Review by Frank Plowright
The Big Book of Little Criminals introduces a slight departure from the format established for earlier volumes. The series always uses multiple artists, but here we also have several writers working on six loosely sorted chapters separating the fraudsters from the heist merchants, and women into their own section. Historical researcher George Hagenauer and crime reporter Carl Sifakis write most entries, but Tom Peyer, Joel Rose and the team of Lou Stathis and Judy Maguire also contribute.
As before, stories are compressed into sequences of five pages or less and drawn by artists covering all points of the spectrum from wild cartoonists to noir realists. The obvious thought would be of such a scattershot approach leading to a lack of cohesion, but the immediate switch of style from one strip to the next rapidly assumes normality. The only artists to contribute twice are Dave Gibbons and regular offender Robin Smith, who obviously knows where the bodies are buried. The sample art supplies the extent of contrasting styles with the loose cartooning of Glenn Barr alongside the precise naturalism of Russ Heath.
Both Hagenauer and Sifakis approach their subjects with a dry, sardonic tone, with Hagenauer more likely to include funny dialogue. Despite dealing with criminal activity there are plenty of laugh out loud moments from John Kelly’s creative accounting for the Ringling Brothers circus (by Rebecca Guay) to Sir Hunt Emerson’s rendition of the Pierre Hotel heist. You’ll also learn how the accepted story of Ma Barker is largely myth, drawn by Frank Quitely, and why the term Mafia faded from popular use in the 1970s in a long chapter about organised crime in which most subjects learned how it paid in the short term, but not the long.
If there’s a criticism to this volume it’s that the title belittles some grim behaviour and despite the cover tagline promising the world’s most incompetent jailbirds, plenty of inclusions were distressingly competent and never jailed. Tubbo Gilbert remained crooked on the Chicago police for forty years, while the victims of appalling multiple killer Belle Guinness included her children. She was never caught. Con Men prove especially resistant. Serge Rubinstein sold the Eiffel Tower for scrap metal not once, but twice; Gaston Means probably murdered his rich client after losing her money and ended up as an FBI officer; and a crook who managed to eradicate ink from bank cheques wasn’t ever identified, never mind captured.
The abiding premise of the series is to present what’s beyond belief, and while a few standard killers find their way in to Little Criminals, the vast majority of the subjects will have your jaw dropping. Job done. Again. The Big Book of Hoaxes is next.
