Review by Frank Plowright

A second graphic novel visit to American detective Harry Dickson in 1930s London adapts a cleverly constructed plot by Jean Ray, enabling him to encompass several cases within the context of a bigger picture, although that’s not apparent when we first meet businessman Frederic Hamilton. He’s experiencing dreams of being on trial before a group of hooded men accused of exploiting the poor and dispossessed. Dickson feels otherwise, noting Hamilton’s charity works have earned him the esteem and affection of the destitute! This may be the case, but Hamilton lives in opulence, and Dickson is invited to spend some time at his mansion.

Co-adapters Doug Headline and Luana Vergari work with Onofrio Catacchio, whose meticulously rendered art makes the story seem a reconstructed period drama. Ray, though, was a French contemporary of Agatha Christie, constructing clever plots set in the homes of the rich and respected. Including a wax museum and thugee tortures, Ray certainly ensures Catacchio has visually stimulating locations, and they’re elegantly drawn.

As with the preceding Mysterion, enjoyment of Ray’s works comes with caveats. The plot is very clever and very imaginative, but it’s everything, and the cast are only there to service it, lacking anything but the most basic personality. At no point does Dickson ever transmit as American, and his main role is to speculate and to explain, but there is one abiding elements of strangeness, creepiness even, in Dickson’s younger assistant Tom Wills constantly referring to Dickson as “Master”.

The opening four chapters feature people readers will be suspicious about, but form a complete solved mystery as a prelude to a mastermind’s return, and Mysterion, for it is he, in one way or another occupies the remainder of the book. Ray supplies a sequel to the opening case, a mad interlude of religious killers, a mysterious murder and eventually a showdown.

Ray writing about a city not his own takes liberties in the form of dramatic licence that 1930s readers would never have realised. Residents of Stoke Newington in North London will be amazed at the castle outside their area, adjacent to a lake and surrounded by countryside no less. Yet the plots hang together very well as conceived by a criminal mastermind, and Ray drops a big surprise at the end, cutting to the heart of what we believe about our period detectives. It’s not a Hercule Poirot solution, that’s for sure, and as such retains a shock, not least because the cast have been so lacking in character throughout.

Dickson returns to take on Red-Eyed Vampire.