*
Lt. Valer saw to it that my time at the scene was limited, and within two hours I was driving in fast-moving traffic in my late husband’s Jag, heading to the hospital to sit with Roger, and make him feel better with my report.
Dan would be there, too, and afterward we’d head to Gino’s for deep dish. Some good guys may need their heads shrunk after killing a bad guy, but me, I like to get my stomach filled.
My God, Chicago was beautiful at night, all that high-rise geometry and electricity unleashed, and the lake wasn’t half bad, either....
Somebody said,
I glanced over in the rider’s seat and Mike was grinning at me. Sharp as hell in a black leather jacket and black t-shirt and black jeans. Alive and well and giving me a proud, loving smile.
“So I did all right?”
I laughed.
And I’m sure any other driver gliding by, who saw me, all alone in my Jaguar, laughing my ass off, would have taken me for crazy.
This is the first prose novel about female private detective Michael Tree, but numerous graphic novels precede it, all written by me and drawn by Ms. Tree’s co-creator, cartoonist Terry Beatty.
The “Ms. Tree” feature began in 1980 when the independent comics scene was just getting started, and one of its pioneers, editor/publisher Dean Mullaney, approached me about doing a serialized tough detective story for
The buzz in comics fandom about that magazine was considerable, because Dean was bringing in some of the hottest talent in comic books to try to do something that could hold its head up alongside (and possibly above) anything the big boys, Marvel and DC Comics, were doing.
I was surprised to be asked to participate, frankly, because I had never written comic books. But I’d been writing the “Dick Tracy” syndicated comic strip since late 1977; and my take on that classic crime strip had attracted attention. I’d attempted to return the venerable strip to its hardboiled roots, with as much gunplay as I could get away with, and reviving classic Chester Gould villains in the context of contemporary themes—human cloning, video piracy, computer viruses.
Mullaney was part of the generation of comics fans-turned-professionals who revered “Tracy,” and I got a lot of positive reaction from this group—eventually I even got to do
Also, Dean had seen a little strip I was then doing with cartoonist Terry Beatty, called “The Mike Mist Minute Mist-eries,” part of a weekly page of comics Terry and I self-syndicated for a year or so to smalltown papers and advertising “shoppers.” This was a great idea that made us not much money at all, but one of our clients,
Anyway, seeing and liking “Mike Mist” primed Dean for allowing me to use Terry—who also had zero comic book credits—as the artist in a magazine otherwise filled with stars and even superstars.
On his initial phone call, Dean asked me if I had any ideas for a new private detective character. Immediately I pitched “Ms. Tree,” because I’d been thinking for a long time about doing a switch on Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and his secretary Velda.
The central notion was that the tough private eye and his loyal secretary, his unrequited love for years and years, would finally get married, only for the P.I. to be murdered on their wedding night, leaving the secretary to take over the detective agency and step into her late husband’s shoulder holster. The private eye’s murder would be the former secretary’s first case.
Though clearly patterned on Hammer and Velda, this notion was generally true of many if not most classic (and not so classic) private eyes, who always seemed to have beautiful secretaries who loved them, for all the good it did.
Of course, what separated Spillane’s Velda from the rest was that she was a licensed P.I. herself, packed a gun in her purse, and was almost as tough as Mike Hammer, despite needing to be rescued by him now and then.
Due to my corrupting influence, Terry was a stone Spillane fan, too, and we looked at the obscure but wonderful “Mike Hammer” comic strip from the early ’50s and used, as a stepping off point, the way Spillane crony Ed Robbins had drawn Velda. But even without cartoonist Robbins to light the way, Spillane’s description had been fairly exact—Velda was a big beautiful brunette who wore a pageboy hairdo.
For a while we toyed with making pin-up queen Bettie Page (who in 1980 had not yet received much mainstream attention) the physical model for Ms. Tree. But we ultimately rejected that, not wanting to go with a sex-kitten Honey West type, on the one hand, and finding it a little too obvious, on the other. Within a year or two, gifted artist Dave Stevens embraced the obvious, brilliantly, and his Bettie Page-styled heroine helped fuel his
Terry and I always viewed “Ms. Tree” as the syndicated comic strip we would have done if continuity strips were still being bought by the newspaper syndicates (which they weren’t, and aren’t). That meant the character names had the kind of on-the-nose Dickensian quality that makes some people wince—from the pun of Ms. Tree/mystery to the chick-stealing Chic Steele, not to mention inexperienced young Dan Green and brave cop contact Rafe Valer (valor).
I don’t apologize for that, because “Ms. Tree” grew out of a specific pop culture myth—Mike Hammer and Velda—and a general one—the private eye and all his/her trappings. If this novel, like the graphic novels, plays less “real” than some of the rest of my melodrama, so be it: in Ms. Tree’s world, blood runs in four colors.
Despite the superstar efforts we were surrounded by, the six-part “Ms. Tree” serialized graphic novel, “I, For an Eye,” was the surprise hit of
