‘The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics’ – Edited by Paul Gravett (Constable & Robinson)

Crime doesn’t pay but it certainly pays to have a little crime in your reading! I’m talking gangsters who have mouths that are as sharp as their suits and scruffy looking private eyes whose moral compass is having trouble finding its way out of that bottle of cheap whiskey. I’m talking dames as well, the more the merrier! I’m not just talking about dames who need help finding their long lost brother or that hidden fortune (before the mob does); I’m also talking about dames who are just as handy with a machine gun as their male counterparts!

Despite issues over the how the books were put together, I found the ‘Mammoth’ books of Horror and Zombie comics to be great places to start for people who want to get into these comics but don’t know where to start. I was hoping for more of the same from ‘The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics’ and I certainly got what I was looking for! Unfortunately I encountered the same kind of publishing issue that had marred the last two collections that I read...

I’m going to get this moan out of the way now as, on the whole, this collection was very good and I don’t want to tar the whole book with a mistake made in just one story. The ‘Horror’ and ‘Zombie’ collections were marred by text that went missing as well as a couple of stories where pages went missing in the middle. Not the story’s fault, just something that went wrong at the printing press... ‘The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics’ has a similar problem in ‘Secret Agent X-9’ where a couple of pages have accidentally been swapped round. You don’t notice it at first and by the time you do it’s far too late. I ended up having to re-read that section a couple of times and then re-read it once more when I realised what order the pages should have run in... This was a real shame as Dashiell Hammett’s script and Alex Raymond’s artwork had this story shaping up to be my favourite in the book. ‘Secret Agent X-9’ built up a real head of steam and then came grinding to a halt over something that wasn’t its fault at all...

Apart from this one small (but telling) mistake, ‘The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics’ ended up being a great read that kept me busy for pretty much the whole weekend, reading a selection of crime comics ranging from the nineteen forties to the present day. It looks like most of them will only be found in this book as far as I’m concerned (I haven’t got the money for the kind of collecting that finding these comics would involve) but there are a couple of the more recent ones that I wouldn’t mind picking up. Paul Grist’s multi-layered ‘Kane’ series looks like one that I might keep an eye open for the next time I’m in somewhere like Forbidden Planet. Likewise Sampayo and Munoz’ ‘Sinner’ series although that might take some finding...

As I find with most collections, I found ‘The Mammoth Book of best Crime Comics’ to be hit and miss in terms of what grabbed my eye. This was more a question of the artwork or story not grabbing my eye right away and reeling into the plot itself. While I can generally give a book a few pages to get going I tend to be a little more demanding with comics. If the artwork isn’t up to snuff at the start then it’s very likely that it won’t be for the rest of the story...

For every ‘El Borbah: Love in Vein’ (Charles Burns), which was catchy and quirky in equal measure, I found there were stories like Fred Guardineer’s ‘Who Dunnit?’ (I liked the concept but found the pace excessively slow) and Neil Gaiman and Warren Pleece’s ‘The Court’, a story with underworld connections but so lacking in crime that I wondered why it was in the book at all...

The stories I liked the best were the ones from the forties and fifties; stories full of hot lead, sharp suits and double crossing dames that were totally at odds with the morality that publishers felt had to be ever present. There seemed to be a really fine line between going for the sensationalism needed to sell comics and not pushing it too far. Not knowing much about what to look for, it was hard for me to get a feel for how hard hitting these comics must have been back in the day but in terms of storylines and dramatic endings they all did their job in keeping me hooked throughout. Standout stories for me included ‘Mary Spratchet’, Bernie Kriegstein’s ‘Lily-white Joe’ and Will Eisner’s ‘The Spirit: The Portier Fortune’.

When a book has as much packed into it as ‘The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics’ it’s hard to go into real detail about what’s inside (I don’t have the time!) Suffice it to say that I found some real eye catching stuff inside and I reckon there will be something for you as well...