Steve Bullitt (The Case of the Winking Buddha)

Created by Manning Lee Stokes
Pseudonyms include Nick Carter, Paul Edwards, Jeffrey Lord, Bernice Ludwell, March Marlowe, Ken Stanton, Kermit Welles, Kirk Westley, Ford Worth, Helen Sayles
(1911-76)

and Charles Raab
(1908-66)

For comic book nerds, it’s a given that  It Rhymes With Lust , published in 1950, was the first American graphic novel. A hard-boiled potboiler, it was written by Arnold Drake and Leslie Walker as “Drake Walker,” with black & white art by Matt Baker (pencils) and Ray Osrin (inks).

It’s pure pulp, pretty much a prime slab of the sort of stuff Gold Medal was pumping out at the time, with the seductive femme fatale widow of a crime kingpin trying to keep control of Copper City (think Butte, Montana) by enlisting the aid of an ex, a crusading journalist who doesn’t realize he’s being played for a patsy.

The “Picture Novel” format was an ambitious move by St. Johns Publications at the time, and they followed up later the same year with another digest-sized title, The Case of the Winking Buddha. It was another hard-boiled treat, this one following big handsome lug and New York City private eye STEVE BULLITT.

A savvy blend of pulp, about a zillion private eye B-flicks and plenty of comic book whiz bang, Steve is a well-off private eye, wealthy enough to work out of a mansion and employ an Asian  houseboy, Bop. He’s hired by Lu Yin, a wealthy Chinese business man and art collector, to track down Lola Vance, an attractive American who double-crossed him and made off with a priceless jade statuette she had agreed to smuggle into the country, the “Winking Buddha” of the title. If It Rhymes with Lust sampled liberally from Hammett’s Red Harvest, it’s clear that author’s The Maltese Falcon was an inspiration here. At least at first.

Steve agrees to look for the “blonde Buddha snatcher” and the hunt soon begins.

He plays piano and smokes a pipe, has a faithful secretary, Penny, and an assistant, Johnny Anger, a red-haired, freckled cabbie who chauffeurs him around and does the odd tail job–nothing particularly interesting.

But as the story progresses, in among the expected lies and double-crosses, Manning delivers more than a few pleasing plot twists, including a bachelor party, delayed wedding plans, a broken-hearted neighbour, a sour-pussed roomie, a fake statuette (of course), a summons to the monkey cage at the Bronx zoo, a small scene apparently airlifted from Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, and naturally, a gather-all-the-suspects ending. Bring your scorecard and a pencil.

Sadly, neither “Picture Novel” sold well, and St. Johns soon abandoned the experiment. Currently, The Case of the Winking Buddha is even more difficult to find than It Rhymes With Lust, which was at least finally reprinted in 2016 in both paperback and e-book editions. I guess we can take solace in the fact that a reformatted version of the book was reprinted in in 1953 in Authentic Police Case #2s, which is currently available for free on various web sites. Unfortunately, the crisp black-and-white artwork of the original is muddied by the heavy-handed colorization, and the cramming and resizing of the panels to fit into standard, cookie cutter comic book format of the era does the layout no favors. Still, if you’re a fan of fifties-era crime comics, it sure is interesting. It’s no lost classic, but it’s still a lotta fun.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Manning Lee Stokes‘ only other comic work besides The Case of the Winking Buddha was scripting for the short-lived Seven Seas Comics (1946), but he  would go on to become a prolific paperback writer, from the late forties through the seventies, pumping out mysteries, detective and spy fiction, westerns, and science fiction, including several Nick Carter novels.

Artist Charles Raab was an assistant for Milton Caniff on Terry and the Pirates  and for Alfred Andriola on Charlie Chan in the thirties, moving on to do  the Adventures of Patsy strip in the forties, when Patsy’s  original artist, Mel Graff, went on to do Secret Agent X-9 for King Features.

COMICS

• THE CASE OF THE WINKING BUDDHA
  (1950, St. John Publications)
  128 pages
  Written by Manning Lee Stokes
  Art by Charles Saab
  Reprinted in a condensed and colourized version and included in the January 1953 issue of Authentic Police Cases. 

THE DICK OF THE DAY

• April 13, 2024
  The Bottom Line: This NYC eye is hot on the trail of a priceless jade statuette in one of the very first (1950) American graphic novels.

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.