The Fatal Bullet: The Assassination of President James A. Garfield (A Treasury of Victorian Murder) by Rick Geary

Treasury of Victorian Murder

by Rick Geary

Geary (The Borden Tragedy, Jack The Ripper) explores the first assassination of one of our presidents in the hands of an obsessive-compulsive stalker, a deluded loser who thought his action would bring him national glory. In this typically carefully researched and constructed story, Geary parallels the lives of the President and the killer. They have striking similarities. The fascinating element is how one went so wrong while the other rose to so high a post even despite himself. Once again, beyond a mere presentation of facts, the author surreptitiously unpeels for us a bit of our national psyche.

Genres: History, Graphic Novels, Comics, Nonfiction, True Crime, Crime, Biography

Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

RICK GEARY was born in 1946 in Kansas City, Missouri and grew up in Wichita,
Kansas. He graduated from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where his first cartoons were published in the University Daily Kansan. He worked as staff artist for two weekly papers in Wichita before moving to San Diego in 1975.

He began work in comics in 1977 and was for thirteen years a contributor to the Funny Pages of National Lampoon. His comic stories have also been published in Heavy Metal, Dark Horse Comics and the DC Comics/Paradox Press Big Books. His early comic work has been collected in Housebound with Rick Geary from Fantagraphics Books.

During a four-year stay in New York, his illustrations appeared regularly in The New York Times Book Review. His illustration work has also been seen in MAD, Spy, Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times, The Old Farmer’s Almanac, and American Libraries.

He has written and illustrated three children’s books based on The Mask for Dark Horse and two Spider-Man children's books for Marvel. His children’s comic “Society of Horrors” ran in Disney Adventures magazine. He was the artist for the new series of GUMBY Comics, written by Bob Burden, for which they received the 2007 Eisner Comic Industry Award for Best Publication for a Younger Audience.

His graphic novels include three adaptations for the Classics Illustrated, and the nine-volume series A Treasury of Victorian Murder for NBM Publishing. The new series A Treasury of 20th Century Murder began in 2008 with “The Lindbergh Child.” His other historically-based graphic novels include Cravan, written with Mike Richardson, and J. Edgar Hoover: A Graphic Biography.

Rick has received the Inkpot Award from the San Diego Comic Convention (1980) and the Book and Magazine Illustration Award from the National Cartoonists Society (1994).

He and his wife Deborah can be found every year at their table at San Diego’s Comic Con International. In 2007, they moved to the town of Carrizozo, New Mexico.

(from http://www.rickgeary.com/bio.html)

Reviews

[Sam Quixote · Rating 4 out of 5]

On July 2, 1881, President James Garfield, whose term has just begun a mere 4 months earlier, was shot in the back by a delusional religious fanatic called Charles Guiteau. 2 months later Garfield would succumb to the bullet wound and shortly after Guiteau would be hanged.

The assassination took place just 16 years after Lincoln's death in Ford's Theatre and the details in Garfield's case pointed to the same mistakes that allowed Lincoln to be assassinated. Garfield had no escort, he walked about Washington D.C. by himself, unguarded. Guiteau even followed him on a couple of occasions - this is the President of the United States of America we’re talking about!!

On the fateful day, Garfield was taking the train for his holidays, walked through the waiting room with one of his ministers and his two sons, allowing Guiteau free access to stand up from one of the waiting room seats and shoot him as he passed. Amazingly it would take a third Presidential assassination - that of William McKinley in 1901 - for Congress to give the President an official guard, the Secret Service.

Geary tells the story in an unusual way by comparing the lives of Garfield and Guiteau. Showing where one had a strong will to study and for hard work, and the other didn't, how people (in his eyes) are made either great or not. The story here isn't as compelling as Geary's other book on Lincoln's assassination with the background being less desperate and the assassin Guiteau acting alone on his own bizarre ideas rather than for a larger cause. He was a deeply religious man who believed “the Deity" had told him to kill Garfield and somehow believed this act would lead to a consulship in Paris. Strangely, it didn't.

The other interesting point is the lack of medical knowledge at this time. The many doctors who attended the President didn't think to operate to try and remove the bullet, nor knew how, and in fact, due to their many odd choices, made the President's injuries worse.

The Fatal Bullet is a compelling story, and Rick Geary has written another strong addition to the Treasury of Victorian Murder series - though perhaps it's not the best place to start. I'd recommend the book on Lincoln for a better Presidential assassination tale.

[George Ilsley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of information about the assassination of President Garfield. Good for all of us weak on US history.

[Taren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" starts "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood...". This is the basic outline of "The Fatal Bullet". 2 roads diverged, one traveled by our 20th President James Garfield, the other traveled by his assassin Charles Guiteau. Garfield enjoyed the American dream life: learned good lessons through hard work & determination, married his sweetheart & brought up a strong, Christian family. By chance, he found himself on the 1881 ballot as the Republican nominee for President. As anybody that has studied American history knows, his run for President was successful, & he became our 20th President. His role, however, would be short-lived as a crazy, misguided cook would do "God's work" & fatally shoot him before he was set to board the train on a much-needed vacation with his family. Guiteau had a similar upbringing to that of Garfield, but as all humans have the gift of free-will & choice, he made a choice to travel the broad road that would ultimately lead to his destruction. After the death of President Garfield, Guideau would face trial that would lead to a quick verdict of "guilty". He would die on the gallows in Washington, DC declaring his godly rightness right up to the last minute.

I am a lover of history, but I can honestly say I had never read much on President Garfield before this book. As with Geary's other graphic novels, it was a quick read that hit all of the important pieces of the story in order to paint a complete picture. The author did what any writer would hope to achieve: he created in me a desire to know more about the subject. I believe it will not be long before I pick up something else on President Garfield to get to know more about him & his short Presidency.

Age recommendation: 12 & up (assassination, death, felony behavior done under the misguided "spiritual leading")

On a scale of 1-10 stars, I give it 9.

[Nate]

My knowledge of President Garfield’s assassination was virtually nonexistent before reading this book, but leave it to Rick Geary to explain this bit of history in an entertaining way. He contrasts Garfield’s life with that of his assassin, the delusional religious nut Charles Guiteau. This guy was a true wacko who believed Garfield’s death would unite the Republican Party (which was fractured at the time) and that he was preordained to end him. Guiteau was a slimy character throughout his life, evading bills and lying about his background to get into politics. I was more interested in him than Garfield, who comes off as rather bland. Also, the jumps between characters can be jarring at times. This book doesn’t have quite the smoothness of Geary’s other books. Still, it’s a mostly interesting read, especially the final third when Guiteau makes his decision to kill Garfield and the aftermath. Another interesting factoid: Garfield regularly walked around D.C. without any security. It wasn’t until McKinley’s assassination twenty years later when the Secret Service began providing presidential protection.

[Radwa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Of the US presidential assasinations, I only knew of Lincoln in more details. This assasination followed that one, and I wasn't interested in a lot of the political details, because it felt very similar to the Lincoln assasination.

[Mark Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bad religion, delusions of grandeur ,egotism unfettered ,an immoral life style ,the killer would have been comfortable ,in the modren world.

[Sparrow .]

my new fascination is "historically-true comic books" (which are for some reason called "graphic novels"). There are remarkable truths in this text -- Alexander Graham Bell invented the metal detector for the purpose of finding the bullet inside Garfield, believe it or not. But the device did not work, because Garfield was laying on a metal bed. (But that latter fact is not in this book -- I began to investigate Garfield afterwards.) Did Garfield have a death wish? He seemed to just lay there, waiting to die. until he did. If he had jumped up and started slowly dancing, and resumed being president, he would have been fine. That's my suspicion. But he didn't WANT to be president -- he was just a weird compromise candidate chosen by a bunch of confused Republicans.

[Deborah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ah, Rick Geary, where were you when those dry, boring teachers were trying to teach me history? The assassination of James A. Garfield, about which I knew nothing, written in a comparison and contrast style as each the President and the assassin had very similar upbringings and yet chose completely different courses for their lives. Quick, brilliant read. The real struggle is whether to devour all my Rick Geary books at once or save and savor them. I vote for savor.

[Jennifer Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hanging my head in shame because of how little I knew about the assasination of our 20th president, James Garfield, and he was from Ohio so double shame on me! Interesting story that followed the parrell lives of the pres and the assasin. What is it that makes one man lead the free world and the other a religious nutjob who shot the president because it was "gods will"?

[Jurij Fedorov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second book in this series I rate 5 stars. Clean and to the point. In some other comic books the author made sure to include all his ideas and theories even ones that are quite weird. At times proposing why something happened. Here it's clean. An insane man marries a 16 year old. He has no great talents, but becomes a lawyer. He borrows money for clothing never returning anything traveling constantly to avoid repaying anything. He visits prostitutes and gets an STD. His wife divorces him. Church throws him out. He can't pay his debt and goes to prison. Then gets to live with his sister who he chases with a hatchet. This guy is utterly crazy. He moves to Washington to initially try to campaign for Garfield then to demand a job in the White House. Maybe be the ambassador in France. The position is filled already. He keeps contacting the White House staff like secretary of state and the president himself talking a bit to each. But he's crazy so no one even understands his points.

Finally he decides to shoot Garfield as there is a strife in the Republican party and he is the middle man. He wants to connect both sides, and sell his book Truth when this gets him famous. He shoots him and goes to prison being hanged soon after. Garfield was struggling for months. Doctors prodding the wound with their dirty fingers. No one helping, but besides looking they seemingly can't do much.

It's a case I didn't know much about. There is not much to know really. It was before secret service so killing a president was easy. Days before the shooting the president even talks to the secretary of war, Robert Lincoln, about how his father was murdered in Ford's theatre.

The story is simple and we don't learn much about the president. But he is presented as a genius and a guy who didn't really want to become president, but was elected as candidate against his will. He was in amazing shape when he got shot. With Lincoln I feel like he did all he set out to do and there was nothing else for him to do besides maybe resign the presidency and relax on a farm. Here it's quite a bit sadder as Garfield barely achieved anything it seems.

[Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I had graphic novels like this in high school, maybe I wouldn'tve nearly failed U.S. History! I do wish the author commented on Guiteau's mental health issues and not simply painted him as a villain. Also the religious undertones were a bit cringe. Otherwise an exciting and informative account of Garfield's assassination. It's crazy to think that one more president after Garfield and Lincoln before him (McKinley) had to be assassinated for the government to create the Secret Service.

[Drew Canole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fatal Bullet(2003)
- The assassination of James A. Garfield in 1881. Garfield, one of the other presidents to have been assassinated, I think these days is overshadows by Lincoln and certainly JFK. There's a fourth one too! William McKinley in 1901.
I found the story here really fascinating. Geary parallels the life of the honourable Garfield with that of his despicable assassin Charles J. Guiteau.

[Frank McGirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solidly good read, and now I know more about James Garfield (than you).

A good selection of nickle-knowledge surrounding the time and the event. My favorite...to deliver him, they laid train tracks right up to the entrance of the house the Garfield was to recuperate in.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. I like how it compared/contrasted the president and his assassin.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

52 Books in 52 Weeks - A true crime novel

[Rachel Piper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fine — I don’t like the assassination stories as much, but I’m a Geary completist.

[Darcy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well done!

[Ashton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cringey and odd but thoroughly enjoyed this, great follow up to visiting the Garfield National Historic Site

[Samuel Goldberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

How come getting shot is only fatal for good Presidents?

[Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Fatal Bullet: The assassination of James A. Garfield is a graphic novel by Rick Geary. The novel follows the lives of both men from birth to death in a third person point of view. We start with the birth of Charles Guiteau who grows up living a hard farm life martialed by his strict father. He leaves the farm determined to do great things. After many failed attempts at being a preacher, lawyer and so on he comes upon the idea to write presidential hopeful James Garfield a campaign speech. He fails to have anyone take his writing seriously despite his insistence so he decides he has enough political experience to get himself a job as an ambassador to Paris. He becomes a well-known pest amongst the Whitehouse staff and finally he is not allowed to even step in the Whitehouse. He realizes in his twisted logic that the only way for him to get a job is to get rid of Garfield and dissolve the polarization he perceived Garfield to be causing. Soon after he shoots the president and like everything else, fails. The president is however mortally wounded and Guiteau gets the attention he has always hoped for. Soon after Guiteau is hanged after the death of the president. He never does get the job of ambassador of Paris.

I found the graphic novel to be an effective way of learning about a piece of history and nothing more. I never felt connected to any of the characters and didn’t particularly feel compelled by the plot. However, the story line did move along nicely and the writing was clear. I did like the comparison of the two men at intervals through their lives to give the reader a feel for how when these two men’s lives inevitably crossed it would be disastrous. Overall I liked the novel for its informative nature in an easy to read text, but as a source of entertainment I wouldn’t rate it highly.

[Evan Hall · Rating 1 out of 5]

NON-FICTION CATEGORY
GRAPHIC NOVEL CATEGORY
"The Fatal Bullet" was an attempt to depict the divergent lives of James Garfield and his assassin, Charles Guiteau, but to do so through highlighting their similarities. Both were raised in the heartland by religious parents and both lost a parent early in their childhood. Unfortunately, the novel quickly abandons the more compelling aspects of the premise (like what specific differences in their rearing affected their later personalities) in favor of an irritatingly didactic tone that it maintained throughout. By the end, I felt educated about the James Garfield assassination but through a lens that I wasn't entirely sure I could trust. As with any depiction of history in black and white (and I do not mean this literally, though the graphic novel was indeed in black and white), the white-washing deletion of the details comes at a high cost, which is the deletion of the parts of history most worth examining. Both Garfield and his assassin were caricatures rather than people, and any historical fiction that takes me away from a rounded characterization of people from history is utterly failing in its primary purpose. That said, I did enjoy the spartan illustrations of the events.

[David Corleto-Bales · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very fine graphic novel about the superficially parallel lives of James Abram Garfield, a Civil War hero and powerful member of Congress who became the 20th president of the United States in 1881, and his assassin, Charles Guiteau, a mentally unbalanced fraudster who had lurched from failed scheme to failed scheme in search of a big score. Thinking he had helped get Garfield elected president, Guiteau stalked President Garfield for weeks after he was sensibly rebuffed for a fantastical diplomatic appointment. In 1881, the president could simply walk out of the White House, unguarded, down the street by himself, and much of Garfield's day was spent warding off and sifting through the hundreds of applications for government appointments. Interesting, historical, entertaining.

[Cindy Waite · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a graphic, non-fiction book. I have never read a graphic novel before and found the illustrations distracting from the words. It has great information about James Garfield and his assassin Charles Guiteau. It actually compares and contrasts the lives of the two men, which have many similarities, but end up so totally opposite in the accomplishments of their lives. So the content was interesting, but I found the mode of delivery to be distracting. Occasionally the author would add a quick pithy comment from one of the characters, which was very comic bookish (I know it isn't a word). I suppose that is a characteristic of the graphic genre, but I didn't care for it.

The information and comparisons were very good, but I'm just not a fan of the graphic novel.

[Jacqueline · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book felt off, as I am reading another book about Garfield right now I can point out several things that were missing, Geary doesn't mention that Robert Lincoln was the one to bring Doctor Bliss to the scene, nor does he mention that Bliss may have contributed to the presidents death due to his medical practices.

The book I am currently reading mentions nothing about an aneurysm, so I was confused when it was brought up here as the reason why the wound was fatal, U.S. Grant was quoted as saying men survived such wounds in the war.

I also disliked Geary's whitewashing of Garfield, mentioning angels taking up to heaven...really, Garfield was a man who hated how much people idolized him, which is just what Geary did.

[Allie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since reading Assassination Vacation, I am totally enamored of Garfield. While this book isn't a complete account of everything that happens (it's a graphic novel for pete's sake), it captured a sense of the event and the players. This book associated a little more grandeur to him than Sarah Vowell did, but I like that too.

I have a lot of mixed feelings toward Charles Guiteau. He was obviously unstable and delusional, but there is something deeply sad about him too. He kept failing at everything he did, and he was so convinced of his place in the world. There's something striking in that dischord.

[Hillary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Parallels the lives of Garfield and his assassin, Guiteau, in a way that illustrates potential paths for men in the nineteenth century, and while it doesn't discuss the medical details enough of Garfield's lingering death (it doesn't even explicitly mention the fact that the metal detector the doctors used to try to locate the bullet was in fact beeping at a spring in the mattress below him, leading to a lot of unnecessary and dangerous poking around inside the president), it does give a lot of thought to Guiteau's mentality and strange stop-and-start approach to the assassination.

[Hotavio · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book up in the gift shop of James Garfield National Historical Park in Ohio. The book details the lives of Garfield and his assassin Charles Guiteau up until the dastardly act. The best thing about the book is that it is a graphic novel!

The art is professionally done, fully employing a range of techniques, and the telling includes some of the intrigue that plagued US politics at the time.

I am delighted the this "Victorian Murder" series contains several more books dealing with criminal acts of the fascinating era.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well done little book, but I would have liked much more detail. I already know bits and pieces of the story of Garfield's assassination, and there's some fascinating information that didn't make it into the book--I wish Geary had mined much deeper in his storytelling. I wanted to see more depiction of the political intrigue and personal motives surrounding Garfield, the strange religious background of Guiteau, Guiteau's often bizarre participation in his legal defense, etc. So, the book is good for what it is, but I wish it had been significantly more detailed.

[Marjanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not know anything about Pres. Garfield until I read this book. Granted this is fairly brief, but still somewhat interesting. And honestly it’s a presidential assassination most people are unlikely to come across in their high school US history class, so it’s good for that reason. As usual, Geary’s Treasury Of Victorian Murder has been interesting, well written and drawn, and I’ll keep reading them.

[Salamah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story is about the assassination of James A. Garfield. I enjoy Rick Geary's work so I had to check this one out. I found it fascinating how the president in the late 1880's seemed like a normal everyday person. Garfield came and went as he pleased and even spoke to ordinary people. Today you nor I could get near the president! A sad story that shows how crazy some people in this world are.