my view, his books Target Blue and The Prince of the City are two true crime classics.

I interviewed Robert Daley a while ago and I hope to post the interview in the near future.