By Ace Atkins & Marco Finnegan (12-Guage Comics/Image)
ISBN: 978-0-9836937-1-0 (TPB/Digital edition)
For the majority of private eyes, unshakable ethics, deductive reasoning and an attitude are not enough. The best ones also enjoy a specific time and/or location as well as a quirk or fascination that drives them. For Nero Wolf it was fine food and rare orchids, Marcus Didio Falco was an anti-establishment family man in first century Rome, Miss Marple was elderly and genteel, and both Phryne Fisher and Lord Peter Wimsey were posh, rich, and socialist. Moreover, Harry Dresden abets sleuthing with wizardry, Dirk Gently favours a holistic approach and Detective Chimp is a chimp…
Locale and an overarching outside interest flavours so many great crimebusting ratiocinators, none more so than Nick Travers: a music-loving history-driven investigator plying his twin trades in the moody Big Easy and its shady, murder & melody immersed environs.
The musical mystery prodigy was devised by former footballer award-winning investigative journalist Ace Atkins, a prolific writer who was himself compelled to re-examine cold cases and forgotten crimes.
Born in 1970, Atkins began his fiction-weaving aged 30: penning Crossroad Blues before going on to write three more Travers books between 1998 and 2004, 11 novels of former soldier Quinn Colson and standalone novels White Shadow, Wicked City, Devil’s Garden and Infamous. In 2011, the estate of Robert B. Parker commissioned Atkins to continue that author’s saga of P.I. Spenser, with a further ten books resulting thus far.
All that industrious fictive intrigue stemmed from an unfinished, abortive early exploit of the still unformed Nick Travers. The author’s Introduction for this stunning monochrome graphic grimoire details the strange circumstances leading to that abandoned outline finally being finished in 2016 to become something of a crime-writing sensation. It pays particular heed to the fevered efforts of fan Marco Finnegan to adapt the potent parable into comics…
A masterpiece of mood and style, the story sees Blues historian and occasional Tulane University lecturer Travers enjoying the distinctive Saturday night ambience of JoJo’s Bar (as well as Loretta’s cooking). In that suitably seedy dive, veteran sax player Fats beguiles drink-sodden listeners whilst continuing his own gradual self-extinction via booze and betting. It’s the founding myth of this city…
At the close, Nick spots him a meal and realises the little legend is especially troubled. He talks about being in love Real Love. Two days later, Fats is dead… an accidental fall…
The bluesman had no friends or family so JoJo and Travers are asked to clear his meagre belongings from the flop he rented. Fats had practically nothing left but his vintage sax. It was worth a fortune if he could have ever conceived of selling it, but it’s missing now…
Outraged and overwhelmed, Nick relentlessly employs his other skillset to discover how Fats actually died, who did it and why. As more far-from-innocents are killed, he kicks open a viper’s nest of betrayal, twisted hopes, frustrated desires, criminal exploitation and bitter disappointment – which only confirms all the legends and lies of the men who make the music and the lovers they despondently play it for…
And of course, even when the case closes and the bad guy is dealt with, there’s one last moment of revelation and another betrayal to avenge…
Atmospheric, moodily authentic and drowning in potent edgy drama and tension, Last Fair Deal Gone Down is a perfect example of comics crime and Southern Noir: a wonderful passport to the world of passion, idealism and shop-soiled justice…
© 2016 Ace Atkins. Image Comics. All Rights Reserved.