By Rick Geary (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-333-2 (Digest TPB)
This book includes Discriminatory Content included for dramatic effect.
Rick Geary is a unique talent in the comic industry not simply because of his style of drawing but especially because of his method of telling tales. For decades he toiled as an Underground cartoonist and freelance illustrator of strange stories, published in locales as varied as Heavy Metal, Epic Illustrated, Twisted Tales, Bop, National Lampoon, Vanguard, Bizarre Sex, Fear and Laughter, Gates of Eden, RAW and High Times, where he honed a unique ability to create sublimely understated stories by stringing together seemingly unconnected streams of narrative to compose tales moving, often melancholy and always beguiling.
Discovering his natural oeuvre with works including biographies of J. Edgar Hoover and Leon Trotsky and the multi-volumed Treasury of Victorian Murder series, Geary grew into a grand master and unique presence in both comics and True Crime literature. His graphic reconstructions of some of the most infamous murder mysteries recorded since policing began combine a superlative talent for laconic prose, incisive observation and meticulously detailed pictorial extrapolation, filtered through his fascination with and understanding of the lethal propensities of humanity. His forensic eye scours police blotters, newspaper archives and history books to compile irresistibly enthralling documentaries and then unleash them on a voracious never-replete readership.
In 2008 he progressed beyond Victoriana into the last century with the (hopefully still-ongoing) Treasury of XXth Century Murder series. It’s been while since anything new has emerged, but at least there are still mega-compilations such as this one, and gradually his other works are being rereleased as eBooks. If you still crave more Geary, there’s the recently-released Daisy Goes To the Moon in collaboration with Mathew Klickstein (for more of which stayed tuned)…
A Treasury of XXth Century Murder – Compendium II gathers a quartet of meticulously researched and imaginatively presented case files highlighting little-remembered scandals which seared the headlines as well as one murder that gripped the world and entered the vocabulary of humanity. They are delivered here with compelling understatement and a modicum of wry gallows wit…
In 2011 The Lives of Sacco and Vanzetti exposed one of the greatest and most painful travesties of American justice in a case which took the entire world by storm in contemporary times. In 1920 a payroll robbery and double homicide in Eastern Massachusetts led to the arrest of two Italian anarchists who were either cunning, ruthless enemies of society, haplessly innocent victims of political scaremongering and judicial bigotry or – just maybe – a little of both…
The captivating capsule history opens with a selection of detailed maps of pertinent locales before ‘The Crime’ details how a bloody wages-snatch in South Braintree, Massachusetts took place on April 15th 1920. Those events are dissected with forensic care, rich in enticing extra data local police ignored when picking up two ideal suspects: immigrant left wing activists Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco.
‘The Accused’ details their personal histories, involvement with Anarchist and Socialist groups and their version of the events leading to their arrest on May 5th after which their deeply flawed trial is deconstructed in ‘The Case For the Commonwealth’: paying particular attention to the illegal manner in which the jury was convened; the nature of the witnesses and the prejudices of presiding judge and prominent anti-immigrant advocate Webster Thayer, who declared before, during and after the trial how he was going to “get those Bolshevicki bastards good and proper” and “get those guys hanged”…
The farcical days in court, in which the defendants found themselves as much at the mercy of their own lawyer’s political agenda as the prosecution’s, and the public’s assumptions and fabrications are detailed in ‘The Case For the Defense’. They inevitably led to a guilty verdict and death sentences for both on July 14th 1921.
‘The Legal Jungle’ follows the numerous appeals, delays, public campaigns for clemency and stays of execution – paying particularly mordant attention to the unfortunate and peculiar legal convolutions of Massachusetts Law which dictated that all appeals in a case must be heard by the judge in the original case – meaning that Web Thayer was “compelled” to rule on his own judgements and directions in the case. Unsurprisingly, every appeal was overruled. He even threw out a confession by a professional gangster who came forward and admitted to committing the crime, calling him a “robber, crook, liar and thief with no credibility whatsoever”…
The graphic account closes with ‘A Global Cause’ as proceedings caught world attention, sparking a massive movement to re-examine the case; its subsequent co-opting as a cause celebre by both fascist and communist national leaders and violent anti-American protest, even riots and bombings in the streets of many countries. At least that sort of stuff can’t happen now, right?
Sacco and Vanzetti, who had always proclaimed their total innocence, were executed on August 23rd 1927, and this chilling chronicle concludes with those events, further facts and arguments that have continued to surface to this day regarding what is still a cruelly unfinished drama…
Travesty gives way to scandal in Lovers Lane – The Hall-Mills Mystery. Occurring during the “Gilded Age” of suburban middleclass America, it describes infidelity that rocked staid, upright New Jersey in 1922 and – thanks to the crusading/muckraking power of the press – much of the world beyond its normally sedate borders. Geary’s re-examination of the case begins here after a bibliography and detailed maps of ‘The City of New Brunswick’ and ‘Scene of the Hall-Mills Murders’, setting the scene for a grim tragedy of lust, jealousy, deception and affronted propriety…
The account proper commences ‘Under the Crabapple Tree’ as a well-to-do conurbation of prosperous churchgoers is rocked by the discovery of two bodies on park land between two farms. Reverend Edward W. Hall of the Church of St. John the Evangelist was found with a single fatal gunshot wound, placed beside and cradling the corpse of Mrs. Eleanor R. Mills, a parishioner and member of the choir. Her fatal injuries easily fall into the category we would now call overkill: three bullet wounds, throat slashed from ear-to-ear and her throat and vocal cords removed and missing…
‘The Victims’ are soon subject of a clumsy, botched, jurisdictionally contested investigation which nevertheless reveals Reverend Hall was particularly admired by many women of the congregation and, despite being married to a wealthy heiress older than himself, was engaged in a not especially secret affair with Mrs. Mills. This fact is confirmed by the cascade of passionate love letters scattered around the posed corpses…
The case swiftly stalls: tainted from the first by gawkers and souvenir hunters trampling the crime scene and a united front of non-cooperation from the clergyman’s powerful and well-connected family who also insist on early burial of the victims. However, the police doggedly proceed in ‘The Search for Evidence’, interviewing family and friends, forming theories and fending off increasingly strident interference from journalists.
With pressure mounting on all sides – a persistent popular theory is that the victims were killed by the Ku Klux Klan who were active in the State and particularly opposed to adultery – the bodies are exhumed for the first of many autopsies. Not long after, the youngsters who first found the bodies are re-interviewed, leading to an incredible confession which later proves to be fallacious.
It is not the only one. A local character known as “the Pig Woman” also comes forward claiming to have been present at the killing. Eventually, the police of two separate regions find themselves presiding over ‘The Case to Nowhere’: awash with too much evidence and too many witnesses with wildly varying stories which don’t support the scant few facts. In the midst of this sea of confusion a Grand Jury is finally convened and peremptorily closes after five days without issuing indictments against anybody…
‘Four Years Later’ the case is suddenly and dramatically reopened when the Widow Hall’s maid – whilst petitioning for divorce – is revealed to have received $5000 dollars to withhold information on her mistress’ whereabouts for the night of the double murder. When New York newspapers get wind of this story they unleash a tidal wave of journalistic excess that culminates in a fresh investigation and a new trial, scrupulously and compellingly reconstructed here by master showman Geary. With all actors in the drama having delivered their versions of events at last, this gripping confection concludes with a compelling argument assessing ‘Who Did It?’…
This is a shocking tale with no winners, and the author’s meticulous presentation as he dissects the crime, illuminates the major and minor players and dutifully pursues all to their recorded ends is truly beguiling. Geary is a unique talent not simply because of his manner of drawing but because of the subject matter and methodology in the telling of his tales. He always presents facts, theories and even contemporary minutiae with absorbing pictorial precision, captivating clarity and devastating dry wit, re-examining each case with a force and power Oliver Stone would envy.
Famous Players – The Mysterious Death of William Desmond Taylor sees Geary again combine his gift for laconic prose, incisive observation and detailed pictorial extrapolation with his fascination for the darkness in humanity, here re-examining a landmark homicide that changed early Hollywood and led in large part to the punishing self-censorship of the Hays Commission Production Code.
In 1911, the first moving picture studio set up amidst sunny orange groves around rural Hollywood. Within a decade it was a burgeoning boom town of production companies and backlots, where movie stars were earning vast sums of money. As usual for such unregulated shanty metropolises, the new community had swiftly accumulated a dank ubiquitous underbelly, becoming a hotbed of vice, excess and debauchery. William Desmond Taylor was a man with a clouded past and a massive reputation as a movie director and ladies’ man. On the morning of Thursday, February 2nd 1922 he was found dead in his palatial home by his valet. The discovery triggered one of the most celebrated (and still unsolved) murder cases in Los Angeles’ extremely chequered history. By exposing a sordid undisclosed background of drugs, sex, booze, celebrity and even false identity, this true crime became a template for every tale of “Hollywood Babylon” and, even more than the notorious Fatty Arbuckle sex scandal, drove the movers and shakers of Tinseltown to clean up their act – or at least to sweep it out of the public gaze.
Geary examines the suspects – major and minor – and dutifully pursues all players to their recorded ends. Especially intriguing are snippets of historical minutiae and beautifully rendered maps and plans which bring all the varied locations to life (he should seriously consider turning this book into a Cluedo special edition), giving us all a fair crack at solving this notorious-yet-glamorous cold case.
Closing the police blotter is a legendary murder mystery, focusing on the Noir-informed, post-war scandal of Elizabeth Short: forever immortalised as the Black Dahlia.
Delivered as always in stark, uncompromising monochrome, the insightful deliberations diligently sift fact from mythology to detail one of the most appalling killings in modern history. Opening with the traditional bibliography of sources and detailed maps of Downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood Boulevard (1944-1946) and the body-dump site, Geary diligently unpicks fact from surmise, and clue from guesswork beginning with ‘Part One: The Vacant Lot’…
Los Angeles California, Wednesday, January 15th 1947. At or around 10:AM, a mother pushes her baby’s stroller past open ground in Downtown’s Leimert Park neighbourhood. When she spots the two halves of a discarded shop mannikin lying in the grass, something makes her look again…
Soon the scene is a hotbed of activity, with cops (the notoriously corrupt LAPD of Police Chief Clemence B. Horrall) and headline-hungry reporters racing each other to glean facts and credit in a truly sensational killing. After a botched beginning, proper forensic procedure identifies the posed, much-mutilated victim and a call goes out to Medford, Massachusetts. Sadly, the distraught mother is talking to a canny, scruples-shy reporter rather than a police representative…
The victim’s life history is deftly précised in ‘Part Two: The Life of Elizabeth Short’ which describes a smalltown girl from a broken home, gripped by big dreams, a penchant for men in uniform and unsavoury morals. Described as flighty, with connections to notable underworld characters and night clubs, Elizabeth has a gift for finding Samaritans to help her out, but as detailed in ‘Part Three: Her Last Days’, with unspecified trouble following her, she walks out of the Biltmore Hotel at 10:PM on January 9th 1947. No one ever sees her again, except presumably her killer…
With attention-seekers of every stripe climbing on the accelerating bandwagon, ‘Part IV: The Investigation’ relates how Captain Jack Donahoe of Central Homicide employs 700 LAPD officers, 400 County Sheriff’s deputies, hundreds of other law-enforcement professionals and even private detectives to trace and interview hundreds of men connected with Short. In the end there are 150 suspects but not one arrest and, despite building a solid picture, Donahoe achieves nothing substantive. The case gets even further muddied and sensationalised when – just as public interest is waning – a string of anonymous letters and items of Short’s personal possessions are sent to the press by someone claiming to be the killer. Of course, those articles and knick-knacks might have already been in journalists’ possession from the first moment they identified her, long before the LAPD did…
The case remains active for years until it’s subsumed in and sidelined by a city-wide gang-war and resultant house-cleaning of corrupt cops in 1949. ‘Part V: Wrap-Up’ recaps prevailing theories – such as the fact that Short’s death might be part of a string of serial killings the police never connected together, or that she was linked to city officials with the case subsequently covered up from on high. Many more false trails and dead-end leads have come and gone in the decades since. The Black Dahlia murder remains unsolved and the LAPD case files have never been made public.
These grisly events in the tainted paradise of Tinseltown captivated public attention and became a keystone of Hollywood’s tawdry mythology. The killing spawned movies, books and TV episodes, and one tangible result. In February 1947 Republican State Assemblyman C. Don Field responded to the case by proposing a state-wide Registry of Sex Offenders – the first in America’s history. The law was passed before the year ended…
Rick Geary is a unique talent not simply because of his manner of drawing but because of the subject matter and methodology employed in telling his tales. He thrives on hard facts, but devotes time and space to all theories and even contemporary minutiae with absorbing pictorial precision, captivating clarity and devastating dry wit, re-examining each case with a force and power Sherlock Holmes would envy. He teaches with chilling graphic precision, captivating clarity and devastating dry wit, a perfect exemplar of how graphic narrative can be so much more than simple fantasy entertainment. This merrily morbid series of murder masterpieces should be mandatory reading for all comic fans, mystery addicts and crime collectors.
© 2009-2016 Rick Geary.
A Treasury of XXth Century Murder- Compendium II will be published on February 13th 2025 and is available for pre-order now. For more information and other great reads see http://www.nbmpub.com/
