By Elizabeth Hewitt
A year ago, I decided I would try to entertain both my
students and myself and offer a class on true crime
literature. It was in searching for exemplary texts on
famous nineteenth century cases (my favorite) that I
discovered Rick Geary and his masterful Treasury of
Victorian Murder series. In these universally acclaimed
books, Geary takes his readers through the cases of Mary
Rogers, Jack the Ripper, H.H. Holmes, Lizzie Borden and
several others. While Geary always chooses the most
sensational of cases, his approach to true crime is
methodical and procedural. But his black and white line,
which resembles lino prints or wood etchings, conveys both
incredible precision and artistic warmth as he leads us
through the historical murders.
A historian at heart, Geary always chooses cases that are
significant not only for their own details but because they
are symptomatic of a cultural moment. And all his books
describe the cacophonous public responses to the cases;
never succumbing to the hysteria that characterizes
sensational murders, Geary calmly details this tumult. My
worry, however, was that Geary would eventually run out of
material for his Victorian Murders, since while there is
never any shortage of crime (in any century) there are a
limited number of historically-significant cases.
Thankfully with the turn to the 21st century, Geary had the entire
20th
century and its celebrated
crimes open to his analysis and artistry. In 2008 he began
the Treasury of XXth Century Murder with the celebrated
kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, The Lindberg
Child. This year
he published Famous
Players, which
tells the story of the director William Desmond Taylor’s
murder.
Both books follow the basic template of his earlier
Victorian Murder series: they provide a bibliography; they
give birds-eye maps of the crime scene and the region (or
regions) where the crime took place; and they briefly
describe the historical setting that makes the case so
important in its historical moment. The Lindberg Child
rehearses how Charles
Lindbergh became celebrated hero; Famous Players
outlines the growth of
Hollywood and the early film studio moguls. Each then turns
to the murder, the investigation of the murder, and the
aftermath of the futile investigations. Like many true
crime aficionados Geary likes unsolved cases, but unlike
many true crime authors he refuses to shape his narrative
towards clear conclusions and indictments. Never playing
his authorial role as prosecutorial, he instead winds his
tale through the numerous investigations. But his drawings
are never speculative: this is not CSI-style narrative in
which he represents possible events. Instead, and this is a
most wonderful aspect of all his books, he only provides
visual representations of events and objects for which
there is no epistemological uncertainty. In the Lindbergh
case, for example, we see the ransom notes, the broken
ladder, the baby’s thumb-guard, because all such objects
were found. And Geary is liberal in his details, revealing
to us minutiae that may or may not be important (like for
example, the peanut shells swept out of Mabel Norman’s car
in Famous
Players.) His
graphic narratives force us to stitch together the clues
and stories—giving us all the pleasure of case-building.
In this way, Geary fathoms what makes comics such an ideal
form for true crime lovers. I know there are true crime
readers out there who like to be disciplined by their
authors, who like to be told who done it and why, and I
suppose such readers won’t appreciate Geary’s adamant
refusal to direct our conclusions. But Geary understands
that the real pleasure of reading history, criminal cases,
and comics is that we aren’t rendered passive. And he
recognizes that the discomfit we feel from not knowing all
the answers can be assuaged only by knowing more, always
more. Geary’s mastery—as both artist and storyteller—is
allowing us to feel comfortable in our uncertainty by
describing it with precise detail. In this way, his slender
books written in formulaic style brilliantly capture not
only the historical moments he records within their own
pages, but our own.
