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Picking a Book of the Month is no small task. Last week, I looked at the schedule and realized that I was up, and worse, I had no idea what to do about that. For one thing, I can’t just pick Alan Moore books every time, can I? Well, I suppose I could, but what good is it saying that an Alan Moore book is good? That’s like saying water is wet, and does no one any practical good. (This is, in no way, a guarantee that I won’t be talking about how good an Alan Moore book is in the near future.) In a panic, I sent out an email to the entire writing staff of iFanboy looking for inspiration. I got some alright suggestions, but nothing that fit my mood, or anything I felt excited to proselytize to you fine people. Yet after a very off-base suggestion of some Punisher book, our man Ron came through with the suggestion of the book I’m about to talk about.

That book is the overly titled A Treasury of XXth Century Murder: The Lindbergh Child by Rick Geary. From here on out though, I’ll just be saying Lindbergh, and you’ll have to make do. I hadn’t heard of the book before, yet the name Rick Geary seemed familiar to me, but I’m not sure if it really was. A quick search told me that Geary has been around for a long while, doing cartoons, book covers, children’s books, illustration, and yes, comics, since the ’70s. The whole idea instantly appealed to me though. On the one hand, you’ve got true history, which I love, and while I really don’t pay much attention to the MSBNCNNFoxNews abduction of the week, the sociological differences of a high profile case like this happening in the ’30s was much more intriguing. Plus, anyone who’s been in the game for as long as Geary should have some chops right? I quick once over at the store told me that I was on the right track. Alright Richards, I’m game. Just for kicks, I also went ahead and bought Geary’s book about Lincoln’s murder too.

I suppose this brings us to the review portion of this review, which is fitting.

Have you ever picked up a short to medium length book, and after a certain point, perhaps 1/3 to 1/2 of the way through, you couldn’t stop reading it, but then at the same time, you didn’t want to stop reading, because that would mean that the book would be over? That basically summed up my experience with Lindbergh. The further I went, the more I wanted to know, and the really sad part is that there are no real answers.

Any student of American history will tell you that this was a gigantic case. Col. Charles Lindbergh was as famous as they got, and when his boy was stolen, we saw some of our first glimpses of the ravenous beast the media would become. The investigation was wide ranging, the details of the case puzzling, and the whole thing was fascinating. A suspect was eventually found, convicted, and put to death, but there was no shortage of leftover questions and loose ends.

If you’re looking for this book to give you theories and speculation, finally giving the really answer of what happened to the Lindbergh baby, then this isn’t the book. In this book, you’re almost in the position of juror, as Geary presents the facts of the case as they are known, leaving you to judge what happened as best you can. It’s a very interesting look at how the justice system works, and how hard it must be to sit on a jury when the facts are not as clear cut as you’d like them to be. While the book is fairly straight forward, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it cold. The research has clearly been done, but what Geary does so well is present it in such as way as to distill all that disparate information into a very readable order and form. With a case that involved and lengthy, there are a lot of details and characters, and choosing the right bits to leave out and leave in must have certainly been a challenge, but the author really made it quite clear.

Geary has a series of books on Victorian murder, so he’s no stranger to telling stories from the past, when things were different, but still providing the reader with context to understand things in today’s terms. What’s really interesting is the context of when this happened. The country wasn’t so far into the depression. Forensic science wasn’t what it is now. The police took 40 minutes to get to the Lindbergh’s house following the call. And these were perhaps the most famous people in the country. Charles insisted the baby keep wire mesh cages affixed to his young son’s thumbs to prevent a sucking habit from forming. The child was held in the crib with two large safety pins. Nearby New York was awash with immigrants, but they were mostly European immigrants, as opposed to the more worldly population of today. I love the details of life 70-80 years ago, in comparison with our own.  Some things have changed drastically, while others are basically the same.

The art in this book does exactly what it should do. It tells the story, and presents the facts in a straightforward manner. Geary really straddles the line with the faces of these people, all of whom were real, and are depicted in photographs. While he doesn’t do straight up caricature, he certainly explores the more cartoonish aspect of reproducing faces, which works for this kind of story, as the exaggerated features of faces more easily replicate the feel for what these people looked like, perhaps better than even a straight reproduction of photorealistic portraiture might. There’s so much conveyed in the face of Charles Lindbergh that doesn’t necessarily come through in a photograph, but the use of cartoon to emulate that face, and show his personality (or the best guess of what that personality is) works so well, and you can see a humble, quiet, shy man, who wasn’t comfortable dealing with any of this. In this way, Geary is especially good with eyes. When you see a face making the sly eyes, the author is indirectly telling you that that person is lying, or being disingenuous, or at least that Geary suspects as much. He also reproduces items from the case in a very effective illustrative style, such as the mysterious ladder, or the ransom notes. They’re not photos, but I can’t help but think the artist brings out the important qualities of these items even more effectively than a photograph can, because the artwork can lead you to see the things that are actually important about what it is that you’re looking at. All in all, the art in this book is extremely effective cartooning, and is easily greater than the sum of its parts. Looking upon it initially is not mind-blowing, but realizing how simply and effectively it is communicating with the reader is where Geary’s real artistic sense lies.

This book isn’t a transcendent experience in the wilds of comic book innovation, but what it is is a fantastic example of the comic book doing something other than the adventure fiction with which we are so familiar. In many ways, I think reading this book is going to make you more informed than if you were to watch an hour long special on the Discovery channel about the same subject. For one thing, you wouldn’t be subject to the dramatization of poorly paid and trained pseudo-actors but rather you have the events retold to you by a skilled craftsman of comics. If you’re into history or true crime, you could certainly do worse than to read this, or any other of Geary’s book.

Josh Flanagan
josh@ifanboy.com