by Otto Penzler
He is well known and trusted by the criminal elements in Miami, who respect his closemouthed integrity and are willing to pass on information not available to the police.
He depends on no special gadgets or devices such as James Bond uses, depending on his fists and an occasional handgun to carry him through.
On all of his cases, I try to give the reader exactly the same facts and information as Shayne possesses at any one time.
That just about sums up Michael Shayne as he has been depicted in sixty-odd books.
Virgil Tibbs
John Ball
IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT won the Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America as the best first novel of 1965. It introduced Virgil Tibbs, a homicide detective with the Pasadena, California, Police Department, who has subsequently appeared in four additional novels and three motion pictures. He is the most important black detective in mystery fiction but, ironically, in the decade of Black Power, Black Militants, Black Panthers and other shibboleths of racial consciousness and pride, Tibbs prefers the word “Negro,” feeling that it has its own dignity. If the truth be known, he prefers not to think in terms of race at all, generally regarding himself and others simply as people, ignoring the question of color and race as often as possible. It works well for him, gaining him the respect and affection of virtually all who come in contact with him—except the bad guys. He is determined and relentless, employing a thorough knowledge of police procedure in his pursuit of criminals. He is also not above using physical force when there is no alternative. As a student of both karate and the advanced martial art of aikido, Tibbs does not often finish second-best.
John Ball, formerly a pilot, music critic, newspaper columnist, broadcaster, science lecturer, and public relations director for an aerospace institute, now devotes his full time to writing, collecting jade, studying Oriental culture, and practicing the martial arts. He is the Board Chairman of The Mystery Library project of the University of California, San Diego Extension, and editor of its introductory publication, The Mystery Story. The 66-year-old author lives in Encino, California.
Virgil Tibbs
by John Ball
MRS. DIANE STONE, SECRETARY to Chief Robert McGowan of the Pasadena Police Department, was on the phone. “The chief has approved the release to you of the details concerning the Morales murder,” she told me. “He has authorized you to go ahead with it at any time, if you want to.”
Of course I wanted to: the unraveling of the case via the patient, intelligent investigation work of the department in general, and Virgil Tibbs in particular, would need no embellishment in the telling. As I always do in such instances, I called Virgil and suggested a meeting. Two nights later we sat down to dine together in one of Pasadena’s very fine restaurants.
The atmosphere was conducive for the conversation to follow despite the fact that the lights were so dim the menus should have been offered in Braille. By the time that the main course had been put in front of us we had gone over the Morales case in detail and Virgil had filled me in on several points which had not previously been made public. As always, I agreed to publish nothing until the department had read the manuscript and had given it an official approval. This procedure helped to eliminate possible errors and also made sure that I had not unintentionally included information which was still confidential.
“When did you first know that it was murder?” I asked.
“When I found that the TV set was tuned to the wrong channel,” Tibbs answered. “The UCLA basketball game had been on at the time of Morales’s death. That appeared all right on the surface, but when I checked on the point, I learned that he had no interest at all in basketball and didn’t understand the game. A show that he was known to watch regularly was on another channel at the same time, so something was obviously wrong.”
The waitress brought ice tea and I stirred my glass. “I have a letter from Otto Penzler,” I said.
Virgil nodded recognition. “The co-author with Steinbrunner of the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection? I have a copy.”
“Otto has asked me for a piece about your background. How much may I tell him?”
I should insert a footnote here. Virgil Tibbs is a basically quiet, sometimes almost self-effacing man. He is genuinely modest. He has mentioned to me more than once that my accounts of some of his cases have proved somewhat embarrassing to him. However, Chief McGowan feels that these books help to explain the police function to the citizenry at large and to show how modern, enlightened police departments function. The outcome of that difference of opinion is predictable.
“I know that you have McGowan behind you on this,” Tibbs said. “Otherwise I’d ask you to drop it, our personal friendship aside. All right: I was born in the Deep South as you know. I was about five, as I recall, when my father sat down with me and on a fine spring afternoon explained that we were Negroes and therefore I could expect to face prejudice, dislike, distrust, and even hatred during all of my life. It was the greatest shock I have ever known; I lay awake all that night wondering why God had made me different when I hadn’t asked Him to. When I finally got control of myself, I began to understand some things I had already noticed.
“Then Dad had another talk with me. He explained that things were getting better, slowly but definitely. His great hope for me was that I would have some opportunities, particularly in education, that had been denied to him. He spoke of Dr. Carver, Walter White, John Hammond, and other influential people who were helping. This is before Ralph Bunche and Martin Luther King became prominent, of course.”
The attractive waitress came and refilled Virgil’s coffee cup. Her pleasant manner attested that times had indeed changed, and for her as well: she was Korean-American.
“When I was about seventeen,” Virgil continued, “one of my friends was murdered—because of his color. When that happened I didn’t rant and rave, but I did feel a terrible determination. I made up my mind that if I ever could, I would try to do what I could to stop such senseless violence and to deal with those who were responsible for it.”
“You certainly accomplished that,” I noted. “You’ve already taken a number of murderers out of circulation. Not to mention drug dealers and the like. But please go on.”
Tibbs ate a little before he continued. I knew that I was putting him over the hurdles, exhuming some painful memories in his mind, but he has the intelligence to overcome such distractions.
“I came to California and managed to get into the university. I worked my way through, washing dishes, doing some janitor work, shampooing cars, and whatever else I could find. I took up social sciences principally, and other subjects that might prepare me for my goal. I wanted to be a policeman.”
As he ate a little more, I paid attention to my own plate and said nothing. I knew that he would continue when he was ready.
“When I was still a freshman I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to make the weight requirements; I was quite thin. One day some members of the All-America Karate Federation gave a demonstration on campus. I was tremendously impressed and went down to see about lessons. I had very little extra money and wanted to find out if I could work out my tuition in some way. John, I think that was the first time in my life that I met a group of people, talked with them, and was never conscious of the fact that we had different ethnic origins. Most of them were Japanese, of course, and they understood. They gave me a scholarship. Two years later I was chosen for a special class; it was taught at first by George Takahashi, then, later, by Master Nishiyama himself. You know his standing.”
“The best in the world,” I commented.
“Believe it,” Tibbs said. “What he did to us I don’t think I could live through again, but I reached the brown belt level and went into competition under his direction. The art suited me; physically and mentally I responded to its disciplines and the things that we were taught. Nine years after the first day that I walked in, Nishiyama gave me my black belt.
; “That’s about it, John. I graduated, took my degree, and then looked for a police department where a Negro applicant would be acceptable. Pasadena was having an examination and I took it.”
The girl came again, charmed us both with a smile, and took away the dinner plates. Virgil had some more coffee.
“Is that enough?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I answered. “The rest is pretty well known.”
“One thing,” Virgil added. “You can put this in for me, if you want to. If people want to call me black I don’t mind, but I prefer something else. My first choice is to have my origins ignored, and within the department, that’s the way that it is. I don’t like the idea of sorting people out by colors; if I called Jim Lonetree ‘red,’ he’d probably slug me. And if anybody called my partner, Bob Nakamura, ‘yellow,’ I’d resent it very much. If I have to be classified, then call me a Negro. It’s a dignified, proud word—my father taught me that.”
I signaled for the check. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll pass this on to Otto, and let him take it from there.”
We stopped together in the parking lot outside before we said good-night. Tibbs looked around him, taking in the pinpointed sky overhead and then the clusters of vehicles that were parked in orderly rows. As he did so I looked at my friend again. Still in his thirties, five feet nine, weight not a great deal over a hundred and sixty. Although I was dressed informally, he had on a subdued Italian silk suit and a tie that had come from one of the best shops. Despite his dark complexion, his features were aquiline in their molding; his nose was straight and well defined, his lips were slightly on the thin side. At one time I had suspected that his heritage might be mixed, but he had denied that. He had known all four of his grandparents and there had been no question of their origins.
“There’s something I wish you would put into your story,” he said, breaking the silence. “So many people overlook it. Police work is a team effort, from relatively simple matters up to major investigations. We don’t have any room for prima donnas, and none of us work in a vacuum.
“It’s a ceaseless war that we’re engaged in, and some of the people we fight for, and take our chances for in some pretty dangerous situations, hate our guts in return for what we do.”
“I know it,” I said.
We shook hands and parted, leaving in our respective cars. I hit the westbound freeway and headed back for Encino.
Fifteen minutes out of Pasadena I tuned the radio to the all-news station to find out what, if anything, was going on. Or, more properly, what was going on that had been made public. The two are seldom if ever the same. After a few minutes the announcer broke into the steady flow of his edited copy to air something that had just come in. A body had been found in an alley in the western section of Pasadena, where most of the thrift shops were congregated.
I was going home for what remained of an essentially quiet evening. The body could be an OD, an alcohol pass-out, or even natural causes. But there was, of course, the possibility of foul play, a very old and time-worn expression that could be compressed into the single fatal word murder.
Before long I would be comfortable and deep in the pages of a good book. Virgil Tibbs might not have that privilege, much as I knew he would value it. If indeed it was murder, then in all probability he was already back at work.
Dick Tracy
Chester Gould
THERE ARE BUT TWO claimants to the title of most famous detective in the world—Sherlock Holmes and Dick Tracy. Both have added their names to the language as virtual synonyms for intelligent, relentless, effective crimefighters. It is logical, then, to learn that Chester Gould, the cartoonist who created Dick Tracy, is an ardent fan of the illustrious English detective and drew his cartoon character to resemble him.
The success of the Dick Tracy strip exceeded the wildest hopes and speculations of everyone involved with its creation. Beginning modestly with the Chicago Tribune syndicate in 1931, the strip today is syndicated throughout the world to some 800 newspapers with a readership exceeding 100 million.
Although he is 77 years old, Chester Gould continues to develop the plots of the Dick Tracy series, and he draws the characters himself. Another artist, Rick Fletcher, fills in the backgrounds; Gould’s late brother Ray did the lettering. Chester Gould has never missed a deadline and has never run out of ideas. (He does confess that he runs out of ideas every week, but he manages to pull himself out of a seemingly hopeless hole just in time to meet his deadlines.)
Among Mr. Gould’s most notable contributions to the idiom of the American language, aside from the name of his detective—and characters as famous as “The Mole,” “The Brow,” and “Flattop”—are two of Dick Tracy’s philosophical saws: “Little crimes lead to big crimes,” and “Crime does not pay.” Chester Gould still lives and works in Woodstock, Illinois.
Dick Tracy
by Chester Gould
IN THE 1920S, THE United States was bleeding, literally and figuratively, through the dark, dry days of the Prohibition era. Illegal bootlegging activities, which had begun quickly but modestly after the Volstead Act was passed, became more and more overt with each passing month. The rate of related crimes and every type of terrible violence which accompanies them spread like the relentless cancer it was. Innocent people, who at first believed they were simply taking the path of least resistance by offering no objection to the criminal activities taking place all around them, were soon caught in a hopeless tangle of fear. They were frightened by the threats of rival underworld gangs to each other. As the wealth and power of the mobs mushroomed, the battle for law and order seemed beyond prayer. Criminals had corrupted not only those victims who closed their eyes to the bootlegging, robbery, extortion, and murder occurring on every side, but also the very people being paid to protect the decent, law-abiding citizens who were powerless on their own. Policemen, lawyers, judges, and politicians all were added to the payrolls of the mobs, and the last small chance for justice appeared doomed forever.
The police, and the rest of the law-enforcement community, simply were not doing the job. Something had to be done; someone had to do it. That is when Dick Tracy arrived on the scene—the modern equivalent of a knight in shining armor on his white stallion. The country didn’t need a detective to sit in an armchair and theorize about crime and criminals. It didn’t need a policeman to calmly and rationally discuss the situation with thugs. It needed someone who was as tough as the gangsters were, who would use some of their own methods, if necessary, to counteract their menace. It needed someone who would physically pursue crooks and shoot them dead, right on the spot, if that was the only effective method of ridding society of their foul presence. Dick Tracy was that man.
It was during these years that I attended Northwestern University in Chicago—the very heartland of gangster-dom—and supported myself by doing free-lance cartooning and commercial artwork. Wanting to make my career in that area, I submitted cartoon strips to Captain Joseph Medill Patterson of the Chicago Tribune Syndicate. Although I submitted countless ideas from 1921 through 1931, nothing seemed to work.
Then I began to think about the times, about the state of the world, and figured I might as well try something that no cartoonist had ever attempted before—a strip about a real crimefighter who dealt with criminal activity in a realistic way. Most cartoon strips were comics—that is, they were funny, or tried to be, anyway. Those which had dealt with crime at all generally had hinted at the violence, letting it occur offstage, so to speak. But I thought killing and robbing and shooting and kidnapping and all the other acts of violence needed a realistic counteraction by the forces of law. I wanted to portray that in my strip. I thought people could understand that approach, and that type of detective in those situations, and truly make the strip a part of their experience, a part of their lives.
Although the country was in the midst of the Depression, with families starving and jobs as rare as honest politicians, crime was on the minds of the vast majorit
y of the population. In 1931, a poll was taken to determine the “paramount problems” facing the United States and “Prohibition” was ranked first, “Administration of Justice” was second, and “Lawlessness” third. Clearly, the American public was concerned about the breakdown of respect for the law. It seemed to me that if the real-life police couldn’t do the job of restoring confidence in the law, and if they couldn’t go out and catch the gangsters, I would create someone who could.
So, after submitting more than forty ideas to Captain Patterson, I sent him six strips with this kind of straightforward, hard-hitting, tough detective. He was called “Plainclothes Tracy.” Patterson liked the idea and he liked the detective, but he didn’t like the name very much—too long, he said. Since detectives were called “dicks” in those days, especially in the “hard-boiled” language of the underworld and even more especially in the detective stories of the time, he suggested “Dick Tracy” as a name. It stuck.
Although a lot of people think of Tracy as a purely two-fisted cop, he is actually very cerebral and solves more cases with his brains than he does with his fists. Because of this intellectual capacity, and because Sherlock Holmes is the greatest detective of them all, I decided to make Tracy look like Holmes: straight aquiline nose, square chin, generally sharp features.
When Captain Patterson accepted the idea of Dick Tracy, he decided to waste no time in getting it off the ground. He gave me only two weeks in which to prepare the first couple of weeks’ worth of strips. The initial story line (suggested by Captain Patterson, by the way) saw Dick as just a citizen, “an ordinary young fellow.” It is in the middle of his proposal to Tess Trueheart that thugs break into her home and try to rob the life savings of her father. When he resists, Mr. Trueheart, a kindly and hardworking grocer, is shot to death. His wife suffers a breakdown and must be taken to a hospital and his daughter Tess is kidnapped. Tracy, although not a member of the police department, volunteers his services to the force. He pursues the hoodlums for approximately a month, finally nabbing them and their boss—“Mr. Big.” Appointed to the plainclothes squad of the city police force, he has remained there ever since. In the four serial films about him, curiously enough, he is portrayed as a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.