Black Pearl

Appeared from Thursday, September 26, 1940 to Sunday, October 27, 1940

Anagram Name: Erad is “dare” spelled backward

Black Pearl’s real name was Pearl Erad. She was an inventor, bomb maker, gang leader, thief and builder of war machines. Black Pearl was a tall, slim, dark-haired woman, whose gang stole American war secrets and government drafting blueprints and plans. From the stolen plans, Back Pearl built models of war machines and, when they were perfected, she sold the perfected blueprints to foreign nations. Her gang had a proving grounds in a secret mountain hideaway.

Black Pearl’s gang included Horace and Emil, and all her men wore black berets and worked bare-chested. Tracy and Pat, following up a lead on a suspected bomb maker, found Black Pearl in her apartment. Before they could act, Black Pearl got the drop on them and scratched Tracy’s face with an oriental weapon called a Ka-wag.

Tracy and Pat found themselves prisoners of Black Pearl, and she forced them to accompany her and Horace to her secret hideaway. They became testers of a new machine she had built that she called a flying submarine. It was a land tank that went beneath the water, flew in the air and was powered by “liquid air”.

Black Pearl and a mysterious, bewhiskered foreign agent, watched from afar as Tracy and Pat, stripped to the waist, entered the tank and submerged it in a lake under sixty feet of water. Tracy found a huge aqueduct pipe underwater and pounded out a Morse code “help” message on it with a hammer. Tracy’s message was picked up by a watchman at a pumping station, who notified the police.

Back at Black Pearl’s, Tracy and Pat were testing the tank against a flame thrower when the police arrived. Black Pearl chased a police car with the flame thrower, but realized that she had to escape so she, Horace and the foreign agent ran to Black Pearl’s underground hanger to fly away in her airplane. However, the foreign agent stopped them with his gun, took off his disguise and announced that he was a G-man. Tracy and Pat came rushing in and realized that the G-man was their old friend, Jim Trailer. Black Pearl and Horace were taken away to jail.

Reprinted with permission from the author Victor E. Wichert “The Dick Tracy Encyclopedia Oct. 4, 1931 – Dec. 25 1977″

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