To The Last Page

The third volume of the complete adventures of Corto Maltese - surely the greatest comic book creation ever in terms of its scope and the brilliance of Hugo Pratt's illustrations - neatly brings the adventurer from one side of the world to the other. Having learned in Peru that in Nonni e Fiabe  (at the end of Volume 2 of the collected Corto Maltese ) that there is a map in Venice detailing the location of the legendary city of El Dorado, the next story L'angelo della finestra d'oriente takes Corto to Venice while Europe is in the middle of war. The lust for gold however is not confined to El Dorado, but is chased by an Austrian army officer and it seems half of the nations of Europe in Sotto la bandiera dell'oro . Money doesn't just make the world go around, it keeps wars going. The white man's madness however extends further than Europe, this volume also taking in Corto's travel to Abyssinia where his guide and colleague Cush also finds that the lust for...

Many of the early stories collected in Volume 2 of the complete Corto Maltese have a feverish quality, taking place in the tropics, in the Amazon, in South American jungles, Caribbean islands and British Honduras. Corto's companion on most of these adventures is Professor Jeremiah Steiner, an academic with interest in the arcane, who has a habit of getting drunk and in trouble, as well as finding ways to open doorways to adventure, hidden treasure and mystical lands. The stories are relatively short, but they cover a lot of adventure, with native uprisings, pirates, witches, headhunters, voodoo rituals, slave traders, German steamships in the jungle and deadly female adversaries. The stories present a great variety of settings and action, and Pratt's black-and-white artwork and page layouts are of his very best, creating atmosphere and character in fluid brushstrokes, detailed where necessary, experimenting occasionally with darker, abstract blocks of ink. It's impossible n...

Los enamoramientos opens with the narrator describing in detail a couple she used to watch every morning at a cafe before she started work at the office of a nearby publishing house. (The later realisation that it is a female comes as a surprise when you are used to the observational voice of the author as Juan Deza in Tu rostro mañana ). María Dolz sees Luisa and Miguel Desvern (or Deverne) as the perfect couple, immaculately turned out, classic in their style and manner, but not ostentatious. It's a little daily ritual that amuses her to observe, but at the time of her " pequeño estímulo matutino " she was unaware of their names, any kind of acquaintance restricted to merely visual observation with a vague nod of acknowledgement, so it takes a while to associate the newspaper report of a man killed in a knife crime with the murder of Deverne. Unlike a typical novel that would explore the underlying motivations or even randomness of the murder (a carpark attendant with ...

A lot of people would be dismissive of pulp crime fiction, considering it sensationalised, but I'd contend that they are actually very important social documents of their time, breaking taboos about what was acceptable for publication in decent literature. As well as being very creative, adventurous and exciting story telling. I've seen that in previous Hard Case Crime books that republish classic noir from the past, from Max Allan Collins's Quarry whose lack of morals about killing come from his time spent in Vietnam to the counter culture of Lawrence Block's A Diet of Treacle . But not everyone needs to be an assassin for hire or a small time drug dealer turned to murder and Seed on the Wind has another unusual and daring angle that takes another look at changing attitudes in society. First published in 1930 before he became famous for his creation of Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout takes on an uncommon and very controversial subject in Seed on the Wind . A woman with a womb...