Jimmie Dale
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Jimmie Dale is a fictional character created by Frank L. Packard in 1917. He was a wealthy playboy by day, but at night put on a costume and became The Grey Seal, who enters businesses or homes and cracks safes, always leaving a grey seal behind to mark his conquest, but never taking anything. He was just doing it for "the sheer deviltry of it" at first, but when a woman catches him she blackmails him to war on certain crime organizations.
Dale's adventures first appeared in People's Magazine and then were collected into novels: The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1917), The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1919), Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue (1922), Jimmie Dale and the Blue Envelope Murder (1930), and Jimmie Dale and the Missing Hour (1935), with the serializations generally appearing the year before the novel version was published. A film serial was made about the character the year he first appeared, 1917.
Jimmie Dale/The Grey Seal is often credited with popularizing and evolving that would greatly influence later pulp and comic book heroes. The foppish playboy by-day-crimefighter-by-night routine had a precursor in The Scarlet Pimpernel, but it was Jimmie Dale that brought the idea into a contemporary setting and added the idea of a costume and mask for his secret identity, serving as a possible influence for characters like Zorro and The Shadow. He also established the concept of a hero's secret hideout or lair, The Sanctuary, a precersor of the Batcave or the Fortress of Solitude.
He also appeared in a movie serial, Jimmie Dale Alias the Grey Seal, in 1917.[1]
(This entry incorporates some material from Jess Nevins Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes)
