In 1990, the year I turned 19, a film full of actors I don't like was released based on the famous comic strip Dick Tracy. Also released in 1990 was a paperback anthology of all new stories about Tracy entitled Dick Tracy: The Secret Files. I've tried to get into the (original, Chester Gould) Dick Tracy comic strip a few times, but the art and the writing, I found, were just too boring. (On the other hand, like everybody, I've loved the Daffy Duck spoof of Dick Tracy known as "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery" since I was a kid.) So, why do I care about Dick Tracy: The Secret Files? Because I recently discovered that our hero Barry N. Malzberg contributed a story to it!
Today we'll read that story, and two other stories by Malzberg that appeared in 1990 anthologies, "Safety Zone" and "Another Goddamned Showboat." I considered blogging about a fourth 1990 Malzberg story, "Playback," but when I looked at it I realized I had read it before but not blogged about it. "Playback" is an annoying gimmick story, a sort of literary stunt in which Malzberg builds a story by augmenting a contemptuous spoof of science fiction penned by Raymond Chandler, quoting every line of Chandler's mocking parody and adding material between Chandler's sentences. I'm in no mood to deal with this kind of thing; consider this a sub rosa blog post on "Playback," like an Easter Egg or hidden bonus track.
"Nordic Blue"
OK, let's take a look at Malzberg's take on the Tracy character, penned like 45 years after the Gould material I just read.
Well, it seems to me that Malzberg here uses the surface elements of Dick Tracy to write about his usual themes, like skepticism of technology and disastrous sexual relationships, and maybe to satirize the violence and pro-law-and-order attitude of Gould's strip; he doesn't seem to be trying to reproduce or pay homage to the elements of the '40s Gould strips that I found engaging, though maybe Malzberg is responding to later strips--somewhat to my surprise, the Dick Tracy comic strip is still going to this day, long after Gould's retirement in 1977.
Malzberg's story starts at police HQ, with Tracy and a female subordinate getting word of a strange death, that of a man who froze to death, even though it is July. A big theme of "Nordic Blue" is growing old and resentment of the change around you, and this woman colleague furthers this theme--it seems likely she will replace Tracy when he retires. A male subordinate plays a similar supporting role in Malzberg's tale; this guy loudly complains about how things like the Miranda ruling and soft judges and juries have given criminals more freedom to operate and tied the hands of the cops; Tracy agrees, but is less vocal about it.
During the investigation, Tracy uses high technology to solve the case, but he and his male colleague are nevertheless very skeptical of technology. The villain is a manifestation of the dangers of high technology, a woman named Crystal Freezum who produces drugs via some process that generates extreme cold, cold that is killing people. Freezum also serves to represent the customary Malzbergian theme of the disastrous sexual relationship--she has two henchmen who are in love with her, even though she treats them like garbage.
Malzberg shoehorns into his story still more themes. One is pessimism about city life--the city is said to be "overpopulated" and unlikely to "make it out of the century." ("Make it out of the century" is an example of a metaphor being used to obscure meaning and evade responsibility rather than clarify meaning and illuminate a point--what the hell does "make it out of the century" mean? It can mean anything, so nobody can accuse Malzberg of being wrong in his dire prediction.) To me, this feels like a 1970s attitude than a 1980s one. More in tune with what I expect to hear from 1980s liberals like our sad sack pal Barry is the idea that the rich are building a two-tier society and walling themselves off from the second-class citizens. Miranda, which gets mentioned a lot in this piece, means "perps could make believe that they were citizens," luxury hi-rises are said to be where people live to escape interaction with the doomed city, and we are told Crystal Freezum never leaves her apartment, the decor of which is entirely uniformly white. The extreme extent of Malzberg's pessimism is revealed by the fact that, in this doomed city of haves and have-nots, Tracy is not universally considered a selfless champion of the have-nots! We learn in no uncertain terms that some beat cops and ordinary civilians have been making snarky comments about how Tracy is now a celebrity who spends a lot of time on TV and only heads out to the field to work flashy cases!
The plot of "Nordic Blue" is not great, and there are problems with the execution of multiple scenes. In the '40s Dick Tracy strips I read, the villains kill people with their own hands in order to get their hands on others' cash, and then kill and deceive and corrupt still more people in their efforts to retain the cash and escape justice--everything in these WWII-era strips is very direct and morally clear. In Malzberg's story, Crystal Freezum is some kind of drug dealer and what she is doing and why, and its moral valence, are far less clearly defined and far less exciting. I couldn't really understand why she needed to generate deadly cold to manufacture drugs nor what the connection was between some of the injuries and deaths in the story and her drug manufacturing operations. I can see that Malzberg wanted some grand guignol scenes, like the one with a veteran of the Bataan death march whose hands needed to be amputated because they froze, as a nod to all the terrible bloodshed in the original comic strips, but Crystal Freezum's connection to this atrocity is sort of tenuous. (Maybe Malzberg is trying to suggest that the really bad criminals in real life are not people who stab other people or set them on fire with their own hands but businesses who pollute the environment or something.) Malzberg starts his story off on a bad foot with some pretty feeble jokes in the police station that don't seem to play any role in developing the characters or generating atmosphere. The concluding action scene is not very well done--you can't visualize where people are or what they are doing, and their movements make no sense. And the ending, a downer of course, is somewhat cryptic.
"Nordic Blue," which as far as I can tell has never been reprinted, is kind of a mess and I am going to have to give it a thumbs down.
"Safety Zone"
"Safety Zone" bears as an epigraph a quote from Joanna Russ that refers to the fact that H. P. Lovecraft had a very limited sex life, and apparently little interest in sex, and dealt very little with sexual relationships in his writing. Malzberg's story is set in Providence, and is narrated by a young woman, Donna, who has never heard of Lovecraft and lives with a lame roommate who hates to leave the house and spends his time watching TV and writing his autobiography. As for Donna, it seems like the center of her life is going to the singles bar.
Tonight Donna meets an odd character at the bar--she doesn't realize it, but it is the ghost of H. P. Lovecraft, come back to Providence in this year, the year he would have turned 100, to try to learn about sex! He clumsily tries to develop some sort of relationship with Donna, even gets physically aggressive, but Donna rejects him. The ghost talks about hearing the hounds in the distance, I guess a metaphor for the realization of those no longer young that death is approaching. Donna goes home, and after finding her roommate passed out in front of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, she goes to bed and for the first time hears the hounds in the distance. It is implied that she, like Lovecraft, has an unhealthy attitude about sex and time may be running out for her to build a healthy sexual relationship before she dies, as it ran out for HPL.
Like "Nordic Blue," "Safety Zone" is a "riff" on a major American pop culture phenomenon that Malzberg (it seems) is uneasy with or hostile to, a story about getting old and a story in which figure people who don't want to leave their apartments and otherwise erect barriers between themselves and others. "Nordic Blue" is much better than "Safety Zone," though; the jokes are actually amusing and the characters' motivations more clear and their fates more poignant. Here we have a solid Malzberg production.
("Playback" is another derivative piece drawing on the work of an iconic American genre writer--I guess this was what Malzberg was up to in 1990. Detractors might call this behavior lazy, but fans can comfortably label these works "meta" and "recursive"!)
"Another Goddamned Showboat"
A moderately good piece that presumably draws on Malzberg's own experience as an aspiring literary writer who had to resort to genre fiction to get published. "Another Goddamned Showboat" debuted in What Might Have Been: Volume 2: Alternate Heroes, and in the same year appeared in the omnibus edition of both volumes of What Might Have Been. In 1994 the story was again presented to the SF community in the collection The Passage of the Light: The Recursive Science Fiction of Barry N. Malzberg, and when our Italian friends put out a book of science fiction about science fiction in 2010 they included a translation of "Another Goddamned Showboat."
I was never a Dick Tracy fan, much preferring Lester Gooch's creation, Fearless Fosdick.
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