Comic Strip Review: Dick Tracy His Greatest Cases #1: Pruneface by Chester Gould
As a popular and long-running comic strip, Dick Tracy has had quite a few collections over the years. This paperback is from a 1970s series that collected particularly favorite plotlines from past years.
It’s 1942, and America is at war. Police detective Dick Tracy has been out in the sticks for a while, tracking down the criminal sound effects man and murderer Tiger Lilly and his gang. He and his kid sidekick Junior have been assisted by amputee nurse Frizzletop, who lost an arm in the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. The trio are heading back into the big city in an automobile owned by local police officer Dennis O’Copper.
The travelers find themselves stuck behind a laundry truck with an improperly fastened cargo, and a roller towel lands on the windshield, causing the car to crash. Since this is a lonely country road with normally little traffic, and night is falling, Tracy and company decide to take refuge in a nearby barn until morning.
Just as Junior is about to fall asleep, he feels something grab his ankle and pull him down through a trapdoor. It turns out there’s a hidden laboratory below the barn, and the man who grabbed Junior is now dead. From the peculiar odor of the room, it’s obvious that poison gas was used on him.
Back at the highway, the crimebusters meet the men from the laundry truck who’d come back to collect their lost towels. No time for recriminations, though, Tracy needs them to contact the Highway Patrol. By a twist of fate, the dead man is in fact George Bullet, the head of the Highway Patrol and one of the most popular cops in the area. Dick has the truckers take him and the corpse to the city while Junior and Frizzletop are assigned to watch the barn in case the killer returns.
Junior, never one to stand still, searches the lab with Frizzletop; it’s been mostly stripped, but they do find a piece of paper with chemical formulae and a phone number on it. In the city, Tracy calls the deceased man’s next of kin, son Cal Bullet to come down to the station. When the two younger crimebusters show up, Cal contrives to burn the piece of paper “accidentally” but this just confirms Dick’s suspicions.
Junior figures out a way to read the burnt paper, while Tracy tracks down other leads (including an illegal search of the Bullet home. Shh, no one tell Internal Affairs.) The phone number turns out to be for the Request Juke Box Company. The service has you put in your nickel, then talk to the disk jockey who plays your request. (We also see this in the Charlie Chan movie The Shanghai Cobra.) That disc jockey, Clara is secretly part of the Axis spy network in the city, using this method to collect and pass messages.
Frizzletop turns out to be a skilled voice mimic, so she replaces Clara to trick Cal into going to the location of his boss, the mysterious “Boche.” Boche turns out to be Pruneface (real name unknown), who’s called that because of his weirdly wrinkly facial skin. Pruneface immediately realizes that Cal has betrayed his location, and punishes his underling with his own lethal gas that will soon reach Dick Tracy who’s trapped in the basement.
The rest of the story is Pruneface narrowly escaping capture, then starting his next plan to weaken America’s war readiness, a couple of times. It ends with him in a snowdrift, bleeding out in subzero weather and suffering severe frostbite.
Despite his precarious medical condition at the end, and Mrs. Pruneface showing up later to take revenge for his supposed death, the strip never actually said he was dead, and much later the Nazi spy showed up several times before achieving final death.
This is indeed a classic Dick Tracy storyline, a couple of remarkable coincidences leading to the discovery of a crime, then that initial investigation widening into a hunt for a colorful criminal. There’s some interesting architecture and gimmicks, several murders, and even a deathtrap thrown in.
Dick’s sweetheart Tess Trueheart and her mother help thwart one of Pruneface’s schemes, so that’s a fun interlude.
Content note: in addition to the usual grisly violence, a dog is killed.
This particular paperback might be hard to track down in good condition, so you might want to read one of the newer complete collections at your local library. (Or go through old newspaper archives there if one of your local papers carried the strip.) Recommended to crime fans.
