Conor did a nice write-up of this original graphic novel on the site, but I feel like the Vertigo Crime series needs as much exposure as it can get, so I decided I should offer up my own thoughts on The Bronx Kill.

Peter Milligan’s story is the kind of mystery that I generally love. It’s the story of a writer, trying to explore his family’s past through his writing, only to find himself caught in the web of an inescapable mystery in the present. The past informs the present. Reality informs the fiction — or is it the other way around?

. Martin Keane is a writer with a failed second book. His father is a cop. His grandfather died in the area called  The Bronx Kill. The mystery of why the grandfather died is what sets young Martin on the quest to write a new book — a historical thriller. He leaves his wife behind and goes to Ireland for research and inspiration. He returns home, and shortly thereafter his wife disappears. Martin Keane is the only suspect, and his fictional thriller about a series of murders doesn’t help matters.

This is one of those paranoid thrillers, in which the noose slowly tightens around the protagonist as he desperately searches for the truth that will acquit him. For the most part, I quite enjoyed it. I tend to enjoy these crime novels as pulpy page turners, and The Bronx
Kill is no exception. I tore through the pages in the span of a few
hours. As the noose tightened around Martin’s neck, I had to know what would happen next.

The format of the book is interesting. Pages from Martin’s manuscript are inserted into the comic pages, sometimes to great effect. There’s one page in which we’re about to witness something very grisly, but we immediately cut to the pages of prose. This format doesn’t always work as well as it should, as I sometimes I found myself wanting to skip over the pages to get back to the mystery at hand, but overall, it informs the mystery nicely.

I did have a few minor quibbles with the overall story. The early segments seem slightly disjointed. I felt like we were racing a bit to set up the mystery. Some of the dialogue seems slightly off. But as the mystery kicked into high gear, I felt as though the pace smoothed out and the story found its proper momentum.

I don’t want to say much about the mystery itself, but I suspect some will find the answers a bit pat. The resolution didn’t come as a complete surprise to me, but Milligan does attempt to show the patterns of behavior and he makes a decent case for it. Past and present dovetail nicely in a captivating finale that answers all the questions asked of the narrative.

James Romberger, an artist I haven’t seen in comics for quite some time, does a great job with the art. It’s a bit messy, a bit cartoonish, but it’s also expressive, detailed, and properly noirish in context.