To The Last Page

In an attempt to undermine relations in the indomitable Gaulish village, Caesar sends out an agent who has an uncanny ability to sow discord wherever he goes. In no time at all he has the combative inhabitants at each other’s throats. Classic Asterix tale, this makes good use of the colourful characters in the village, and even has a landmark battle where all four Roman camps join forces in battle against a village without magic potion, and practice their own form of “psychological warfare”. Even the pirates get in on the act. Marvellous.

Good, but not classic post-Goscinny Asterix. Uderzo tells a nice visual story and the script - in the English version - is well adapted with all the usual terrible puns, but little that is really inspired. The Arabian Nights in India story is fine, we get the usual fun with the pirates and there's a nice cameo by Julius Caesar, but really you miss the big punch-ups with the Romans.

One of the very best Asterix stories, all the way back from 1967, Asterix The Legionary is strong in every department – a purposeful story, superb drawings, marvellous secondary characters and - since the boys have joined the Roman Legion in their attempt to bring back the boyfriend of Panacea, who has been recruited – there are plenty of Romans to both bash and endless frustrate. The script and names are wittily translated, as ever, into English and there are good running jokes throughout – one at the expense of a hieroglyphic-speaking Egyptian unwittingly conscripted into the army believing the barracks is a hotel, the other around characters constantly breaking down into tears.  Needless to say, the journey gives the boys an opportunity to get reacquainted with their old friends the pirates on the way to Rome and again on the return journey.

What starts out seemingly as a regular attempted burglary gone wrong soon turns into something much larger when it is discovered that the ringleader shot by one of the family is none other than Arsène Lupin.  The mystery of his activities in the house and the location of his dead body are revealed by an ingenious young student called Beautrelet (modelled very much on Gaston Leroux’s Rouletabille), but the discovery of a coded paper referring to the L’aiguille creuse (the hollow needle) suggests an even greater mystery. Lupin of course isn’t dead, and the mystery deepens as Beautrelet sets off around France on the trail of the master criminal in an attempt to uncover one of the greatest secrets of the French Royal family. Through kidnappings, abductions, impersonations and threats of dire consequences, Lupin manages to stay one step ahead of the young investigator, the chief of police and even Herlock Sholmès in an always thrilling, and ultimately tragic adventure.

When a man turns up in his office, anticipating arrest for the murder of an old lady, Maigret travels to a little village in the provinces in a non-professional capacity. Shot through the eye by an air-pistol while looking out her window, the villagers aren’t exactly sorry that the old woman is dead – she’s been the terror of the village for years – but if someone has to pay for the crime, they reckon it might as well be the school teacher, since he’s considered an outsider. Simenon’s in familiar territory here – Les Fiancailles de Monsieur Hire , L’Assassin –convincingly depicting the workings of small communities, watching each other through windows, gossiping, ostracising outsiders, creating a sense of community only through mutual fear, guilt and suspicion. Coming from a small country village himself, Maigret is only too familiar with this kind of behaviour, and slips quietly back into their way of thinking to uncover the underlying motivations of the killer.

Written in the form of a journal, L’homme au petit chien is a rather reflective meditation by a man who has lost everything in his life. This type of story can often be rather dull and depressing with Simenon ( Les anneaux de Bicetre or Le grand Bob for example), but there is an intriguing crime element that is gradually revealed in L’homme au petit chien . Felix Allard lives alone with his dog, and has been working for the past eight years in a small bookstore. Terminally ill and contemplating suicide, his condition doesn’t escape the notice of the shop’s owner. Allard however isn’t going to die until he has recounted in his journal the events that took his wife, his children and a successful career from him. Behind the cold, reflective tone and outlook, there is the story of a crime passionnel .

There is a sense of both La Fièvre d’Urbicande and L’enfant penchée in the latest book of Schuiten and Peeters’ marvellous Les Cités obscures series, when the city of Brusels starts to show signs of strange localised phenomena that threatens to gradually overwhelm the city. An elderly man discovers large white rocks appearing out of nowhere into his apartment on a daily basis, one of his neighbours finds her house gradually being inundated with white sand, and a chief in a restaurant notices that he is getting lighter each day. Mary Van Rathen ( L’enfant penchée ) is called in to investigate the links between these seemingly unrelated events and believes they may be connected to the death of a mysterious foreign visitor to the city. It’s marvellous to see François Schuiten working in black-and-white once again and his detailed drawings of the cityscapes and people of Brusels are simply wonderful. Whether the story lives up to its promise remains to be seen however, since this is anot...

Taiyo Matsumoto’s wonderful underground manga is a much darker prospect than its flowing, full-colour movie adaptation by Michael Arias. Matsumoto keeps his vision of Treasure Town closer to the perspective its guardians Black and White, two young boys known as The Cats who protect their district from rival gangs that threaten destroy its character in their competition for influence there. Matsumoto’s artwork appears unconventional and almost hallucinatory in places, but the development of the story, the whole pace and perspective, is a familiar one in Japanese manga. Black and White obviously represent the yin and yang, the delicate ecological and psychological balance that is under threat from the ways of the modern world. Once that relationship is altered, events rapidly escalate and inevitably there are violent consequences. This all-in-one phone-book size edition, released to coincide with the release of the film adaptation on DVD, is beautiful, providing a wonderful opportunity t...

What greater stage for a super-criminal who plays to the gallery like Lupin than the challenge of pitting himself against no less than the great English detective and his sidekick "Wilson" from Parker Street in London (all with less than subtle name-changes after threats of litigation by Conan Doyle). The battle more than lives up to the billing across two crime mysteries that stretch both Sholmes and Lupin to their limits, but which unsurprisingly manage to see both come out of the challenge neither victors nor defeated. Only poor Wilson seems to come off the worst in both adventures. Delightful and thrilling crime entertainment, as always with Lupin.

Les Petits Riens de Lewis Trondheim, Vol 2. Syndrome du prisonnier contains more wonderful, humorous journal entries from Lewis Trondheim - little one-page vignettes recording his unique observations on his home life and his travels around the world as an ambassador for French comics. If the stories aren't quite as fresh in this volume - you more or less know what to expect now from Trondheim - the odd quirky story will still have you laughing out loud. Most pleasurable however is the refinement of the author’s drawing style – simple, yet detailed, conveying the essential tone and characteristics of his little stories. The colouring too is simply amazing.

Shortcomings is about relationships of course - what else with Tomine? - and the author/artist pulls no punches here. The characters are very flawed, make terrible judgments and behave embarrassingly, but there's truth in the observations and no small amount of wry wit. At times the recognisability factor makes it a painful experience - we've all behaved badly like this at one time or another. I prefer Tomine's shorter work, but this longer book - which inevitably recalls Ghost World - manages to sustain its theme well.

An elderly lady Virginia, a lepidopterist by profession, her academic study of moths making her reclusive, obsessive and a little eccentric, has been living alone in her family’s crumbling Dorset mansion. Little by little over the years she has been disposing of the family’s “clutter”, all the precious furniture, as well as all the unwelcome family associations it holds for her. The memories of the past, with her mother Maud and her studies with her father Clive all come back when her wayward sister Vivian returns after decades of absence. Her return seems to be prompted by something she is looking for in the house, but with so much having been sold off, will she find what she is looking for? Neither the title nor the premise of Poppy Adams novel hold much attraction, suggesting a rather academic study of the human behaviour of an eccentric family reduced to the automatic responses and activities of the moth. There is indeed rather a lot of background information provided on the behavi...

It’s certainly not difficult to see the comparison to The Bourne Identity in Jeff Abbott’s new thriller – secret CIA agencies operating to cross purposes and causing major havoc in the world of international terrorism, with no accountability for their actions. Abbott’s a good writer for this kind of material, achieving the same immediacy and kinetic energy within the first few pages of the book and creating an incredibly tense situation. There’s a difference however – Abbott makes it credible. Not too credible (our heroes manage to shrug off a number of bullet wounds quite manfully to get on with the task in hand), but by viewing the situation from a number of different perspectives, Run presents a wide view of the motivations of each of the parties involved, and in the process shows that there is no clear line that can be drawn between the good guys and the bad guys. Everyone is involved in murky activity outside of accepted legal and moral laws, where good and bad are relative terms...

Giving up life as a schoolteacher on the hope of better prospects with her wealthy estranged uncle, Mary Finch travels from Cambridge to the Suffolk coast. The journey by coach and the people she encounters open up Mary’s view of the world, but one particular incident is to have major consequences on the direction her life takes. Near Ipswich, the coach party come across a man who has been injured by the roadside. Mary stops off to look after him until help arrives, and finds that the injured man has a watch belonging to her uncle. Accompanied by a kindly army office, Captain Holland, Mary arrives at her uncle’s estate to find that there are other suspicious activities taking place in and around the house late at night. The year being 1795, the activities could be those of freetraders and smugglers, but the discovery of coded letters found among her uncle’s papers suggests that there is a traitor in their midst conspiring with the French Revolutionaries at war with England. There’s def...

Can’t say a great deal about this one as it didn’t inspire me enough to finish it. It’s about a young woman called Gally, who is suffering from trauma and other unsettling memories that she can’t really define. When she buys a run-down house in the country with her husband Mike, a history lecturer, things start to feel right. A wise eight-year old man, Ferney, helps her realise that many of the things that trouble her are related to past lives, ones where not only the house feature prominently, but where he himself was often her partner. What Long does well – and partly, it’s one of the main intentions of the book – is make history seem real and close.  It’s not something in the distant past, but closely connected with who we are. People haven’t really changed so much in all that time and still act out of the same motivations. One of those motivations is “love”, and that’s the other theme of the novel – love transcending time. These two characters have loved each other over many li...

The book’s title is the description of the sound made by a mind that has been broken, and Robotham brings the full horror of that to bear in his latest novel. What are the buttons that can be pushed to mentally destroy a person and what kind of monster is capable of doing it? If he is capable of understanding this, clinical psychologist Joe O’Loughlin just might be able to get closer to the answer of why a killer has driven a number of women to their deaths. The first victim is a naked woman in red heels who jumps from the Clifton Suspension Bridge despite the best efforts of the professor, who has recently moved to the area with his wife and two daughters. Unable to understand what could have motivated the woman to apparently kill herself, Joe suspects that someone may have driven her to her death – the voice on the other end of a mobile phone she was holding at the time. The police are sceptical about Joe’s theory, so he calls in an old friend - former Chief Inspector Vincent Ruiz, n...