Content Notes for detectives and organized crime, people are tailed, there are threats of violence and some violence. A dog is fed chocolate, but it only makes them hyperactive where I was under the impression that they could die?
This is not an action book, it's more a study of either character or of life I guess. As I already mentioned there are threats and some instances of violence. But like with most stuff I enjoy, the violence is not the focus of the visuals. We don't get decompressed frame after frame of the action or gore or whatever. Obviously that is a personal choice for me and not necessarily a moral judgement. I save that more for the ways I feel like violence is taken seriously or not, and I did appreciate how when people in this book are beat up they stay beat up for a reasonable amount of time and weren't just magically healed in the next panel.
What keywords came to mind reading this book? Noir, grey morality, being a grown up, and creative problem solving.
And, while I don't actually like it that much, let's flip to the official synopsis and then I'll comment. " After two years of unemployment, Maggy Garrisson lands a secretarial job. Too bad her new boss is the shady, chaotic Anthony Wight: private detective and alcoholic. But a job is a job, and Maggy could use the cash. Five days into her new role, Wight is beaten to a pulp and Maggy is tasked with returning his wallet. With this seemingly innocuous request, Maggy enters a sinister underworld of corrupt cops, crooked businessmen, and career criminals. There’s a lot to investigate, from the disappearance of a family album to the theft of gold teeth from bodies at the crematorium. But for someone with the energy, ingenuity, and enterprising spirit of Maggy Garrison, puzzles are there to be solved—especially if there’s money to be made in the process."
And this is the reason I was hesitant to pick this book up. It's not not true, but I feel like it makes Maggy's character seem super generic noir babe. But let's continue to dig in.
As far as the quality of words and art goes, it was very good in my opinion. But I could barely put this book down, so somewhat biased. The page layouts were actually super basic, but I was never bored. I suspect the secret is that the framing of each scene and the way that the characters moved communicated a lot.
But the gender representation is probably where I felt like the book really shined.
To start with, Maggy is neither virgin or whore, and she is neither a prude or a party girl. Not to say any of these things are bad, obviously, but even empowered female characters can fall into tropes. Maggy drinks a lot of beer at the pub and bums a lot of cigarettes, she has an average body, and hides her ill gotten gains in apparently very predictable places. We see Maggy partially unclothed twice and even in the shower once, but nothing in the composition of the frame directed me to objectify Maggy. The frames were generally just communicating, time goes by and Maggy is comfortable in her home with this person.
Maggy is also never put on a pedestal. She blends in very nicely with the generally gray morality of everyone around her. She seeks out female friendship but isn't super girly either. Maggy's not an action star by any stretch of the imagination, but she can still handle herself around all the tough guys that the plot line sends her way. Flipping back through the book I'm pretty sure she almost never smiles.
Sexuality is pretty heteronormative, but I must admit that I liked the way that the romantic relationship developed throughout the book. It's not a romance, and as much as it was not action centric it was also not titillating in the romantic or sexual departments either. We just get glimpses as Maggy and Alex's lives cross paths professionally and personally; winding closer and closer together. Coming from very different directions, both of them develop and reveal themselves to us in interesting ways. It's a lot of show and not tell.
Race was pretty good. Both of the main characters are white, but it felt like we had something at least close to proportional representation of black and people of colour in side and background characters. I'm not the final judge on these things, but we read so many books where everyone is pearly white, so as someone who lives in a very racially diverse city (which I believe London is also supposed to be) it was nice to break things up a bit.
It also helps that the bad guys, as much as there can be bad guys in a book that (as I've already noted) mostly sits in the moral grey area are bosses and cops. This understanding of power dynamics and the female representation really sold this book for me. Because so many noir things objectify the female form and shill for cops, to the point where I'm not sure if this is exactly noir because it doesn't do those things. But otherwise I think the tone, level of smoking, and morality really remind me of noir so I'm sticking to it. Maggy and Alex and both pushed into their positions in part because they cannot find work elsewhere and Maggy is shown several times stealing food and cigarettes because she has no money. Neither character has much ambition in life and that's ok.
Any exploration of ability vs disability was mostly left unexplored, except for as I said previously, the fact that several people are beaten and they generally seem to stay beaten for a reasonable amount of time. People disappear out of the story to reappear much later having been released from the hospital.
Yes I'm fanning out over this one but I think I'm going to rate this one five out of five.