Comic books and Hallowe'en.

I've never made any secret of the fact that I have a great affection for comics, particularly American comics. My favourite comic company is D.C. comics. In my mind their product is always associated with crime and mystery fiction. That's not just because the acronym stands for "Detective Comics", the company's flagship title, nor because they have featured a huge variety of detectives over the years from the hardboiled Slam Bradley through Roy Raymond "T.V. Detective" to Bobo, the Detective Chimp. (I don't think this character had any conscious influence on my adoption of our mutt Bobo from the Dog's Trust last year. He may have been at the back of my mind when I bought my "deerstalker" hat though.) I formed the association between D.C. and mystery because it was through one of their comics that I first became aware of the "fair play" detective story.

Despite trawling through the internet I've not been able to track down the story title. I know that it involved Batman and Robin solving a murder where the victim had left a clue as he was dying. He was an amateur artist who worked in a travelling circus and was slain while working on a painting. Even as he was dying he managed to scrawl a cryptic clue onto the corner of the canvas: a minus sign ( -) followed by the letter Q.

I know that in a previous post I've written that I'll never give away the solution to a mystery but I have to if I'm going to illustrate how I became hooked on detective stories. Please take this as a spoiler alert and, if you're an aficionado of early Batman and Robin stories in particular, skip the following paragraph if needs be.

Anyway, of the 4 or 5 suspects one had the surname Dial. The Batman, being the world's greatest detective and able to tell that an ex-con thrown into the mix was only a red herring, knew that Dial was the murderer. The story was written long before key pad telephones and I certainly read it when we still were on a "party line" and had to spin a DIAL when making a call. The only letter of the alphabet missing from such a dial is the letter Q, hence "minus Q". This struck me as being unbelievably clever especially since I was only about 7 or 8 at the time. Looking back I should probably have been puzzled by the convoluted path that a dying man's thoughts could take but I was overawed by Batman's deductive skills.