To The Last Page

I hadn’t realised how much of an impression Sam Hurcom’s first dark horror thriller A Shadow on the Lens had made on me until I saw that Sam Hurcom was publishing another book set in the early 1900s featuring photographer and forensic investigator Thomas Bexley. Set in a remote Welsh village, the first novel was a fabulously atmospheric piece of classic folk horror, not so much a ghost story as a genuinely scary work of dread terror, one that crept into your soul and left an indelible impression. If the events that took place in 1904 in the Welsh village of Dinas Powys make such an impression on the reader, imagine the impact the must have had on Thomas Bexley. Hired by Professor Hawthorn as a special investigator he had been assigned to look into the murder of a 16 year old girl Betsan Tilny, gathering photographic evidence of the crime scene for the new science of forensic investigation. What appeared on the photographs was profoundly disturbing to the investigator, but the whole pl...

Part 1 of the latest Spirou adventure Hope Against All Odds really packed a punch, returning a classic children’s comic book series back to the original period of its creation in Belgium in 1938, just as the country was about to be invaded by Nazi Germany. Without losing any of the charm or character, even borrowing a little from the clear line Hergé style of the period, it managed to deal seriously and subtly with attitudes and complex undercurrents that it can be difficult and misguided to understand or judge from a distant time. But on one level at least it’s made clear that whatever the prevailing attitudes of the time and whatever compromises needed to be made, ordinary people suffered and struggled under the Nazi regime. Before it gets to the atrocities that occurred – which we mustn’t underestimate as something quite extraordinary for a Belgian children’s comic series – Émile Bravo spends a large section of Hope Against All Odds – Part 2 detailing – in an unsurprisingly humor...

Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason series, also wrote a series of around thirty private eye Cool and Lam detective books under the pseudonym as AA Fair, of which Top of the Heap is the thirteenth in the series. Donald Lam is a Los Angeles detective who is used to getting results, only it all seems to come a little too easily when John Carver Billings the Second calls in looking for a couple of girls. The wealthy client, son of a banker, wants to find Sylvia and Millie as he picked them up and spent the night at a motel with them. It's important to find the women as it appears to be connected to a police looking for a missing woman, the moll of a notorious gangster who Billings had foolishly tried to pick up earlier that evening. Lam is more than a little suspicious with the ease of his own investigation and the clues that seem to have been left for him to find. The not terribly elusive Sylvia even provides the necessary corroborating information makes it sound convenie...

You can always depend on Daniel Polansky to find a unique and unusual way to tell a story. Even though it’s one of his short fantasy works (such things do exist, rare though they might be), it takes a little while before you can build up any kind of picture of the world of The Seventh Perfection . In a way the bigger picture is something that Manet – the main character of this short fantasy novella – is trying to discover, because she has an object in her possession that could change the whole history of the place. I say the main character, but we don’t actually hear anything from Manet herself, as the whole story is constructed of a series of monologues from people she comes into contact with, each of them providing a one-sided view that perhaps adds up to a multi-faceted vision of a strange world. Although some are rather vague in what appear to be responses to her queries, unwilling to talk about or professing ignorance about the locket she has in her possession, we soon determine t...

There’s a dark core that runs through all of David Mark’s writing, whether it’s a by-product of community history in the landscapes of the north of England ( Still Waters , Cold Bones ), or the more modern areas of criminal activity found in his DS McAvoy series ( Scorched Earth ), in his standalone horror writing ( A Rush of Blood ) or historical fiction ( The Zealot’s Bones ). It’s not surprising then that even when he turns his hand to romantic melodrama in the style of Daphne du Maurier, that he somehow still manages to bring a dark edge to the story. The familiar strengths of David Mark’s writing are evident in Suspicious Minds from the get-go. The first is how he reliably establishes a tense dangerous situation, often involving a sympathetic character who is in a lot of trouble. We don’t yet know much about Liz in the first few pages of the prologue, but it’s hard to imagine that she has done anything bad enough to deserve being taken into the woods with the 9 year old daughter ...

It seems an obvious remark to make but it’s the visual aspect of comics and graphic novels that give them a unique individual characteristic and an advantage to be able do things that you can’t do with a words alone. Or, to be more precise, it’s when it’s used well and you have the benefit of a good artist who is not only able to illustrate but use techniques to bring out the distinct character of a story that the visuals can make all the difference. That is done on several levels in Gentlemind , a new European graphic novel scripted by Juan Díaz Canales and Teresa Valero, with artwork by Antonio Lapone. What Lapone brings to Gentlemind in his attractive artwork is an immediacy that within a couple of panels or pages helps define the period of the 1940s in New York in an approximation or evocation of the classic art style of the New Yorker magazine cartoonists. It’s a style that is adaptable to all sides of this world, whether it’s the glamour of the Broadway shows, the elegance of ex...