THE COMPLETE CHESTER GUILD'S DICK TRACY Dailies & Sundays Volume 1 1931-1933

A new kind of detective story: Dick Tracy, in its earliest days, was a police procedural while Dashiell Hammett and other Black Mask boys were writing about private eyes and crooks. It would be years before W.R. Burnett wrote about cops, decades before Jack Webb and Ed McBain became the respective masters of television and prose police procedurals.

In these pages, Dick Tracy performs ballistics tests, uses a lie detector, traces fingerprints and utilizes the teletype between his and other police stations. All of this was brand-new in fiction, never mind comic strips. The level of violence, while perhaps mild by 21st Century standards, was shocking-early on a vicious gun battle on the street pushes the envelope Gould had so recently opened.