Category Archives: Book Review

Shortly after I began working on the Depot I found myself collecting 1930’s and 1940’s era Big Little Books.  With over two dozen BLB’s to find and a limited budget I focused on those BLB’s featuring stories not found in the daily comic strip.  I first reviewed Dick Tracy on Voodoo Island last year and the book to the left, Dick Tracy and the Phantom Ship, is another such kids novel.  Published in 1940 as part of Whitman Publishing second series, The Better Little Books, this thick hand sized book was taken directly from Ned Wever’s Dick Tracy radio broadcasts.

Sponsored by Quaker Puffed Rice and Wheat, these short radio shows usually ran a complete case in about a 15 episodes (3 weeks) and this particular case was sold in 1939 as a radio play called Dick Tracy and the Strange Case of the Ghost Ship.  The Depot doesn’t have a copy of this script, but it can be found in the Ohio State University Library where a trove of Dick Tracy treasures from the Chester Gould family reside.  In this book, the play has been novelized as a 13 chapter story complete with picture panels on each opposite page.  While the artwork is unique to this Big Little Book, the dialog itself reads as if directly from the radio script itself and one can imagine the voice of Ned Wever (Tracy), Walter Kinsella (Patton) and Andy Donnelly (Junior) speaking from a sound stage.

The case begins with Dick Tracy receiving a request from a whaling captain friend named Billy the Kid (not the cowboy) who needs help with a troublesome racket taking place down in the Antarctic.  Remembering for a moment we are in 1940 and whaling is an accepted past time, Tracy’s jaunt down to the Antarctic Ocean follows the global theme of other radio cases such as the Purple Rider in northern Canada.

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