THE NICK CARTER THAT NEVER WAS
By Roberto Barreiro
One of
the mysteries of the Wold Newton Universe that has not been
adequately explained has been the disappearances and reappearances of
Nick
Carter; each reappearance has also been
marked with a
very notable change of personality.
Two
periods of those disappearances exist. One between
1923 and 1932 and another between 1937 and 1964. Reappearing
twice in
the public eye, the Nick Carter of each resurgence is very different
from the
previous one, as demonstrated by Professors Todd Rutt
and Arn Mc Connell in The
Mysterious Case of the Carters Or, How Hirohito
became Nick Carter' s Aide.
It has
been postulated as a theory that Nick Carter had immortality or a extended longevity as an explanation of how he
could have
such a long, active career. Though it is
possible that this really happen (with Wold Newton genes explaining
this), the
character’s changes of personality cast doubt that this was the same
man in every
incarnation. Recently the Professor Dennis Power in its Lethal
Luthors: A
Deceptive Brilliance William Luthor
(1903 -1967) explains (in a footnote, to be specific) that the Nick
Carter
of the Killmaster period was a literary
fiction that
based its histories in the three operatives of the Agency Axe, known
like N1
(Hamilton Nash), N2 (Nick Carter jr.) and N3 (Nick Fury), all agents of
the
organization mounted and directed by the real Nick Carter. A mystery is
explained here.
But it
remained to resolve the mysterious change of personality in the
histories of Nick Carter between 1932 and 1937, where the personage is
a typical
hard Boiled detective, in little keeping with the Nick Carter of the
dime
novels. The explanations of that return never have been convincing,
explaining
the public disappearance of Carter in those years as having been in the
spirit
of traveling to surpass the death of his woman. This explanation turns
out to
be less convincing to explain the psychological change of Carter from a
rationalizing investigator into a type more expert in hitting blows to
obtain
results as is the Carter that appears in the pulps of the you years
1932
-37.
Part
of the reason that this has never been adequately explained is that
most of the investigators of the Wold Newton Studies are natives of
English-speaking countries. They did not possess an important piece of
the puzzle
that was only clarified in the Hispano-american
editions of Nick Carter. That piece is the simple confession that Nick
Carter
never returned to its detective work between 1932 and 1937 and was
another
person (with the consent and the public authorization of the one real
Nick) who
occupied its place.
Ladies
and gentlemen, I present Jim
Echagüe
Wallace.
Before
continuing with the tale, it’s indispensable to explain the
sources used by this article. Sources that are
evident
and clear, like you will see next. We start with the cover of the first
number
(could be any but the comparison will be fortified if is done with the
first
issue of the pulp) of Nick Carter
Detective Magazine, published in 1933.
There in the cover reads itself clearly:
But if
we see the cover of the same novel translated in Spanish that
went out into the street for the first time in 1941 (four years after
the
second “disappearance” of Carter) we find us with the following cover:
The
name Jim Wallace has replaced prominently that of Nick Carter! But
the history is identical in both books... except in a small addendum at
the
beginning of the first chapter. I believe that this deserves to be
transcript
(and translated) in its totality, being the proof that sustains this
article:
Jim Fonseca Wallace descendent of
an old Californian family that for more than one hundred years,
has been preserved completely pure, marrying only with other Spanish or
South
American families that could present heraldries without defect. There
had been
only one exception and of her was born our protagonist, who, in spite
of the
mixture of races, showed to be always as much a gentleman as his better
ancestors.
The father of Jim fell in love
with a rich American heiress that on account of a
damage
in her car was obliged to remain some time in the Fonseca estate. From
there
they only left to go to
His infancy passed in the
enormous estate of their grandfather, who by his bribery managed to
conserve it
in spite of the efforts that infinity of Americans trying to snatch it
from him
when, due to the conquest of California by the United States, all the
crimes
and abuses were permitted. But Don
Gerardo of Fonseca y Guzmán had been
educated in the
From all these details it will be
understood that Jim Wallace had all the inclinations and qualities of a
Spanish
gentleman. He had been educated in a house where only Spanish was
spoken and
only read newspapers and books written in the same tongue.
At the age of five Jim rode as a
consummate rider on the endless plains of the Fonseca hacienda. In that
land
there was gold and petroleum, but they never consented to extract
neither of
them. The Fonseca traded with cattle and with the fruits of its
orchards. Their
rectitude in the business was very known: when they put for sale any
herd of cattle
they had
many buyers, who were there with the certain assurance of not being
deceived by
the Fonsecas.
This environment of manliness,
rectitude and bravery made the young Wallace a true champion of
justice.
Besides, the life in the open spaces that he experienced in his first
nineteen
years him predisposed him for the work that later, at the death of its
parents,
he was going to undertake. Despite his grandfather’s wish for him to
remain on
the ranch because he handled the rope as the best cattleman, mounted
all types
of horses and shot with so mortal aim that in more than one occasion
its gun
put an end to the career of many a famous bandit, he felt he needed to
say
goodbye. When he arrived at
Later, when the great Nick,
feeling the weight of the years, began to decline in his career, the
jobs being
offered were coming fewer and far, his assistants went to offer their
services
to Jim Wallace and, presently, all the collaborators of Nick Carter
were under
the orders of the youth and famous detective whose fame came close to
surpassing of that of Nick itself, as being a name feared by all the
delinquents.
Looking at the difficulty of the
American people to pronounce the name Fonseca, Jim decided to use the
surname
of his predecessor which was more in, more in harmony with his
occupation.
Beyond
the evident Hispanic ultranationalist hyperbole (we recall that
this text was written in years where the nationalist, right-wing regime
of
Francisco Franco was in his heights) this text retold with enough
accuracy the
real history of Jim Wallace. This article cleans up that hyperbole and
clarifies the exaggerations to give a more detailed life of the
personage.
Who
was the author of this text, an obvious attachment to the book made
in the Spanish translation of 1941? It is quite obvious to assume that
he was
the translator of this novel, a gentleman called José Mallorquí.
Take note of this name: he will appear subsequently.
From
this text we began the investigations that carried to discover the
history of Jim Wallace, the true protagonist of the adventures ascribed
to Nick
Carter in the period 1933 -1937. This is their history:
Jim Echagüe Wallace (the surname Fonseca was a
deliberate distortion of Mallorquí that
will be
explained later) was born in 1899 (1) in a castle
situated
near the Spanish city of
In the
past of the Californian Echagües, there
was a fascinating history of an avenger who protected the poor and
helpless of
the tyranny of the… American oppressors. El
Coyote
began its adventures in 1851, just after the Yankee occupation of
The
Coyote had a lot of support from the inhabitants of Hispanic and
Mexican descent that were with no protection from the Americans that
arrived at
The
young Jim was fascinated by the many stories of this avenger. The stories came alive because the man who
told them to him was his grandfather, Don Cesar de Echagüe,
who was also the man behind the mask of the Coyote. Cesar de Echagüe was publicly known as a man
spectacularly afraid of
violence but gifted of cunning and a prodigious ability to convince and
seduce
people. With these skills, Cesar not only he resisted all legal
maneuvering and
illegal attacks made by the Americans to expropriate his hacienda, but
he
expanded his possessions and diversified his wealth. He was a generous
and
loyal boss with the ones under his command, which assured him the
absolute
loyalty of his subordinates.
He
married two times, first with Leonor de
Acevedo, daughter of another family of ancestry of the zone. She gave
birth to
his older son, also called Cesar (we will name from now Cesar Jr. to
avoid
confusions) in 1855, before dying of birth complications. The grieving
Don
Cesar disappeared after that a couple of years, in which he worked
under
pseudonym as a spy for the Confederate government during the American
Civil
War. His son was raised by his housekeeper, Guadalupe, who had secretly
been in
love with the widower since she was a child. When Don César
returned, he will married again, this time to Guadalupe. She would give
him a
daughter, Leonor.
The
career of the Coyote finished around 1875, when age would not permit
Don Cesar to continue with his double life. Likewise, in those years
there was
much less need for the Coyote and he felt that his second identity
could be
abandoned without trouble. Don César
continued with
the administration of his properties with the aid of his son, Cesar
Junior (2).
The
second Cesar, though equal in intelligence than his father, was
always of a warlike and abrasive nature. When young, he flirted with
the
possibility of a double life like his father but paternal pressure
managed to
keep him from following this perilous path. He channeled his abilities
toward
the management of the family possessions. But a trip to
Cesar
Junior was invited by the distant kin of the Echagüe,
the Fonseca, to visit their possessions in
A
fortuitous accident permitted at the second Cèsar
of Echagüe to know his future wife, a rich
heiress of
the high American society called Wallace (3) (we do not know her first
name).
By chance (the text says that a damage in its car, but the dates do
highly
improbable that it was a car, a technology that barely began to appear
in those
times) she need to be lodged a season in the Echagüe
estate. Seems that there was an explosive romance and the couple soon
married
and left for a long honeymoon trip to
The
infancy of Jim happened in the Echagüe
hacienda, listening the stories of his
grandfather Don
Caesar who told the youngster his adventures as the Coyote. As child
Jim also
learned to ride like a veteran rider and became a crack marksman. His
masters
in this last apprenticeship were his father and grandfather, both
excellent
gunmen.
One of
the distortions made by the Mallorquí
text was that the Echagües only spoke
Spanish in
their house. Though (keeping in mind the paternal fondness by
At the
age of 18, Jim was enlisted as a soldier of the American army in
the WW1 and fought in
When
he returned from the war, he would be given the sad news of his
parents’
passing in an accident. For a time, he administered his hacienda but
his heart
was not in it. So he decided to leave other people in charge of his
land and
went to
We do
not know exactly when he first met Nick Carter. We know,
that he was one of his many assistants from 1919 until
Nick withdrew in 1922. Keen on the work of private detective, Jim opted
for
opening his own private detective agency, being helped by some of the
old
assistants of Nick in this task. Slowly
and patiently, he decided to be known by his maternal name, Wallace,
and not by
his paternal name due mainly to the prejudices that a name like Echagüe would bring to his work, in view and knowledge of
the buried racism of the epoch. Thus the
Nick
Carter was already beginning to collaborate with the U.S.
Government but wanted to restart his agency, with him as figurehead.. For this cause he sought his former assistant
and
proposed him to be the acting head of the new Nick Carter and
Associates
Agency. Jim would be the responsible for all and would have the huge
resources
that Nick could provide him, including the juicy contact with Street
&
Smith, the pulp editorial. They would again publish the stories
provided by the
Agency, with the condition that in the fiction, Nick Carter would be
the star
of the stories, even when he had nothing to do with them in real life.
Jim did
not mind that their name weren’t public: he was not a man worried by
the
publicity.
There
was a point of conflict, nevertheless: the leftist positions of Jim, that had grown and solidified in the midst
of the Great
Depression. Though Jim never had embraced completely the Marxist
theories, he
openly supported the New deal of F. D. Roosevelt and had helped unions
attacked
by strike-breakers groups, free of charge. Some people (including the
FBI, with
whom Nick was obliged for the moment to have fluid contact) did not
want that
“this pinko” (as Edgar Hoover called Jim
once) were
the public face of Nick Carter and Associates. Carter asked Jim that he
abstain
from mixing in ideologically tricky situations, a condition that Jim
accepted
grudgingly.
From
1931 to 1936, Jim was the main investigator of the
But
something would appear in the horizon that would change all: The
Spanish Civil War. When this conflict erupted, Jim could not resist the
double
call of his familiar and ideological influences. It was the
We do
not know a lot from about the
role of Jim Wallace in the Spanish
Civil War. We are sure that he knew in
In 1938 Jim became prisoner of
the nationalist troops after the battle of Teruel.
It
is known that already under heavy guard, he was sent to be cured of
some wounds
at a military hospital. Shortly after his admittance to the hospital
all traces
of him are lost. Apparently he was imprisoned until he died but the
date is not
known. A sad destiny for somebody so brave.
After
the war, José Mallorquí tried to find
his friend. He managed to discover that Jim Wallace was a prisoner. Without being able to do a lot directly (he
himself was regard
very well by the pro-Franco officials since he was known
as a
Republican, though never a militant), Mallorquí
began
to try to contact people who could help him.
There wasn’t a way to find Nick Carter (by those years already
compromised in the secret agenda of the American government and for
this, he
went underground) but he managed to speak with the Fonseca and
convinced them
to free to their “red” relative. The Fonseca made some tepid attempts
that
amounted to nothing. Nevertheless they were very generous with Mallorquí and they passed him more information
on the
family Echagüe. Little by little, Mallorquí
would know more about Don César de Echagüe than about his unlucky grandson.
But Mallorquí would take advantage of one of
the opportunities of the Destiny to call attention at the existence of
his
friend. When the Editoria Molino, in which
he worked,
decided to publish (mainly for the Latin-American market, since
Unfortunately
this was not possible. The pulps of Jim Wallace would then
be the final legacy of a skillful and brave man that was during years
the secret
Nick Carter. Let this article be the deserved and deferred homage by
which all
the investigators of the Wold Newton Universe will know him.
Roberto
Barreiro
(1) We know from The
Silk Secret
that Jim participated as a young man in the First World War. Keeping in
mind
that the
(2) There will be a future article that explain
more in detail the history of The Coyote.
(3) ¿Were her family descendent of
the Scottish leader William Wallace? We
do not know with accuracy but could be a trail to investigate…