Booktube: Dick Tracy

 

Cover Cavalcade

DECEMBER IS DICK TRACY MONTH! 

This 1952 cover is by Joe Simon, ghosting for Chester Gould.

Cover Cavalcade

 

DECEMBER IS DICK TRACY MONTH!

This 1976 paperback was part of a three-book series that taught me just how awesome Dick Tracy's comic strip adventures were.

Cover Cavalcade

 DECEMBER IS DICK TRACY MONTH!!!

This very cool cover from 1957 is by Joe Simon, ghosting for Chester Gould. 

Cover Cavalcade

 DECEMBER IS DICK TRACY MONTH!!!

This high-impact cover from 1948 is uncredited.

Cover Cavalcade

 DECEMBER IS DICK TRACY MONTH!

This 1950 cover was drawn by Joe Simon, who was ghosting for Chester Gould.

Drinking Water from a Fork

 

My Dad used to tell me about a particular Dick Tracy story arc he remembered reading in the newspaper (probably the New York Daily News) when he was a kid. It involved Tracy being captured by villains who tried to starve him to death, feeding him only water served on a fork.

Well, I was delighted a few years ago with the publication of The Complete Dick Tracy, volume 10, which reprinted this story. Sharing this with Dad was nice.

Anyway, the starvation sequence began in late November 1945. Tracy was pursuing a bad guy named Itchy, who had (among other crimes) kidnapped Tess Trueheart. This by itself is not unusual. Prisons in those days were stuffed to the gills with criminals who had kidnapped Tess Trueheart.

Tess is rescued when Itchy's car gets stuck in a tunnel. But in the ensuing confusion, Itchy steals a patrol car. Tracy manages to dive into the trunk of the car as Itchy flees the scene. 

Unfortunately for Tracy, Itchy spots his reflection in a plate glass window. He manages to get the drop on the detective and, along with Kitty--the widow of a crook killed by Tracy--decides to do away with him in a particularly insidious way.

They keep him tied up, feeding him one turnip per day and all the water that will cling to a fork. The idea is to slowly starve him to death, as they often eat full meals right in front of them. Their meals and snacks are all chosen because they smell so good, such as popcorn or hamburgers with onions. 

Chester Gould's villains were meant to represent the depths of evil that human beings can sink to. With Itchy and Kitty, this symbolism might have been the most explicit he ever achieved. They are driven entirely by the need for vengence and this in turn amps up their capacity for cruelity.

Tracy gradually weakens, but the patrol car (which Itchy dumped) has been found. The cops search it and fail to find a clue. Fortunately, Tracy's adopted son Junior is better at being a detective than the actual detectives. He gives the car one more going over and finds a note Tracy had left in the trunk, revealing the address at which he's being held.

Junior sneaks in, cuts Tracy loose and gives him a gun. Then, while Junior goes for reinforcements, the weak but still game Tracy gets the drop on his captors. 

Kitty faints, but Itchy makes the mistake of trying to pull a gun. He's dead before he hits the floor.

I can see why Dad remembered this story arc so vividly. The cruel plan of the villains combines with Gould's disturbing portrayal of a gaunt and starving hero makes the tale very, very memorable. 

Next week, we look at another example of just how much fun it is when Jack Kirby draws a story about a rampaging monster.

Fire, Ice and Horrific Deaths

Last week, we looked at the first act of Dick Tracy vs. Shaky, which ran Tracy's daily newspaper strip over the winter of 1944/45.  That first act was action-packed, with the events that took a number of weeks to show us probably only covering a single day. It ends with model Snowflake Falls escaping from Shaky after jamming the crooks hand in a door frame. Shaky, though, has escaped along with his last two henchmen.

Artist/writer Chester Gould was really good at pacing and knew that his readers would need a breather after several weeks of chases and shootouts. So the story proceeds at a more casual pace for its second act, while Gould sets up the next phase in the story's plot. This also allowed him to bring back one of his most successful and endearing comic relief characters--the ham actor Vitamin Flintheart.

In the volume of The Complete Dick Tracy that reprints this story arc, Max Allan Collins has some insightful remarks about Vitamin, who was originally a direct parody of real-life actor John Barrymore:

Vitamin is a particularly well-realized comic character, with universal appeal and resonance... [He] grew in both appeal and warmth, and came to represent all "ham" actors, not just the tragic Barrymore.

Vitamin auditions Snowflake and gives her the co-starring role in his new play. The play is a hit. Also, Vitamin and Snowflake fall in love. Here we see that though Tracy might be a brilliant cop, he's less than skilled at giving personal advice. Warning Snowflake about the danger of a May/December romance, he just gets everyone mad at him. Stick to your skill set, Tracy. Tracking down villains doesn't qualify you to play Dear Abby.

In the meantime, Shaky is looking to get revenge on Snowflake. When he and his friends meet Vitamin, who is tying one on after being "betrayed" by Tracy, he sees an opportunity to get his hands on the girl once again.

Shaky convinces Vitamin to elope with Snowflake and offers to throw a party for them. It's not much of a party, though, as Vitamin is knocked out, then robbed of both his fur coat and his lady.

This opens the final act of the story arc, with the pace of the tale speeding up once again as we race to what can only be described as a brutal finale.

Shaky tosses Snowflake into the river. Fortunately, she lands on a barge and is later rescued just before freezing to death. Gould was not shy about killing off likeable supporting characters and, in fact, had just done so a few months earlier in an earlier story arc. So newspaper readers that winter must have been on the edge of their seats, wondering if Snowflake was going to survive. In Dick Tracy, there were no guarentees. This is one of the reason the strip was such a great one.

In the meantime, Shaky and his two men are sleeping in a cheap hotel, using a portable heater to keep warm. When Vitamen's stolen coat falls onto the heater, the hotel is soon engulfed in flames.

The ensuing sequence is brilliant, with Gould's expressionistic artwork dripping with a sense of terror, panic and danger. The henchmen both come to horrible ends (one burns, the other jumps off the roof in a panic). Shaky brutally kills a fireman and tries to make a break for it. He steals a car, but the ensuing chase leads him to a dead end at the waterfront.

Shaky sends the car off a pier, hoping to make it look like he died in the crash, then hides in a nearby hole. The next week's worth of strips has Tracy and his men trying to recover the car and confirm Shaky's death, while the crook gradually realizes that ice is sealing him up in the hole. By the time he decides to shout for help, no one can hear him. And the air supply in that hole is limited...

Shaky was a violent sociopath, but Gould presents his death with such stark brutality, that you can't help but feel a little sorry for him despite realizing his fate is well-deserved. To quote Max Allan Collins one more time:

Life is harsh in Gould's world. Death, too. There are thrills, there are laughs, there is compassion, but there are mostly consequence, and sometimes just plain cruel fate.

As I mentioned last week, a paperback reprint of this storyline (along with another paperback reprinting the Pruneface story) was my earliest experience with classic adventure comic strips. Because of Chester Gould's brilliance as artist and storyteller, I was also later drawn to Milt Caniff, Hal Foster, Alex Raymond and Roy Crane. I wish I had had a chance to meet Chester Gould. I would have liked to have thanked him for enriching my life.

Next week, we'll stay in World War II (though via a story from 1975) as we look at the formation of the Marvel superhero group The Invaders.

Snowflake, Shaky, Machine Guns and Getting a Hand Stuck in a Door.

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.

Knocking Out an Old Lady and Strangling a Dog

See these two books? Much like Dr. Paul Bearer, these two books helped make me who I am today.

These two paperbacks reprinted a couple of classic Dick Tracy story arcs from the 1940s. It was my first important exposure to classic adventure strips. We'd always had quite a few paperback collection of Peanuts kicking around the house when I was a kid, but these books are what made me vividly aware of just how awesome a newspaper adventure strip could be.  This, combined with Prince Valiant (the one adventure strip the local paper ran on Sundays) are probably a key factor that led me down a path in which I eventually wrote a book about such things.



A few years later, when I was in the Navy and stationed in the Philippines, I ran across a book reprinting the first year or so of Milt Caniff's Terry and the Pirates in the base hospital's small library. That clinched the deal, but it was Dick Tracy that got it all started.

I'm pretty sure I read the one featuring Prune Face first--a story arc that ran from September 1942 to January 1943. It's a cool story, beginning when Tracy, his adopted son Junior and a young girl called Frizzletop (a short-lived supporting character) are driving back to the city after solving a case in the country. They have a minor accident and have to spend a night in a barn. Junior

promptly discovers a dead body.

This in itself is a great scene. I probably didn't know the word "Expressionistic" when I read this, but that's what Chester Gould's art is. His character designs, use of perspective, use of shadows and silhouettes--all emphasize emotions over realism. It's an artistic style that works perfectly for the fast-moving, high-impact stories that Gould was telling.

Well, the dead guy turns out to be a local Highway Patrol chief and various clues eventually point to the chief's scientist son Cal as being involved. Tracy tricks Cal into leading him to the base of Prune Face, a Nazi spy. Cal has been making poison gas for Prune Face.

Tracy rarely gets to make a quiet arrest. Soon, he and another cop are trapped in the building furnace room, while Prune Face releases poison gas to kill Cal as punishment for being an idiot and leading the cops there.Prune Face escapes, though another of his confederates is captured.


I'm afraid that I no longer remember if the story's next plot twist bothered me as a kid, because it's a perfect example of just how unashamedly Gould used coincidence to move the story along. When reading the strip in daily installments, this was probably not as noticeable as it is in a collection like this, but it's one heck of a coincidence all the same. Prune Face, needing a new hideout, rents a room from Tracy's future mother-in-law Mrs. Trueheart. Gould used such coincidences a lot--probably as a result of his tendency to write his stories without plotting them out in advance.

But even as an adult, I'm okay with this. Gould's fast-paced action and great artwork is strong enough to allow the reader to just accept the coincidence and move along with the story. Like much like the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dick Tracy was just so darn good that the coincidences seemed to be a perfectly natural part of the story.

Prune Face begins plotting more sabotage, but Mrs. Trueheart soon suspects her tenant is up to no good. With the help of Junior, she secretly snaps a picture of him (because he's so hard to describe?) and manages to switch the bomb he's making with a box of rocks.

What happens next is an example of just how unrepentantly evil Gould's villains are. In Dick Tracy, good and evil are defined in stark terms, with a clear difference between them. And when someone chooses to do evil, there's no limit to the depths he can sink.

Prune Face demonstrates this by slamming a rock into Mrs. Trueheart's skull. He then pursues Junior, but ends up in an alley with a broken leg. He sees a cute little Scottie dog wearing a sweater--something he can use to cove his distinctive face. So he grabs the dog and strangles it.

And Prune Face might not even reach the top ten as far as acts of evil committed by Gould villains are concerned. But the casualness with which he nearly kills an old lady and strangles a dog are striking. Gould understood human nature--he understood that if we let ourselves start doing wrong, we can sink faster and farther than we ever imagined we could.

Prune Face forces a doctor to set his leg and contacts another Nazi agent for help. They find a new hideout and keep the doctor as a hostage, but the doc cleverly leaves a clue to his location. Soon, the cops are surrounding the place. Prune Face kills his confederate for a perceived double-cross; the doctor is released;

and Tracy has his cops break all the windows to the home and let the snow in, planning on freezing Prune Face out. But Prune Face would rather die than surrender--as long as he can take Tracy with him.

I was fascinated by this story when I read it as a young teen. It had a different vibe to it than the comic books I'd been reading for years and taught me a bit about our cultural history. At a time when I was attending a sad excuse for a public school and simply reading in the back of the class rather than paying any attention at all to my teachers, it was books like this that gave me a real education.

Tracy vs. Karloff

Read/Watch ‘em in Order #26

I’ve actually written about Dick Tracy Meet Gruesome (1947) before, when I pointed out it was one of two occasions that Boris Karloff faced off against one of the Great Detectives.

But let’s it review anyways. Karloff plays Gruesome, a brutal thug who was recently released from prison. He falls in with a dishonest scientist who has gas bombs that put its victims into suspended animation for about fifteen minutes. Soon, Karloff has scared everyone else in the small gang into accepting him as leader.

They rob a bank and Tracy is quickly on their trail. They almost nail Gruesome after a car chase, stalking him through a taxidermy shop filled with stuffed animals. But Gruesome keeps slipping away. Finally, Tracy tries a gambit to trick Gruesome into giving away his hideout. This only partially works—leaving Tracy alone and unarmed while Gruesome stalks him while armed with a revolver.

The plot—with its science fiction element—gives this entry a different feel from the previous Tracy films. It’s still a solid police procedural, but director John Rawlins tones down the film noirish look this time. Still, it looks great and the final action scene—which involves a conveyor belt and a big incinerator—is particularly good.

Karloff plays Gruesome with a sense of subdued menace, making it perfectly believable when he cows the other criminals into obeying him. The supporting case is good as well, most notably bespectacled character actor Skelton Knaggs as X-Ray, the dishonest assistant to the dishonest scientist. Ann Gwynne plays Tess Trueheart this time around. She’d been a villain in the serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe just a few years before. Now she plays the good and true-hearted Miss Trueheart. But whether she be good or evil, she’s always gosh-darn adorable.

Many fans of the Tracy films cite this one as the weakest of the four, mostly because of the admittedly silly freeze gas. But even those who rank it last admit it’s an entertaining film.

And it remains my favorite. It lacks the film noir elements that were such a strong part of the other films; and Karloff’s subdued take on Gruesome means we have a villain who is not as over-the-top as Tracy villains usually should be.

But that subdued performance is exactly what makes Karloff so effective in the role. It may be a film with a silly plot, but he gives it verisimilitude because he plays the villain in a straightforward, non-ironic manner.

Also, that final action sequence, with Gruesome stalking Tracy around the big incinerator, is honestly tense and expertly choreographed.

And finally—IT’S BORIS KARLOFF, PEOPLE! IT CAN’T HELP BUT BE GOOD!

That brings us to the end of the RKO Dick Tracy films. I’ve been trying to decide what films to cover next. I want to do something other than a detective film series next. I was thinking about the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad films, but then I remembered I’ve dealt with them already, darn it.

I just can’t decide. Well, I’ve got four Mr. Moto novels to cover before we run out of them—and I’ve already decided what book series to do after that. So there’s time to figure something out in regards to films.

He's Back!

READ/WATCH ‘EM IN ORDER #23

Ralph Byrd was the original screen Dick Tracy, playing the famous detective in four Republic serials from 1937 to 1941. In 1947, he returned to the role when he replaced Morgan Conway in the RKO B-movie series. And now he’d get to play Tracy as Tracy was meant to be played—as a big city homicide cop. The serials, though quite good for what they were, “upgraded” Tracy to a federal agent, taking him out of his proper milieu. The RKO films put him back where he belonged.

In Dick Tracy’s Dilemma, there’s also a new Tess Trueheart (Kay Christopher) and a new director—a B-movie vet named John Rawlins.  But there’s still a lot of continuity to link it to the Conway films, including Lyle Lattel as Pat Patton and Ian Keith earning some good laughs as Vitamin Flintheart.

The main link to the previous Tracy films, though, is the visual style. The directors of the first two films—William Berke and Gordon Douglass—had given their Tracy films the sort of gritty noir style that the filmmakers at RKO used to do so well. On this film, John Rawlins does the same thing, effectively using light and shadow to give Dick Tracy’s  Dilemma a very hard-boiled ambiance. Of particular note here is the finale, in which Tracy pursues the villain through a dark junk yard.

The villain this time around is a thug called The Claw because because he has a hook in place of his right hand. John Lambert, who played many a thug in his career, gives the Claw an aura of brutality and violence that makes him an effective and downright creepy bad guy.

The story itself is yet another well-plotted procedural, with Tracy logically following up clues after the Claw and a couple of other thugs steal some fur coats and murder a night watchman. At one point, for instance, the Claw is interrupted by the cops while trying to use a pay phone. He gets away, but Tracy notices the scratches on the phone dial from the Claw’s claw. This allows him to deduce the phone number and eventually track down the mastermind behind the Claw’s crimes.

It’s all good, solid storytelling, adding up to what many consider to be the best film in the RKO series.

Before long, we’ll take a look (actually, a return look) at the last film in the series, Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome—one that many consider to be the weakest. But it’s my favorite and—since it’s a well-established fact that anyone who disagrees with me is wrong—then it simply MUST be the best of the series.  I’ll concede, though, that Dick Tracy’s Dilemma comes in a close second.

Behind the Cueball

Read/Watch ‘em in Order #21

It was during the 1940s that Chester Gould starting portraying the villains in his comic strip Dick Tracy as men (and occasionally women) whose grotesque appearances mirrored their grotesque lack of morals. The 1940s is arguably Gould’s finest decade as a storyteller. Bad guys such as Prune Face, Shaky, the Brow and Flattop were tossed into violent storylines that kept the attentions of 30 million readers riveted on the comics page of their local newspaper.

But when RKO decided to produce a series of Dick Tracy films, they didn’t draw on any of Gould’s established villains. That’s too bad—when you look at what make-up artists of that era were capable of (think of Jack Pierce’s work at Universal), producing an appropriately creepy-looking Brow or Pruneface doesn’t seem too impossible.

But I suppose the time and budget restrictions of B-movie production prevented this. Still, the Dick Tracy films did pretty good in coming up with acceptable villains. The first film, as we’ve already seen, featured Mike Mazurki sporting a vivid scar down his face. The second movie—Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946)—tossed shaven-headed actor Dick Wessel as a brutal thug appropriately named Cueball. Wessel doesn’t have much range as an actor, but this actually works well for him this time around—he is a truly menacing presence throughout the film.

As with the first film, Cueball is a solidly written police procedural, filmed in a shadowy film-noir style that gives the violence a brutal edge without ever allowing it to become unpleasantly graphic. Cueball has been hired by some dishonest workers in the diamond industry to steal some valuable jewels. He proves to be more violent than they figured, though, when he strangles the courier, then decides to hold his erstwhile employers up for more money. By the time the movie is over, Cueball has racked up quite a body count.

It ends with a cool noir-looking chase scene through a busy railroad yard.

To quote Ron Backer’s excellent book Mystery Movie Series of 1940s Hollywood: “This film contains a menagerie of wonderful characters, played by wonderful character actors.” Cueball really goes to town with making the supporting characters individually interesting while giving them the sort of names that would have fit similar characters perfectly in the comic strips. The owner of a sleezy bar is Filthy Flora; an antique shop owner is Percival Priceless; and a gem dealer is named Jules Sparkle.

Though the villains are original to the movie, Dick Tracy’s friends are all taken straight from the comics. Pat Patton, Tess Trueheart and Junior are all there, while Ian Keith hams it up marvelously as Tracy’s actor friend Vitamin Flintheart.

This is Morgan Conway’s second and last appearance as the detective. Ralph Byrd, who had played Tracy in the Republic serials made a few years earlier, would return to the role for the final two films of the series.

It’s interesting to run across different opinions about which actor was better. In his book, Ron Backer considers Conway to be an uninteresting and one-dimensional Tracy. My DVDs of these movies, though, include very informative introductions by Max Allen Collins, the prolific mystery writer who wrote the Dick Tracy strip for over 15 years after Gould retired in 1977. Collins prefers Conway to Byrd, considering Conway to have more authoritative weight in the role.

Well, I like Conway as Tracy, but I’ve always preferred Byrd. I will say, though, that my opinion is probably colored by nostalgia. The first movie Dick Tracy I saw as a kid was a Byrd film (I think it was an edited feature-length version of one of the serials), so in my mind he’s always the “real” Tracy. If I’d seen Morgan Conway first, I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer him in the role.

Well, I’ll be watching Ralph Byrd again soon. Next up is 1947’s Dick Tracy’s Dilemma.

MORE MIKE MAZURKI!

Read/Watch ‘em in Order #19

Chester Gould’s bizarre and violent comic strip Dick Tracy first came to the big screen in 1937, as a serial starring Ralph Byrd. Three more serials followed over the next four years.

For what they are, the Tracy serials are pretty good, but they made the mistake of changing the titular character from a city cop to a G-Man. That just isn’t right for Tracy—he has a city cop vibe that fits him perfectly. The serials, therefore, don’t really feel like they’re about the “real” Dick Tracy. (Though Ralph Byrd does strongly resemble the comic book character.)

But when RKO decided to make some Tracy feature films beginning in 1945, they fixed this. Tracy was returned to the police department of his unnamed big city, which was infested with the highest percentage of bizarre criminals this side of Gotham City. The films also brought back much of his supporting cast from the comic strip, most of whom had been sadly missing from the serials.

Morgan Conway plays a tough, no-nonsense Tracy in the first two films. If I had to pick my favorite actor as Tracy, I’d probably go with Byrd. But that’s subjective, since Conway was arguably the better actor of the two and does bring an appropriate air of competence and stubborn determination to the role.

We start out with 1945’s Dick Tracy, Detective. And it is indeed a fine start. There’s a strong script involving an apparent maniac who leaves extortion notes, then kills his victims whether they pay or not. Dick and his partner Pat Patton look into it, running into a number of quirky characters who are both suspects and potential victims. It gradually becomes clear that the killer isn’t the same person writing the extortion notes. And it also becomes clear that there is a pattern to the seemingly unrelated murders.

I like the way the story plays out—Dick and Pat spend most of the movie logically following clues, making incremental progress without any clear idea either the killer’s identity or motivation for most of the movie. Then, when it all finally starts to come together, the killer snatches up Dick’s girl Tess Trueheart. But then Tess went to the Lois Lane School for Girl Friends of Heroes, so she knows darn well its her job to get kidnapped.

Well, we know the killer’s identity from the get-go, even if Tracy doesn’t. The killer is known as Splitface—a nickname derived from the vivid scar that runs down his face. Though not a character from the comic strip, he has that same menacing vibe that made Gould’s villains so memorable.

Of course, Splitface is played by Mike Mazurki, who pretty much holds the patent on being menacing in such roles. In fact, on the Lon Chaney Standard Menacing Scale, I think he scores a 9.3. And that darn scar amps up his scariness at least another half-point.

Always remember, by the way, that when watching a movie with Mike Mazurki in it, you are obligated by tradition to shout his name aloud when he first appears.

But what makes the movie really work is director William Berke’s use of unusual camera angles and the film noirish use of light and shadows.  From start to finish, the movie is simply fun to look at. The noir sensibility of the film also adds a palpable degree of suspense and brutality to a couple of the murder scenes (though it does so without making those scenes unpleasantly graphic).

In the end, we get an energetic fist fight between Tracy and Splitface aboard an old, abandoned riverboat. That looks cool as well. But then, how could it not look cool? It’s Dick Tracy vs. Mike Mazurki, for gosh sakes. 

1937--A Good Year for Adventure

By pure coincidence, I just read a couple of books that were both originally published in 1937. Both were good mysteries featuring established characters and it got me to thinking. What were all the famous detectives and adventurers doing that year?


We’ll start with the Whisperer—the secret identity of James “Wildcat” Gordon, police commissioner of an unnamed big city. Gordon isn’t satisfied with the slow course of official justice and the corruption that slows it down even more. So, on top of his efforts as a cop, he often assumed the identity of the Whisperer. Using specially designed dental plates to disguise his voice, he wielded a pair of silenced automatics to dispense a somewhat faster method of justice than the court system allows.


In The Red Hatchets, he finds himself caught between two opposing forces when a Chinese tong wages brutal warfare against a local gangster. A lot of mobster skulls get split with red-handled axes while the Whisperer tries to rescue a kidnapped girl and sort out exactly what’s going on.


Beautiful girl reporter Torchy Blane (the inspiration for Lois Lane) had several 1937 adventures chronicled in the movies. One of them, Fly-Away Baby, had her traveling around the world to keep tabs on a suspected murderer. She and her boyfriend, NYPD Lt. Steve McBride, eventually confront a killer aboard the zeppelin Hindenburg.


Interestingly, Charlie Chan had been aboard the Hindenburg (though traveling in the opposite direction) while pursuing a spy in Charlie Chan at the Olympics. Of course, though that film was released ’37, it was recounting events that took place the previous year. For Charlie’s 1937 adventure, we need to look to Charlie Chan on Broadway, where he sorts out a killer’s identity from among a bevy of Damon Runyon-esque gamblers.



Terry Lee and Pat Ryan (from the comic strip Terry and the Pirates), while still bumming around the Far East, begin the year escaping from the bandit leader Pyzon, though Pat gets shot in the process. While recovering, he encounters his long-lost love Normandie Drake and her sleezy husband Tony Sandhurst. Terry and Pat rescue Sandhurst from kidnappers, but the chubby villain then attempts to frame Pat for several felonies.


Dick Tracy spent a large part of 1937 breaking up an insurance fraud ring. In the end, he is forced to track the main bad guy through a pitch-dark theater.

Hercule Poirot was in England that year, responding to a letter for help from a rich woman who feared one of her relatives was trying to off her. The letter is delayed and the poor woman is dead before Poirot arrives. But he can at least put the finger on the killer, as recounted in the book The Dumb Witness.


Back in New York City, gargantuan detective Nero Wolfe looks into a murder in The Red Box. It’s a case complicated when one of the suspects has the bad taste to die in Wolfe’s office, presenting him with a possible conflict of interest in his further investigations. But, with the help of his hard-boiled assistant Archie Goodwin, the overweight genius manages to figure it all out.


There was, in fact, quite a bit of action in the Big Apple that year. The Shadow was quite busy, but his most notable case that year was recorded in The Shadow Unmasked. While looking into some jewel thefts, the Shadow is forced to abandon his usual secret identity of Lamont Cranston. For the first time, we learn who he really is—Kent Allard, an aviator who was supposedly killed in a crash years before.


The Spider had a busy year as well. In Dictator of the Damned, he prevented a madman from using assassinations and an army of thugs to take over the city. It all comes to a head with a desperate gun battle inside a riverfront building, while the lovely Nita Van Sloan is caught up a yet another death trap. I think that poor girl may have even beat out Lois Lane for the number of death traps various villains tossed her into.


Ellery Queen had a quieter but still fascinating adventure when he tried to deduce who had plunged a pair of scissors into the neck of a famous novelist in The Door Between.


Doc Savage was hopping around the globe quite a bit that year (as he was throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s.) His adventures included battling an evil dwarf armed with a super-weapon in Repel and preventing some mercenaries from taking over a Central American nation in The Golden Peril. That latter case was especially important—the country is the source of Doc’s great wealth, regularly supplied to him in gold by some grateful Mayans he once helped out.


Over in Los Angeles, famed criminal attorney Perry Mason solved a murder aboard a gambling ship in The Case of the Dangerous Dowager. A little later that same year, Della Street gets tossed in jail for a short time helping her boss figure out The Case of the Lame Canary. She also gets the first of what will be several marriage proposals from Perry in that book. But she believes Perry needs a secretary who will back his plays no matter what more than a wife, so she always turns him down.


Even when I read the books, my mental image of Della is that of Barbara Hale from the TV series. I don’t blame Perry for being persistent in his proposals. Gee whiz, that gal was purty!


And that’s only a small portion of the vigilantes, detectives, and explorers that had adventures that year. It was an adventurous year indeed. But whatever problems might arise, whether it was a single murder or the threat of world domination, there were more than enough heroes scattered about the globe to keep the innocent safe.

The most insidious death traps ever!!!!

Being a fan of pulp fiction, B-movies, comic strips and comic books, I have vicariously run across more than my share of horrible death traps. Rare is the pulp or comic hero who hasn't had to fight, think or trick his way out of a death trap or two during his career. Some heroes, such as Batman and the Shadow, literally aren't capable of making it through an adventure without getting caught in at least one death trap.


Death traps come in all shapes and sizes. A Nazi spy once tried to drop Charlie Chan through a trap door installed in an elevator. Batman was once tied up to a giant birthday cake candle that shot him up into the air. The Shadow was once trapped in a locked room with metal doors and a small army of gangsters sticking machine gun barrels in his direction through narrow gun ports.


But, by golly, any hero worth his salt will beat impossible odds and make good his escape from the latest model death traps.


There are two particular death traps that have always stood out in my mind as being particularly horrible.


The first pops up towards the end of the novel The Return of Fu Manchu (1916), the second of that series. The heroes, Nayland Smith and his friend Dr. Petrie, have been captured by the evil Devil Doctor.


Smith is laid flat on the floor and locked into a cage divided into six compartments, with the first compartment containing Smith's feet and so on up to his head.


Then:


He glanced toward the Burman, who retired immediately, to re-enter a moment later carrying a curious leather sack, in shape not unlike that of a sakka or Arab water-carrier. Opening a little trap in the top of the first compartment of the cage (that is, the compartment which covered Smith's bare feet and ankles) he inserted the neck of the sack, then suddenly seized it by the bottom and shook it vigorously. Before my horrified gaze four huge rats came tumbling out from the bag into the cage! The dacoit snatched away the sack and snapped the shutter fast. A moving mist obscured my sight, a mist through which I saw the green eyes of Dr. Fu-Manchu fixed upon me, and through which, as from a great distance, his voice, sunk to a snake-like hiss, came to my ears.


"Cantonese rats, Dr. Petrie, the most ravenous in the world . . . they have eaten nothing for nearly a week!"


So poor Nayland Smith is going to have to watch himself get eaten alive by rats, one body section at a time. Petrie is chained to a chair next to him and given a sword, but his range of motion is limited so that the only action he can take with the weapon would be to put Smith out of his misery.


Now that's evil.


But not, perhaps, as evil as the trap the villainous Mrs. Pruneface placed Dick Tracy into. In a  sequence of Chester Gould's brilliant comic strip published in 1943, Mrs. Pruneface (looking to revenge the death of her husband, the Nazi spy Pruneface) captures Tracy and ties him to the floor. Then she mounts a refrigerator over him on blocks of ice, with a spike protruding from the 'fridge down towards Tracy. So, as the ice melts....

 

There have been a lot of really evil death traps, but I gotta rate these two as a solid 10 on the evil-meter.

Boris Karloff vs. the Great Detectives

Boris Karloff was a wonderful actor. Everything he did as an actor--from Frankenstein's Monster to the narrator of The Grinch That Stole Christmas, was done with class and style. Whether the film he was in was an A film or a B film (or, in a few cases, a Z film), he was pretty much always worth watching.


Many of his best roles were bad guys, so we tend to remember those best. And that's just as well--because Karloff (though by all accounts a true gentleman in real life) could always create one heck of a bad guy.


And during the course of his career, the villainous version of Karloff got to go up against a couple of the best and most famous of the fictional detectives.


The first time was in Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936). Karloff plays an amnesiac opera singer who has recently escaped from an asylum. Soon after, people start turning up dead backstage during a performance. Karloff is there--using his knowledge of backstage passages and trap doors to stay hidden. But is he guilty of the murders--or is someone else using his presence to cover his or her own guilt?


Like all the Chan films featuring Warner Oland as the master detective and Keye Luke as his son Lee, Charlie Chan at the Opera has a strong story and great production values. It's a cracking good mystery with an appealing protagonist and (of course) a great villain. Karloff's portrayal of a mad man only barely hanging on to his last shreds of sanity is downright creepy, but also forces us to feel a level of sympathy for the man.

Eleven years later, Karloff went up against Dick Tracy in Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947). This time, Karloff is a ruthless street thug (of course, when you're stuck with a name like Gruesome, you're pretty much doomed to grow up to be a ruthless street thug.) He gets hold of an expermental gas that freezes people up like statues when they breath it, allowing him to pull off a bank robbery or two. Along the way, he also makes time to double-cross a few of his comrades in crime. No sympathy for this character--but then there didn't have to be this time around. Gruesome's job is to be as gruesome as possible in every possible way--and Karloff manages this effortlessly.

The Dick Tracy films made at RKO in the late 1940s are all lively and enjoyable efforts. This one arguably has the weakest story, but with Karloff as the bad guy, good production values with film noir-ish lighting effects and a really neato gun battle at the climax, it still makes for a good time.

So Boris Karloff got to go up against Charlie Chan and Dick Tracy. The detectives manage to bring him to heal, of course, but he gives them both a run for their money. I only which he'd gotten a chance to go up against Sherlock Holmes. I would have loved to see how he would have interpreted Professor Moriarty.