Wed Aug 19, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler

Review: Famous Players by Rick Geary

The second book in the Treasury of XXth Century Murder

Famous Players: The Mysterious Death of William Desmond Taylor
By Rick Geary
NBM, August 2009, $15.95

No one does murder like Rick Geary. For more than a decade he’s been regularly creating slim books in this loose series, each depicting a separate, horribly violent crime of passion in his inimitable crisp and detailed style, each with enough Geary detachment and subdued whimsy to keep the blood from being too much. This is the tenth – not including an earlier, larger-format Treasury of Victorian Murder, Vol. 1, which had shorter stories and served as a dry run for the later books – and Geary is still at it. As usual, he’s digging into once-scandalous events from about a century ago; the series was explicitly “Victorian” until last year’s Lindbergh Child, and this book examines a murder case in the early days of Hollywood.

After a few pages of scene-setting – and no one does scene-setting better than Geary, one of the very few cartoonists who routinely incorporates maps and schematics into his comics pages, and makes them fit perfectly – Geary focuses his story on 1922, when the star director of the highbrow but very successful Famous Players studio was William Desmond Taylor, a man of middle years who – as it turned out – was not really named William Desmond Taylor, and who had a complicated hidden past. That all came out after the morning of February 2^nd, when his cook/valet found him dead on the floor of his apartment. Police science was not advanced at that point, and the power of the studios was, so the crime scene was tampered with by various people – both random sightseers, hangers-on, and reporters as well as possibly culpable parties such as Famous Players’ “troubleshooter” and two of Taylor’s colleagues, whom Geary shows moving, concealing, and removing evidence. (What that evidence was – and whether it had anything to do with Taylor’s death – is of course impossible to know now.)

Geary as always is fascinated by complicated murder cases, where the culprits are mysterious or entirely unknown and the victims have secrets that even death couldn’t reveal. Taylor’s death is another such – there’s a mysterious self-proclaimed doctor, who gave an utterly wrong cause of death; a mysterious former lodger; Taylor’s secret gay life (even in 1922, not the first such in Hollywood); hysterical young starlets and their overprotective mothers. Geary revels in plots and possibilities in Famous Players as he did in his earlier books; he gives time to every wild surmise and possibility, shooting most of them down quickly but leaving the few that could be true standing. As in many of the previous books, there’s no simple answer here – history doesn’t know who killed Taylor, and Geary doesn’t claim to know, either.

Geary is one of the quiet treasures of comics, and Famous Players is another great book – a wry, thoughtful, meticulously researched investigation into an intriguing historical mystery, enlivened by his always perfectly-worded narration and his wonderfully evocative art.

Geary’s line, as usual with his mature style, is heavily horizontal and utterly controlled, but sprightly and unexpectedly energetic, with all the playfulness of his early surreal work now channeled into his character’s faces, typically meticulously rendered background details, and his often blackly amusing choice of angles and panels. Geary’s art is thrillingly paradoxical: both precise and puckish, filled with minute detail but always full of life and energy. Famous Players is another great Geary book, and as oddly joyful as ever, a celebration of life’s complexity and conditionality even as it’s an examination of the way one life ended.

Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He¹s been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.

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