"For Vietnam specifically, Sarge Steel gets named as the
first comic book private eye to serve in the Vietnam War in
the Fine Art of Murder by Max Allan Collins. Was he the first
known fictional private eye in any genre to serve in the
Vietnam war?"
Don't know when Sarge Steel was, but for novels, among the
first Vietnam vet PIs must be Spenser (1973). But like Mack
Bolan before him (1969), his time overseas gave him skills,
not trauma. Same year, though, there were traumatized vets in
Michael Z Lewin's Way We Die Now. However, they weren't PIs,
but victims: a security guard company hired damaged vets and
turned them into programmed killers.
I'm sure there were others between then and 1977, but here's
an interesting speech from Thomas Harris's (recommended)
Thomas Kyd:
"For some reason clients trust investigators with war
records. They assume you're going to be methodical and tough.
I didn't see any reason to tell Joe Elevel that of the four
soldiers in the picture, one had an oil-burning junk habit,
one had been court martialed for black market activities,
another was now in a Mexican jail for drug possession, and
the fourth, whose name was Thomas Kyd, had spent a month
under psychiatric observation in a military hospital. I
didn't tell him that it had taken me over three years to get
out of the habit of throwing myself flat on the street when I
heard a car backfiring. Was it the picture of me with a crew
cut and in officer's uniform that decided him? I'll never
know. He frowned at it a long time . . ."
Mark
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 23 Jun 2008 EDT