Book Review: Dick Tracy the Official Biography: the Life and Times of America's No. 1 Crimestopper, by Jay Maeder (1990)

The cover of Dick Tracy the Official Biography, by Jay Maeder (1990). Photo by Mark C. Taylor.

This summer, when I rediscovered the comic strip Dick Tracy, the book I kept going back to was Jay Maeder’s 1990 book Dick Tracy the Official Biography: The Life and Times of America’s No. 1 Crimestopper. A narrative history of the Dick Tracy comic strip, Maeder’s book is also filled with many reproductions of the strip itself, so you can get an idea of what it was like. When I was kid, I read bits and pieces of Maeder’s book, but I never read the whole thing, cover-to-cover. With my interest in Dick Tracy rekindled, I decided I should. 

From the thoroughness of the book, I assume that Maeder read every single one of the Dick Tracy strips that Chester Gould wrote and illustrated for 46 years, from 1931 to 1977. That, in and of itself, is a remarkable feat. And it’s still not an easy one to do. The Library of American Comics, through IDW Publishing, has been republishing all the Chester Gould Dick Tracy strips. The project began in 2006. The most recent book was Volume 26, and there are still three more volumes to come.

Dick Tracy and his 2-way wrist radio, 1952.

Maeder is an excellent guide to the world of Dick Tracy, which follows the titular character, a plainclothes detective, as he encounters bizarre and dangerous criminals. Chester Gould wrote Dick Tracy by the seat of his pants, and it was rare that he knew how a storyline would end before he started it. Like Dick Tracy himself, Gould relied on his intellect to guide him. While Maeder acknowledges that sometimes this led to unlikely coincidences to wrap up stories, “Most of the time the total absence of outline lent it a crazed urgency as Gould sped along in units of action that existed pretty much for their own sake.” (p.17) Maeder is right; as you read the strip, you just sit back and enjoy the ride it takes you on. Of course, I should add the caveat that my experience reading Dick Tracy is not the same as the people who read it in the newspaper day by day. Because I’m reading it in books or comic books, I can read it in chunks and devour an entire storyline spanning months. 

Maeder astutely points out that while there were many Good Samaritans in Dick Tracy that helped out the police on a case, “On the other hand, quite a lot of the Samaritans got themselves tragically killed for their butting in, so the moral was ambivalent at best.” (p.18) For all its celebration of middle-America values, Dick Tracy could be quite a dark comic strip. There is a kind of fatalistic doom about the strip, as bad things continually happen to innocent people for no reason. In this way, the strip mirrored real life. As Maeder writes, “This was a very mean comic strip.” (p.70) 

Even during the gangster-filled 1930’s, there was concern over the hard-hitting violence of Dick Tracy. Gould was pushing the boundaries of censorship, and in 1933 the editor of the Tulsa Tribune wrote to Gould’s syndicate that a reader had complained that he did not want the paper in his house anymore, “because our comics too frequently caused his children to cry in sympathy for tortured victims.” (p.31) Well, to put a positive spin on it, maybe the kids were just learning empathy. 

Joseph Medill Patterson, the owner and founder of the New York Daily News, was the man who gave Chester Gould the greenlight for Dick Tracy. Gould had been drawing gag-a-day comic strips for years, and none of them had caught the public’s imagination. Gould had other ideas for strips as well, and he had pestered Patterson with ideas for years. Finally, in August of 1931, Gould sent Patterson five strips of a proposed serial. It was unlike any of Gould’s other ideas. Patterson telegrammed Gould back, “Your Plainclothes Tracy has possibilities.” It was Patterson himself who changed the name of the strip to simply Dick Tracy, and it started appearing in the New York Daily News in October 1931. 

Patterson always staunchly defended Gould’s work, and he wrote a letter in late 1941 to the Omaha World-Herald, which had been aghast at the grotesque villain the Mole strangling a crook with his bare hands. Patterson forwarded his letter to Gould, and added a cover note of his own, writing: “You see that I come to your defense to the best of my ability. But nevertheless, Chester, I think you do go a bit too far sometimes.” (p.84) If the Omaha World-Herald was that outraged about the Mole, I wonder what they thought of all the numerous people who got shot clean through the skull in Dick Tracy? 

A writer himself, Patterson would periodically offer advice to the stable of cartoonists who worked for his syndicate, and a piece of advice that Gould took to heart was Patterson’s credo about villains: “Kill them before they outlive their usefulness; leave your readers longing for another look at them.” (p.82) Gould stuck to this pretty well; villains in Dick Tracy usually didn’t get a run of more than 3 or 4 months. 

Gould’s vision for Dick Tracy was unlike anything else that had come along. Gould created a mixture of scientific detective work, grotesque criminals, and hard-hitting violence, mixed with the occasional serving of humor.  In doing so, Gould essentially invented the modern police procedural. 

Dick Tracy often combined humor alongside its violence. “So it was that Dick Tracy, punitive and retributive and life-poisoning and cruel, was also quite often a screwball laff riot.” (p.107) As the 1940’s went on, Gould increased the supporting cast of the comic strip, introducing comic figures like the ham actor Vitamin Flintheart, who looked quite a bit like the late John Barrymore, Gravel Gertie, a homely woman who lived in a gravel pit, and B.O Plenty, a malodorous farmer. 

Scientific Detective work in the talky 1930's, 1935.

The crisp, classic look of 1940's Tracy, with the memorable villain Flattop, 1944.

Dick Tracy under investigation, 1951.

A striking panel from just a month before Chester Gould's last strip, November 20, 1977.

Gould’s artwork for Dick Tracy changed as the years passed. His style improved throughout the 1930’s, as it moves from being kind of grainy and very dialogue and description-heavy to the stark, crisp black and whites of the classic period of the 1940’s and 1950’s. Gould’s artwork got even more minimal throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s, as he favored thicker and thicker black lines and less detail in the backgrounds. Throughout the run of the strip, Gould was able to create arresting visual tableaus that equaled those found in any film noir. 

A promotional drawing for Dick Tracy, 1932. Notice the difference between the realistic Tracy and the cartoonish Pat Patton.

Gould’s style was always a mixture of the realistic and the cartoonish. You can see that in the characters of Dick Tracy and Pat Patton. Dick Tracy looks like a real person. Okay, a very square-jawed real person. But he’s realistically rendered. Pat Patton is clearly a cartoon character, although he gets more realistic looking as the strip goes on. This mixture of realism and cartoons carries over into the tone of the strip. You have this intense, violent realism, and at the same time, you’ve got these grotesque villains that look positively nightmarish. And this largely goes unremarked upon. No one in the strip is saying, “Ye Gods, Tracy, why do we always get the ugliest criminals in our city?” Indeed, most of the villains themselves don’t seem to be aware of their own hideousness. 

Dick Tracy during the space age, 1964. Personally, I think giant escargot from Moon Valley sounds pretty gross.

Maeder covers the first twenty years of Dick Tracy, from 1931-1951, in great detail. The remaining 26 years occupy much less space in the book. Maeder is very critical of the “Moon Period” or “Space Period” of Dick Tracy, which preoccupied Gould through the 1960’s. But this also shows that Maeder has opinions of his own and isn’t just blindly writing about how great every single year of the strip was. To sum up the “Moon Period,” it began when industrialist Diet Smith, whose company had invented Tracy’s famous 2-way wrist radio in 1946, invented a Space Coupe in 1962. The Space Coupe, which used magnetism, could travel around the world in a matter of minutes. Eventually, the Space Coupe went to the moon, which was populated by human-looking aliens. Dick Tracy’s adopted son Junior ended up marrying Moon Maid, the daughter of the moon governor. The Moon Period was a very bold choice for Gould to make, as he took what was basically a gritty, urban crime procedural, albeit with a highly eccentric cast of characters, and turned it into a sci-fi strip. None of the Moon Period stories were reprinted in the Dick Tracy anthologies that I read, so I confess to being quite ignorant about it. 

Destroying Mr. Intro, 1968.

However, I admire how Chester Gould went all in on the Moon Period. It was a bold gamble to make, and one that ended up costing him a lot of readers, as newspapers started dropping the strip. From 1960 to 1974, the number of newspapers carrying Dick Tracy went from 550 to 375. (p.199) More and more stories revolved around criminals hijacking the Space Coupe, and in one story from 1968, Tracy vaporized a criminal with a laser. “The wedded atom and laser deliver total finality,” the narration thundered. Where could you go after that? Maeder writes of the Moon Period, “Dick Tracy had obviously gone mad.” (p.198)

The moon stories receded after Apollo 11 landed in 1969, and Tracy returned to being a mostly Earth-bound detective. I find this something of a curious choice to make. People knew that Dick Tracy was incorporating elements of science fiction—I doubt that after Apollo 11 landed, anyone was shouting “Chester Gould lied to us! There’s no race of moon people living in Moon Valley! What a fraud!” As Gould was usually right in his future predictions—the 2-way wrist radio, the rise of closed-circuit television, which had first appeared in the strip in 1941—this was one time when Gould had for once imagined more than was actually discovered. 

Dick Tracy, the later years: December 31, 1975. It's not every day you hear the word milksop.

During the 1970’s, the strip got more political, as Gould got more heavy-handed in his criticism of the rights of the accused. Maeder reprints some of the sample questions the characters posed during the 1970’s: Lizz the policewoman: “Have the courts become an ally of the underworld?” Sam Catchem: “What chance has law enforcement got in today’s judicial climate?” and Dick Tracy himself mused on December 31, 1975: “With the milksop backing a cop gets, should he quit his profession?” 

It’s not really that surprising that Chester Gould held such views. After all, he was literally working in a black-and-white world. In Chester Gould’s world, Dick Tracy was always right, and the criminals were always wrong and guilty. Of course, in the real world it’s more complicated than that. 

Gould finally retired from Dick Tracy in late 1977, turning the strip over to mystery novelist Max Allan Collins, and his longtime assistant Rick Fletcher. Maeder writes that in all the years Fletcher assisted the old man, “Gould had never once permitted Fletcher to touch Dick Tracy himself.” (p.210) Dick Tracy is still around today, written by Mike Curtis and illustrated by Joe Staton. The strip that Chester Gould created all those years ago has been written and drawn by other people for 42 years now, and there’s no ending in sight. 

Maeder’s book covers the post-Gould years in just a few pages. Even though Dick Tracy the Official Biography is almost 30 years old, it’s still the most complete history of Dick Tracy out there.