It is 1953, and comic strips are big business. Jack
Starr, “vice president, chief troubleshooter and occasional bottle washer” for
Starr Newspaper Syndication Company is on the job. Starr specializes in comic
strips, and its biggest player is Sam Fizer’s Mugs O’Malley, but Starr is in negotiations to pick up a new strip
from another big hitter named Hal Rapp, which could be a problem since Fizer
and Rapp despise each other.
Things heat up when Fizer is found dead in his Waldorf-Astoria
residential suite. It is staged as a suicide, and poorly at that; Fizer is
right handed, but the gun is in his left, and the suicide note is a comics-style
inked affair (making handwriting analysis useless). The obvious suspect is Rapp,
but Jack is skeptical and with his “troubleshooter” fedora firmly in place, his
private eye license in his back pocket, he starts his own investigation.
Strip
for Murder is cleverly plotted, humorous—tongue firmly in cheek
from beginning to end—whodunit with a twist that needs reading for believing.
It is heavy on dialogue, in a good way, and the descriptions of 1950’s New
York, Broadway in particular, and the syndication business are great fun. The
prose is spirited in a smooth and whimsical manner—
“Maybe
ten seconds later, Maggie stuck her head in; more than her head, the uppermost,
most exposed part of her. Very distracting neckline, that red gown.”
Even more distracting, Maggie is his widowed
step-mother, and President of Starr Syndicates. His boss, you could say. The
characters—from Maggie to Hal Rapp to a Police Captain named Chandler—are
charmingly eccentric and make a compelling juxtaposition to Jack’s hardboiled
tendencies. A relationship that generates more humor than black eyes.
Strip for Murder is the second in Max Allan Collins’ comic book trilogy; subsequent to A Killing in Comics (2007), and prior to Seduction of the Innocent (2014). It was originally published in 2008, and Dover Mystery Classics has brought it back as a very nice trade paperback with all the trimmings—fully, and very nicely, illustrated by Terry Beatty.
2 comments:
Ben, thanks for reviewing this book. I had no idea about this comic book trilogy by Max Allan Collins. I'm not familiar with contemporary comic books and graphic novels.
Prashant. I have never been big into comics, either, but I found the history of comic strips portrayed in this book interesting. Although in an Afterword by MAC he states he was pretty loose with the facts. I should add (since that didn't make much sense) that the Hal Rapp / Sam Fizer characters were based on two actual cartoonists in the early days of comic strips.
Thanks for reading.
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