The above paperback is one of two Dick Tracy reprint books I acquired as a kid and that (as I've written before) I believe to be important steps in making me the person I am today. For which the world really should be grateful, you know.
I'm not sure if Shaky is among the best remembered of Tracy's classic villians, but his story arc which ran in late 1944 and early 1945) is a great one. It begins with Tracy and Junior driving back to the city, when they run across a dazed woman in a wedding dress. They bring her into the city, where she starts to yell at Tracy for refusing to marry her. Oddly, she refers to Tracy as Nat Banks, a local rich guy.
It turns out to be a blackmail scam that went awry when the girl stopped the wrong car. We also soon learn that the girl (a model named Snowflake Falls) is drugged and not acting on her own initiative.
Well, the villain behind all this is a scam artist with a violent streak who is appropriately named Shaky. (The gag is that despite his constant shaking, he's a crack shot and can do things like build ships-in-a-bottle.) Like all Tracy villains, his physical appearance is meant to mirror his inner evil. From a practical point-of-view, we often wonder why Tracy just didn't arrest the first odd-looking person he encounters when investigating the case. This would almost always turn out to be the bad guy.
When Shaky's henchmen tell him that the blackmail scheme has gone awry, he realizes they have to get Snowflake back before the drug wears off and she talks. He improvises a plan to get some men with guns into the police station, then snatches the girl out of a window.
I'm not quite sure how Shaky's men were eventually supposed to get out of police headquarters, but it doesn't matter. Two cops with tommy guns settle things for them. A third henchmen is caught not long after that, but Shaky and his two remaining goons get away with Snowflake.
But as the drug wears off, we begin to realize that Snowflake might have moxie. And, boy, does that turn out to be true. She has the moxiest moxie ever, getting away from Shaky and leaving the criminal with his hand rather painfully stuck in a door. In the Dick Tracy universe, you apparently do not mess with pretty, young models.
Unfortunately, Shaky and his two goons manage to get away again, though Snowflake does escape. But now Snowflake is on Shaky's hit list.
The first half of the Shaky story arc is very fast moving, running for nearly two months but with the action covering a time frame of probably only a few hours. The pacing for the rest of the story slows up a little as Chester Gould sets up the conditions for a brutal climax, but the tale is never anything less that enthralling. Because this is one of the first classic Tracy stories I ever read, my opinion is undoubtably colored by nostalgia--but it is still one of my favorite story arcs.
We'll return next week to see how it all turns out.
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