INTRODUCTION
Marty Greenberg again. The fifth time this year. But again, I asked for it. It was November 16 at another of SFWA's annual editor-publisher receptions. I was sitting with some of the mystery guys whod dropped by—Bob Randisi, Michael Seidman among them—when Heather Woods of Tor mentioned a Dick Tracy anthology in the works, deadline end of December so they could time its release with the Warren Beatty film next year.
I straightened in my chair. Dick Tracy? Who's editing it? She told me Max Allan Collins and Marty Greenberg. I was rolling on Reprisal, I was diddling with a story for Jeff Gelb's Shock Rock, and only six weeks left before the Tracy deadline. None of that mattered. I had to be in it.
In all the long history of dramatic comic strips, two titles stand head and shoulders above the rest. Little Orphan Annie is tops. Whether or not you agree with Harold Gray's politics is irrelevant. The LOA strips from the thirties are a folksy chronicle of the Great Depression, challenging Dickens in their portrait of the poles of human venality and nobility. With limited wordage crammed cheek by jowl with drawings into the confined space of four little boxes, with only the stark blacks and whites of newsprint at his disposal, Harold Gray somehow managed on a daily basis to produce mini- masterpieces of dramatic expressionism.
Dick Tracy is the second standout. Although Chester Gould also used light and shadow to excellent advantage, his characters lacked the depth of Gray's. But with the rogues' gallery of grotesque villains he flung against his hero through the years, who noticed? Flattop, the Brow, Flyface, Coffee- head, Shakey, the Mole, Pruneface . . . everybody has a personal favorite. Mine has always been Mumbles.
I had to do a Mumbles story.
I didn't know personally the coeditor, Max Allan Collins, though I did know his work—his mystery novels and his scripting of the current Dick Tracy strip. So I called Marty and said I wanted in. He said, No problem, but hurry, and he gave me Collins's phone number.
A1 (that what he's called) and I discussed Mumbles. He had drowned in the strip in the midfifties, but A1 had brought him back later on. He told me Mumbles would be in the film, played by Dustin Hoffman, no less. No one else was doing a Mumbles story so I was welcome to him.
But hurry.
I hurried. I put Reprisal aside once more (amazing the book ever got finished) and dove into Chester Gould's characters. My story takes place in October 1956. It's a bit tongue in cheek, but I slipped in a tiny lesson in sociology for those in the under-thirty crowd who take it for granted that rock has always played up and down the radio dial, who remain unaware of the racial storms that raged around the music in the early days.
I was there. I may have been only ten in '56 but I'd already experienced my rock and roll epiphany (see Soft & Others) and remember buying a copy of "Hound Dog'V'Don't Be Cruel"—on a ten-inch 78, no less. (Wish I still had it.) I remember rock and roll being called "race music" in polite circles and "nigger music" on the street. But all that was a sidebar to the story. Uppermost in my mind was remaining true to Gould's sense of the grandiose and the outre.
A1 was delighted to get a story with a classic Chester Gould death trap.