Chester Gould was the creator of the comic strip character Dick Tracy, one of America's most popular fictional detectives. From 1931 until his retirement in 1977, Gould chronicled the square-jawed, hawk-nosed Tracy's heroic battles against a steady stream of wildly surreal underworld villains, always being sure to have his hero strictly follow actual police procedures. By the late 1940s, Tracy was so well known that he was the second-most recognized figure in America, just behind Bing Crosby and ahead of then-president Harry S. Truman. At the peak of the strip's popularity in the late 1950s, Dick Tracy was carried in well over one thousand newspapers around the world.

Gould was born in Pawnee, Oklahoma, the son of a printer and newspaper editor. "It was probably that influence which got me into the frame of mind to become a cartoonist," Gould explained in The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy, 1931-1951. At...