""Escape! Freedom! Revenge on Tracy!"" screams the wonderfully hyperbolic narrator in this second collection of one of crime fiction's most beloved-and most influential-serialized adventures. Collecting dailies and Sunday strips from May 1933 to January 1935, the book is an onslaught of plot, chock full of protection racketeers, smugglers at sea, crooked politicians, car theft rings and whatever else Gould's wildly fertile imagination could concoct in time for deadline. Frankly, it's a bit much for prolonged reading but is a wonderful historic resource nonetheless, and fans of police procedurals can bask in the genre's early, experimental days. The world has changed a lot since then, of course, and some plot elements (Tracy ""slapping some sense"" into a woman; the fairly common endangerment of his adopted son Junior as bad-guy bait) might not sit well with modern readers. A well-written and surprisingly un-fanboy introduction by Max Allan Collins, himself the author of the Tracy strip from 1977 to 1998, nicely sets the tone, pointing out that much of the territory covered in this book represents Gould's on-the-job education in how to tell a great story. A lengthy and revealing interview with Gould from 1980 will delight long-time fans of the strip.
