Dick Tracy Case Files #1: 88 Keyes (1943)

The cover of The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy: 1931-1951, first published in 1970.

The reason I got so intrigued by the comic strip Dick Tracy again this summer was because of a dream I had. The only thing I can remember about that dream was that I had a brief flash of the villain 88 Keyes. In my dream the image I had of 88 Keyes was closer to Mandy Patinkin’s portrayal of the character in the 1990 movie than how he looked in the comic strip. 

That scrap of a half-remembered dream then led me to rediscover my old Dick Tracy books, which were still in my Mom’s basement. I knew 88 Keyes’ story from the book The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy: 1931-1951, first published in 1970, and then reprinted in 1990 in order to capitalize on the movie. Unfortunately, The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy doesn’t include the Sunday strips, so there are awkward breaks in the story. You’re still able to piece the story together, because Chester Gould would inevitably offer a recap in Monday’s strip. Re-reading the 88 Keyes story reminded me how interesting Dick Tracy was, and the story has some themes that resonate along the whole history of the strip. 

88 Keyes’ storyline in Dick Tracy ran from April to July 1943. When we first see Keyes, he’s playing the piano at Club Joy, where Dick Tracy and Pat Patton are enjoying a meal. As soon as Tracy and Patton leave Club Joy, a murder occurs there. The millionaire A.B. Helmet is found stabbed in the chest with a steak knife. It turns out that 88 Keyes, along with his girl singer Jinny and an unnamed piano tuner, killed Helmet on orders from Helmet’s wife. This all comes to light thanks to some classic Dick Tracy scientific policework. While a lot of Dick Tracy focused on shoot-outs with tommy guns, and the detective repeatedly escaping elaborate deathtraps, the strip also focused intently on the less glamorous side of policework—the scientific gathering of clues and evidence. The scientific element of policework is one of the long-running themes of Dick Tracy. Chester Gould’s interest in the science behind police work was obviously very deep, as Dick Tracy is a mixture of the cerebral and the physical. 

88 Keyes tries to hide the evidence of his murder of Jinny inside his piano.

Using the acid method, Tracy’s sidekick Pat Patton can determine that the steak knife came from the Dove Club. At the Dove Club, they encounter the piano tuner, whom they had noticed at Club Joy. Tracy spots a grinding wheel in the tuner’s kit, takes the wheel without a search warrant, and through scientific tests, it’s determined that the wheel ground down the murder weapon. Meanwhile, 88 Keyes shoots Jinny dead when she listens in to his phone call to Helmet’s widow and learns that Keyes is double-crossing her. Keyes stuffs Jinny’s body in his piano and leaves town with the widow and her $200,000 of life insurance money. Tracy discovers the body, and this convinces the piano tuner to make a full confession of his crimes with Keyes. 

Mrs. Helmet, asleep as the Western Limited is about to plow into her. This wordless panel is a superb example of Chester Gould's artwork. It's tense and visually interesting.

Once the widow falls asleep in the car, Keyes decides to leave the car parked on the railroad tracks, in the path of the oncoming Western Limited train. Keyes then hops on the train, which is making its way back to the city. And then we get the racial stereotypes, in the form of two African American railroad porters, who are depicted with large lips and speaking the English all too common in racial stereotypes of that time. One porter says to the other, “But I’ve followed all de jive bands! I seen ‘em all when dey played de Palace. And I say dat man is 88 Keyes!” His co-worker replies, “Sho nuff!” It’s pretty cringeworthy stuff. And it made me think about how African Americans are portrayed in Dick Tracy. Which is to say that I can’t think of any major African American characters in Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. The Dick Tracy wiki page for African American characters is shockingly small. The only major African American character in the strip, detective Lee Ebony, was introduced in 1980, after Gould no longer wrote or drew it. To my knowledge, Chester Gould never had Dick Tracy taking on an African American criminal. The positive spin on that is Gould didn’t create African American villains who were crude stereotypes. The negative spin is that Gould didn’t include African Americans at all in his fictional universe—even as bystanders, innocent victims, police officers, etc. 

The African American railroad porters. *Cringe*

Gould does give the porter who recognizes Keyes a great phrase when he walks up to Keyes and says, “Being an ardent follower of your hot jive, Mr. 88 Keyes, I sho’ would be honored with yo’ autograph.” The phrase “ardent follower of your hot jive” just has a beautiful ring to it. I want someone to tell me they’re an ardent follower of my hot jive. Keyes tells the porter that he’s not 88 Keyes, and the porter is dumbfounded. 

An in-joke: Chester Gould was born in Pawnee, Oklahoma.

However, during a stop at a small town, the train gets the evening papers that have 88 Keyes’ face splashed all over the front page. (These small-town papers sure work fast!) The headline blares “88 Keyes sought after crash,” proving that it’s not the smartest idea to commit gratuitous murders when you’re already a famous bandleader. 

Keyes escapes at the train station in the city, and Tracy pursues him onto the roof. Keyes exchanges gunfire with Tracy and gets away to the roof of the building next door, an employment agency. Keyes gives them an alias and is sent out on a bus to the country to work on a farm. That’s pretty funny, since Keyes is very obviously a city slicker, with his slicked-back hair, omnipresent cigarette, and fancy clothes. This also highlights an actual issue during World War II, the shortage of farm workers, due to so many young men joining the military. Which makes me wonder, why isn’t 88 Keyes in the military? He’s such a heel, he probably lied to his draft board and cheated his way out of service.

Placed at the Wheaten farm, Keyes is totally out of his element. One of the funnier days in the storyline occurs when Keyes asks farmer Wheaten about his farm, and Wheaten goes on with several facts about the cows on his farm. (“All brown swiss…no mastitis.”) Keyes has no idea what Wheaten is talking about and says, “Yeah? That sounds pretty good, pop. But what about your cows?” Farmer Wheaten is less than thrilled with Keyes’ incompetence as a farmhand, but the Wheaten’s adolescent daughter Nellie is instantly smitten with Keyes after he plays the piano for her. 

88 Keyes plays "Brazil" for Nellie. Another wordless Gould panel that tells us a lot of visual information. We know from the flaming letters that Keyes is playing a passionate, romantic piece of music. We can see the look of admiration on Nellie's face, and the disapproving looks from her family, standing in the doorway.

Dick Tracy thinks he’s bungled the case, as he has no idea where Keyes is. Then Tracy catches a break. Keyes is tearing up his Musicians’ Union card and the torn pieces accidentally fall into a milk can. In true Dick Tracy scientific fashion, the milk company rejects the can of milk, and the milk inspectors piece together Keyes’ card and promptly call Dick Tracy. Dick Tracy is oftentimes reliant on these observant civilians who aid the police in their searches. 

Nellie is unable to hide her feelings for "Mr. Smith."

When Tracy shows up at the Wheaten farm, Keyes plays off Nellie’s affection for him, tells her a false story about being set up by criminals, and convinces her to hide him from the cops. She tells him to hide in the corn shredder, where he goes undetected by Tracy and the police. Nellie gives Keyes the keys (hah!) to her Dad’s car so he can make a getaway. Nellie then hides in the backseat so she can run away with the man she thinks is “Mr. Smith.” Keyes gets impatient and makes a huge blunder when he leaves the farm before the police do, so Dick Tracy sees him drive off and quickly takes off in hot pursuit. 

That feeling when you tell your crush how you feel, but he's clearly more interested in the gas rationing coupons.

Poor Nellie is one of those innocent people who, in the Dick Tracy universe, get unwittingly caught up with criminals. Sometimes they escape with their lives, and sometimes they don’t. Nellie helps Keyes evade the police pursuit and convinces him to buy her boy’s clothes, so she’ll be disguised. Completely lovestruck, and probably getting a serious adrenaline high from disobeying her parents, Nellie blabs on about she’ll make Mr. Smith “a good wife.” Which is funny, and sad, and a little disturbing all at the same time. It’s never explicitly stated how old Nellie is, but it’s clear that she’s underage, so my guess is that she’s supposed to be 14 or 15. 

When Nellie and Keyes stop for gas, they meet Red Bluff, a sailor who recognizes Nellie. She tells Red that “Mr. Smith” is her fiancée. I’m sure Red Bluff is wondering what the hell is going on, since Nellie’s dressed as a boy and says she’s engaged to a much older man. Like everyone else, Red recognizes Keyes from “a Navy show,” and blackmails Keyes into taking him along with them. Red says he needs a change of clothes, and so Keyes robs a general store. When Nellie sees Keyes training a gun on the clerk, she realizes the horrible mistake she’s made and that “Mr. Smith” is really a criminal. Overcome with guilt, she determines to crash the car and kill them all. She hits a pig in the road and the car is wrecked. Keyes and Red run away, leaving Nellie behind at the car. Tracy quickly comes upon the scene and Nellie tells him everything she knows. 

88 Keyes meets his end. Throughout the run of the strip there were always reader complaints about how violent it was.

Keyes shoots Red and leaves him in a stream, continuing on as a solo act. Keyes then waits by the railroad tracks for a freight train to come by. But he soon hears the cops that have followed his trail. He hides in a tool shed by the railroad tracks. When Dick Tracy climbs up the bank from the stream to the railroad track, he spies the shed, notices the lock has been broken, and figures out Keyes must be inside. He calls on Keyes to surrender, and when he gets no response, he fires an “x” pattern in the shed with his tommy gun and cuts down 88 Keyes. Tracy grimly says, “It was the only way.”

Dick Tracy offers some words of wisdom, before kissing Nellie goodbye.

Nellie gets a stern talking-to from her parents, but she has fortunately survived her encounter with 88 Keyes. She was probably lucky that she wrecked the car when she did, as Keyes showed a pretty low regard for the lives of anyone around him. Tracy drives back to the Wheaten farm to check on Nellie. He tells her that “those glamour boys aren’t nearly what they’re cracked up to be.” Tracy then gives her a kiss on her forehead, which might not have been the smartest thing to do, given the fact that she’s a romantic and impressionable young girl, and the final panel shows Nellie with hearts surrounding her speech bubble. Well, better that she should have a crush on Dick Tracy than 88 Keyes. 

88 Keyes isn’t as frightening a villain as some of the other classic 1940’s Dick Tracy characters. Keyes doesn’t submit Tracy to an elaborate deathtrap, and indeed, he has very little direct contact with Dick Tracy at all. While you might presume that a slick-dressing nightclub pianist might not make the most hardened of criminals, 88 Keyes proved that he was dangerously homicidal. Keyes quickly disposes of anyone who stands in his way: the girl singer Jinny, his paramour Mrs. Helmet, and Red Bluff. So how did he go from nightclub pianist to cool-eyed killer? It’s a surprising transformation. The piano tuner reveals to the police that the Helmet murder was the fourth murder that he, Jinny, and Keyes had committed. Presumably all four murders worked the same way the Helmet killing did, with the piano tuner doing the actual killing while Jinny and Keyes were on the bandstand, providing a distraction. Still, that’s three people that 88 Keyes personally killed, and four more people whose murders he was involved in. That’s a hefty body count for an Eddy Duchin-type to accomplish. 

What’s also intriguing about 88 Keyes is that it’s clear from the strip that he’s a famous person. We know that he makes records, as Tracy goes to the record store to buy all the records Keyes solos on, he’s performed at Navy shows, and he’s recognized by railway porters. It seems like he has a thriving musical career. So why then did he turn to a life of crime? Was he really that hard up for money? Of course, at some point the crimes just continue so that no one finds out about his earlier crimes and killings. Crime always begets more crime in the world of Dick Tracy, and 88 Keyes is neither the first nor the last criminal to just dig himself deeper and deeper. 

Another question, that I’ll admit never occurred to me as I was re-reading the story, but that I only thought about in hindsight: What happens to the $200,000? As the train crashes into Mrs. Helmet’s car, Keyes says he has it in his pocket, which seems unlikely, considering what a large sum of money it is. (When Breathless Mahoney gets $50,000 two years later, it fills a giant knitting bag.) And then the $200,000 is simply never referred to again. Keyes is nervous about people finding his identification cards when he’s on the Wheaten farm, but he never mentions hiding the money. If Keyes still had the money, then why did he needlessly stick up the general store? It seems clear that the stickup is in the plot so Nellie can observe 88’s criminal behavior firsthand and understand that she’s made a mistake. 

The 88 Keyes story is a great example of Gould’s propulsive storytelling. You just go along for the ride, as Gould leads you from one thrill to another. Gould basically wrote the story for Dick Tracy as he went along, figuring that if he didn’t know where he was going, the reader’s interest would always be kept as well. There’s certainly some truth in this, and the Keyes story highlights the strengths and weaknesses of this style. The strength of the style is that it’s very suspenseful, and it never seems obvious where the storyline is going. The weakness of the style is that sometimes loose ends, like the $200,000, never get resolved. 

The 88 Keyes storyline is an excellent example of Dick Tracy during a classic period of the strip. Dick Tracy fit the violent world of the 1930’s and 1940’s so well. It captured the zeitgeist of those years, when the world seemed to be filled with grotesque gangsters.