I bought the Dell "Mapback" PB,
Death Draws the Line by Jack Iams (1948), because it was about murder in the newspaper strip world. I always meant to get around to reading it. I've been meaning to get around to reading it for thirty years. I finally took it in the tub with me yesterday.
Zeke Brock is the writer/artist of a wildly successful daily strip,
Little Polly Pitcher, an obvious takeoff on
Little Orphan Annie. The strip has made Brock rich and famous while filling the coffers of the wildly dysfunctional Whitcomb family, which owns the syndicate. Brock has been drinking himself to death for years, leaving most of the work to his young assistant Mary Bradley. One night Zack apparently finally succeeds in drinking himself to death. Our hero, syndicate editor Mark Wallis, and Mary are caught between the law and the Whitcombs when the cartoonist's death proves to be murder.
An author's note on the flyleaf thanks Roy Crane and Ward Greene, editor of King Features Syndicate, for "technical assistance." This sounded exciting, and I looked forward to snippets of local color about the glory days of newspaper comics, but I was disappointed. We learn almost nothing about the comics business. It's nevertheless an entertaining whodunnit.
Death Draws the Line operates at the level of a decent 40s B-movie mystery. The Whitcomb clan, at the center of the turmoil, is a familiar bunch: dominating old matriarch, two dissolute sons, a nymphomaniac daughter, a bull-like chauffeur, an enigmatic family doctor, and enough closeted skeletons to fill a churchyard. Well, maybe in a B-movie the daughter wouldn't be a nymphomaniac. Anyway, sordid secrets are revealed, a will is contested, two weeks of originals mysteriously vanish, and everyone gathers in the drawing room at the end for the surprise reveal. In a novel twist, the missing originals holding the mystery's key are printed for the reader to see as our hero displays them to the family (see below).
Nothing remarkable, just a pleasant time-passer. Too bad there wasn't more comic-strip ambience. In 1948 the Golden Age of newspaper strips was winding down, but it was still possible for a successful cartoonist to buy mansions, breed horses, and hire assistants to do the hard work. We hear a bit about deadlines and the production process, but except for the gimmick of the missing dailies the story could just as easily have taken place in any big-money business. When the hero and Brock's assistant must produce some strips on their own, we finally get a glimpse of the real stuff--and Jack Iams gets it wrong. The strips are drawn on "cardboard" rather than Bristol board, and the artist inks the dailies before they're lettered rather than after.
Iams may have slacked off on those technical details, but he certainly didn't shortchange the city of New York. The book's most remarkable passages are loving word pictures of misty dawns, rainy neon-touched boulevards, the parks, the districts, the neighborhoods. It's quite a performance. Iams obviously was crazy about NYC.
Iams was a journalist, novelist, and TV critic. Here's a bio from a paperback cover site. It's largely a rewrite of Iams' AP obituary:
Jack Iams was a pseudonym for Samuel Harvey Iams Jr. an American crime writer who before striking out under that pen name was a reporter for The London Daily Mail.
He then wrote for other newspapers 
