Created by William E. Barrett
(1900-1986)
I wonder if Jeff Johnson, creator of P.I/tatoo artist Darby Holland, knows about NEEDLE MIKE, William E. Barrett’s crime-solving tattoo artist from the pulps?
Posing as a seedy, disreputable alcoholic owner (complete with gold tooth and bum leg) of a grimy tattoo parlor on South Broadway in the equally disreputable Tenderloin district of St. Louis, needle was actually handsome young man about town KEN McNALLY, the bored son of a local millionaire. He used his disguise as a way to keep tabs on the assorted schemes of the city’s criminal elements. It’s “a game that he played with the gods of adventure,” as he puts it in “The Tatooed Chief,” which appeared in the February 1938 issue of Dime Detective.
He appeared in over a dozen hard-boiled tales, several of them multi-part, in that pulp in the thirties.
Truth to tell, though, unlike Darby,he’s not really a private eye. Still, like many of his pulp brothers of the era, Needle Mike sure acted like one, rescuing assorted women, solving murders and battling the usual villains.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
An amateur pilot and author, many of William Edmund Barrett‘s early stories focussed on World War One combat; he had published Flight from Youth (1939) before turning to writing for the crime and detective pulps, where he also wrote about underworld-gossip column Dean “Blue Barrel” Culver. Years later he hit the bestseller lists with ended up a bestseller with Catholic-themed books like Left Hand of God and Lilies of the Field (1962).
SHORT STORIES
- “The Tattooed Corpse (Part One)” (January 1, 1935, Dime Detective Magazine)
- “The Tattooed Countess (Part Two)” (March 15 1935, Dime Detective Magazine)
- “The Tattooed Curse (Part Three)” (May 15 1935, Dime Detective Magazine)
- “The Tattooed Cobra (Part One)” (August 1935, Dime Detective Magazine)
- “The Tattooed Chain (Part Two)” (October 1935, Dime Detective Magazine)
- “The Tattooed Cop (Part One)” (February 1936, Dime Detective Magazine)
- “The Tattooed Circle (Part Two)” (June 1936, Dime Detective Magazine)
- “The Tattooed Chinamen” (August 1936, Dime Detective Magazine)
- “The Tattooed Champ” (October 1936, Dime Detective Magazine)
- “The Tattooed Claw” (January 1937, Dime Detective Magazine)
- “The Tattooed Clock” (May 1937, Dime Detective Magazine)
- “The Tattooed Card” (July 1937, Dime Detective Magazine)
- “The Tattooed Chief” (February 1938, Dime Detective Magazine)
- “The Murder of Needle Mike” (August 1938, Dime Detective Magazine)
- “The Tattooed Combination” (November 1938, Dime Detective Magazine)
COLLECTIONS
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
