The Great Detectives

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Tracy doesn’t age much in the strip, although many of the other characters do. On Christmas Day, 1949 (eighteen years after his proposal), Dick marries the still young and beautiful Tess Trueheart, and two years later they have a little blond daughter, Bonnie Braids.

  In addition to being a cerebral and physical detective, depending upon what each situation calls for, Dick Tracy also has the good sense to use the most modern techniques and equipment that science has managed to develop. Sometimes, in fact, he uses technological devices that real-life police can’t use because they haven’t been invented yet. These devices are not far-out gadgetry; they are merely logical extensions of currently available equipment or concepts.

  When Tracy began using the atom-powered two-way wrist radio back in 1946, it was science fiction. Today, of course, in its considerably altered form, it is science fact. He also used a crude type of “voice print” called a “Voice-O-Graf” long before it became one of crime detection’s most valuable tools, and he was the first policeman to use closed-circuit television as a burglar alarm and as a silent, unseen monitor of potential crime areas. Called “teleguard” then, today it is one of the most frequently used and effective methods of crime prevention.

  Tracy spends a great deal of time in the police lab, where he has a reputation for knowing how to use much of the complex paraphernalia of the modern laboratory: microscopes, lie detectors, X-ray and telescopic cameras, and other electronic equipment. He also boasts a good working knowledge of chemistry, ballistics, fingerprinting, psychology, and handwriting analysis.

  In the 1950s, Dick Tracy and his associates became involved in more areas that were considered science fiction, most notably the trip to the moon and the meeting with the Moon-Maid. Some people thought this was pretty farfetched, but look at what has happened since then. Sure, there was no Moon-Maid when we landed on the moon, but the scientific achievement of making the lunar landing is now an old story. And many of the other things portrayed in those strips will come to pass—the same kind of moon stations that Diet Smith had, for instance. And there is no doubt that those stations will have to be protected—by armed forces, in all likelihood—and so will everything else that we want to keep.

  On more traditional cases, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, Tracy has combatted an extraordinary rogue’s gallery. The villains in his adventures are often considered ugly, and they are, but they are far more ugly on the inside. All murderers are ugly, regardless of their visage. But when someone reads a Dick Tracy comic strip, there is never a question or doubt about who the bad guy is. The villains are vicious, cruel, and ugly people, and neither Tracy nor I (nor readers) feels the slightest remorse when they get what’s coming to them.

  Mumbles (he is called that even by his friends) has a member of his gang always with him to translate his impeded speech to others. When he says, “Whrz acob?” he has actually said, “Where’s the cop?” Perhaps not surprisingly, he is a singer. His girl friend’s name (she fingers him when she learns he is a crook) is Kiss Andtel.

  Flattop, a professional killer, is imported by a gang of black marketeers to “hit” Tracy. Because of his short, wide head, he is named for the descriptive jargon used for the aircraft carriers that were so much in the news at that time.

  The “Blank” is a faceless criminal who rescues Dick Tracy’s adopted son, Junior, but murders former members of his own gang in various bizarre ways. His real name is Frank Redrum (murder spelled backwards), a former convict believed killed in a prison escape but who actually managed to elude the law. At the end of his adventure, the face, which has no eyes, nose or mouth, is revealed to be a piece of flesh-colored cheesecloth glued over his real face.

  The Mole, with the face of a huge rodent, lives in an underground sewer and provides a hideout for other crooks. Food is secretly delivered each day, he has dug a tunnel in which he and his occasional guests can walk and exercise, and he has little need (or, evidently, desire) to surface. Having once promised former members of his gang a free hideout for life, he prefers to eliminate them, one by one, taking their money. When captured, he says, “It was fun.”

  Other villains include the Brow, a spy whose tall forehead has half a dozen highly prominent ridges. Littleface Finny, whose oversized head has a huge forehead and large cheeks, has eyes, nose and mouth squeezed into a tiny area in the middle of his face. When he is forced to spend a night in a deep freeze, he gets frostbitten and must have his ears amputated—just before Tracy nabs him. Pear Shape gets his sobriquet not from the shape of his head or face, but of his entire body. He is a swindler in the weight-reducing business. Shaky is nervous. Pruneface looks as if he had a face made of wax which has been too long in the sun; his wife is equally unattractive. B.B. Eyes, a tire bootlegger, appears to be in a perpetual squint with two tiny dots to reveal the location of his eyes.

  Some of Tracy’s friends and associates have been in the strip since its inception and new ones appear from time to time while others fall by the wayside. Some change more quickly than others, following a natural aging process, while others change hardly at all.

  When Tracy joined the force, his superior was Chief Brandon, a good, competent, and honorable man. When Brilliant, the young scientist who had invented the two-way wrist radio, is murdered, Chief Brandon blames himself, feeling that he had not provided enough protection to the threatened scientist. Although it was impossible for him to have prevented the killing, he resigns. Some years later, he reappears in the strip as the operator of a garden shop called “Lawn Order.”

  Tracy’s partner, and the man with the best sense of humor on the force, Pat Patton, takes over as the new chief. Dick was offered the job, of course, as befits the ace of the department, but he prefers to allow his friend to take the position because he likes to be on the street, fighting crime with his fists and gun as well as with his brain. Patton, by the way, loses most of that sense of humor when he takes the higher office because he thinks it inappropriate for a man at his level to make jokes.

  Tracy’s new partner is Sam Catchem, not so new after fifteen years.

  Early in their careers, Gravel Gertie and B.O. Plenty (the B.O. stands for Bob Oscar) are outlaws, but they reform and are living as itinerants until Tracy brings them together. They marry and have a daughter, Sparkle Plenty, who grows up to be a beautiful married woman herself (to cartoonist Vera Alldid).

  Junior, needless to say, has matured a good deal through the years. He, too, is married, with his own child, and is a responsible and valuable member of the police department, working as an artist.

  Liz has played a prominent role in the police procedure since she joined the force some years ago. She is one of the most necessary people in the department, constantly demonstrating the huge need for policewomen.

  You can have only one hero in a strip, or you lose your readers, but I think it’s important to keep some of the old familiar faces nearby. It is like having a family. You may not always want to be around them, but it’s nice to know they are there. It is this sense of comfortable familiarity that keeps readers coming back for more, and keeps them wanting to know who will do what to whom next. Dick Tracy is someone people have come to know down the years, and they care about him and his associates, just as they know and care about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and the sitting room at 221B Baker Street and Professor Moriarty.

  Much has been made of the fact that Tracy was one of the first “hard-boiled” detective heroes, and that he was perhaps the first of the American exponents of the “police procedural” style of combating crime. He simply realized he had to be realistic, and those methods and attitudes were the only way to effectively fight crime in the gangster era, just as they were the most effective method of fighting the war on espionage, and just as they are the most effective way of dealing with the rampant crime of today. It was a combination of the times—the Prohibition era—and my boyhood idolatry of Sherlock Holmes that made Dick Tracy the man he was in 1931—and the man he is today. And
the man he will always be.

  Inspector Van der Valk

  Nicolas Freeling

  INSPECTOR VAN DER VALK of the Amsterdam police department is unmistakably a creature of the twentieth century, with all its complexities and apparent paradoxes. Among the things he passionately hates are bureaucracy and bureaucrats; yet he is himself a member of that government officialdom. His politics are leftish. He loves his wife but has no aversion to enjoying other pretty women. Though considerable time has passed since be himself was young, he is especially attuned to the problems of young people. After ten years as an inspector on the police force of Amsterdam, he was made chief inspector of the Juvenile Brigade. A good cop, he nevertheless occasionally circumvents the rules and often employs bizarre methods to achieve success.

  After ten successful books (The King of the Rainy Country won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America as the best novel of 1966), Nicolas Freeling committed a shocking, if not unprecedented, act for an author: he killed his hero. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or Professor Moriarty, once threw Sherlock Holmes over a cliff at the Reichenbach Falls but resurrected him.) Dead for five years now, and much lamented, Van der Valk seems unlikely to have further adventures.

  Freeling’s first mystery, Love in Amsterdam, may have compensated in part for his once having been arrested for a theft he had not committed. Born in London, the 50-year-old author lived for a time in France, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and now resides again in Bas Rhin, France. His deep knowledge of that country is reflected in his several recent novels involving Inspector Henri Castang of the Police Judicaire.

  Inspector Van der Valk

  by Nicolas Freeling

  THE LEGEND RUNS THAT Alexandre Dumas came from his working room, the face distorted by tears, saying, “I have killed Porthos.” A version I find nearer reality runs, “I killed Porthos; it was a necessity.” But the tears are believable, for a character one has lived with for ten years is the writer’s closest kin, and this fictional deathbed is fratricide.

  Nobody found it easy to forgive me the death of Van der Valk. Editors with big reproachful eyes began planning (they are a cynical tribe) posthumous adventures; angry old ladies sputtered fiercely about my callousness. As though it were my fault … We speak of a character in fiction “being alive” and we mean just that. He obeys the rule of life, which is death. The professional police officer, and we tend to forget this, accepts that his life is more fragile than most, a fact that profoundly influences his manner of living. In fiction, to be sure, there are plenty of figures who could not possibly die, and go on interminably, even surviving their creators, but then they never were alive …

  Van der Valk is buried close to my home and I am reminded of him daily: I see him as vividly present and intensely alive. Which he is, for as long as one of his books is owned and re-read. Stendhal, who had small success during his lifetime, hoped only for one reader in a hundred years’ time. The man of course fills my room; he always did. Physically, to be sure, he was a solid presence. Large-boned, he took a size forty-five in shoes and left them sticking out for people to trip over. Big hands, too, with flat well-shaped nails, not always very clean, just as his shoes were not always polished: a job that bored him. Wide mouth in a heavy jaw, filled with large white teeth, and a harsh metallic voice which though quiet made itself heard anywhere. He could and did keep still when it was needed, with enviable concentration and a cop’s patience, but a low boredom-threshold led him to roam restlessly about the room; paperwork made him grunt and pick his nose.

  The nose too was large, reddened where he rubbed it and showing broken veins from drinking too much. Ears large and flat, with a good shape. Only the eyes were small, of a sharp electric blue, flat and hard, and could become frightening. He was of course a peasant, with the slyness and cunning one finds in backward rustic corners, but he became furious if one said so, being vain of his birth and upbringing in an earthy, crowded quarter of central Amsterdam. His father was a jobbing carpenter with a taste for fine joinery, and he could never withhold his respect from any man with skill in his hands.

  He was intensely Dutch, characteristically fond of crude personal remarks followed by a guffaw: obstinate, brutal, pragmatic, and given to lavatory humor. He did not have the unimaginative insensitivity: he acted it, but this was police protective coloring. He could be—like most people—cruel, vindictive, and petty, but never for long. A generous and open person, the quickest way to reach him was to show simplicity and spontaneity. Any show of self-importance, and he would take pains to arrange a banana skin beneath your feet.

  He loved form in things: he could always be captivated by a person, a building, a picture with a sense of form, and even a wash basin or a park bench that was well designed caught his eye and gave him pleasure. He was bored by sport, though it kept the beer at bay and speeded up metabolism. It was the shape and balance of a good slalom skier or an attacking out-half that excited him. He loved above all his French wife because she was so well designed.

  Arlette was his entire secret: he knew it and was fond of saying so. Of both his personal equilibrium and his professional career. It would be true also to say that he used her, with a Dutch sense of pragmatism: she was the sharpest and handiest of his tools. She disliked hearing details of police work—life was sordid enough as it was—but her judgments of persons, situations, hypotheses would be asked for, carefully heard, stored away, and thought about. She stretched the man, enlarged him, gave him suppleness where he was stiff and rigid. He was always a feminist, and a libber before the term was invented, and was forever saying how immeasurably police work would be improved, more competent as well as more human, by using women more. He was, too, one of those men who find women easier and more understanding to talk to than other men. It was amusing that Arlette had no wish whatever to be libbed: she took pride in her status as housewife, was as obstinate as he himself, and determinedly a “femme d’interieur.” She had few friends, and with them generally talked children and clothes. When she went out without him it was to concerts, for music was her passion, and on subscription evenings he was left ruthlessly in front of the television set. Her home was a fortress, and the fortress was for him; a large but shabby and old-fashioned flat, since they had only his pay to live on. He was known for not taking bribes. Not so much because of honesty, for he was dishonest in plenty of ways, saying bluntly that without dishonesty a cop could not function: independence was more precious. A bent cop can never get off the hook: take favors, and you will be asked for them.

  The fortress thus badly needed new curtains and new carpets. It was full of flowers, but most Dutch houses are (this is one of the nicest things about Holland). Arlette, being French, spent much more on food than on clothes. Dutch food is penurious in the extreme, and she came from the Var, where it isn’t much better … One can make good food only by taking much time and trouble, and she did both because he was a big man with a healthy appetite. Some people would find this stupid, even ignoble. Marriage seen as dinner-on-the-table, and doubtless plenty of rice-pudding sex to follow! (Certainly; Arlette was an intensely beddable woman.) Van der Valk would not have bothered arguing the point. Not that he ever cared much what opinion people formed of him, and least of all critics: one imbecile once called him a sexual fascist, at which he guffawed. The grub is good, he would say, paraphrasing Brecht; the ethics will be better as a consequence.

  Briefly, Arlette and a very closely knit family life made him what he was. He had his job; hers was him …

  They also had two children, both boys, and in later life, when these reached student age, they adopted a little girl. The books make small mention of the children, for the technical reason that children are very difficult to handle in telling a story. It should be realized that children, both his own and other people’s, were extremely important to Van der Valk.

  His beginning, eighteen years ago, sprang from my boredom with existing crime writers’ platitudes. I could not see any po
int or interest in a character (be it the English amateur, mannerisms-and-manservants, or the beat-up Cal-Flor eye; the species never flourished in Salt Lake City) who was no more than tired mechanical catalyzer of a denouement that stayed obvious no matter how many surprise twists it could be given. The whole business of crime writing rested upon a false premise: that it was a somehow inferior genre, not to be taken seriously. Was not the answer to present a crime tale that introduced people one could care about, with problems that were ours? In my youthful enthusiasm I overlooked the difficulties of overcoming nineteenth-century prejudice, in this as in other moral questions deeply rooted.

  The first and essential factor was a “detective” who would be a recognizable human being, a member of society, who worried about the children’s inability to pay attention in class and the cost of shoe repairs, and whose car would not start on foggy mornings. He would be a professional cop, because when we have a crime to contend with in the world we do not call Mr. Chose the philosophy don, or Viscount Machin: we scream for the despised fuzz. My man would be an officer, because he had some education and intelligence. Such a man would be a middle-grade career officer in a well-disciplined, unpolitical metropolitan police force. The city of Amsterdam fitted the case perfectly. The first detail was to find a name, for once a character has a name and address he is in business, defined, as it were, in length and breadth. I recalled an Officer of Justice, to give the public prosecutor his Dutch title, with whom I had once had a none too sympathetic meeting, and whose name was Van der Valk …