Strip for Murder by Max Allan Collins, Terry Beatty (Illustrator)

From the Publisher

Manhattan, 1953. Hal Rapp's Tall Paul, one of America's most popular comic strips, is now a Broadway musical, infuriating Rapp's long-time rival Sam Fizer, creator of the once beloved boxing strip Mug O'Malley. Adding insult to injury is the casting of Misty Winters, Fizer's wife, as one of Rapp's hillbilly gals. Then Fizer is found murdered——with all evidence pointing to Rapp.

Starr Syndicate has distribution deals with both cartoonists, but V.P. Jack Starr and his stepmother (and company president) Maggie believe Rapp's been framed. Between loan sharks, jealous husbands, bitter artists, and Fizer's widow, there are more colorful characters with murderous motives than in a month of Sunday funnies.

New York Times

Bestselling author Max Allan Collins "has an outwardly artless style that conceals a great deal of art.

VOYA

Decades ago, this reviewer read a cousin's comic books surreptitiously at our grandparents' cottage, their merits paling in the eyes of parents who fed me classics such as Little Women and Anne of Green Gables. Fortunately comics have long since earned solid respect in poignant graphic novels, robust adventures, and now in entertaining mysteries such as Collins's Jack and Maggie Starr series. No adolescent protagonist, Jack narrates in the tradition of wisecracking, nearly-know-it-all detectives. Here he describes his stepmother/boss Maggie, "a woman pushing forty who men under twenty would still gladly pay to see naked, though she's given that up." The setting is postwar, 1953 New York City, in the colliding competitive worlds of Broadway and publishing, where a new musical based on a strip is opening-starring publisher Maggie Starr. Mystery and layered complications involve the death of a comic strip creator, his rival, and scores of colorful characters-real and fictional. The novel opens at a costume party in a comic strip universe. Collins's plot is inspired by the Al Capp/Lil Abner-Ham Fisher/Joe Palooka cartoonist feud. Creative ethics, McCarthyism, jealousies, and backbiting come together in playfulness, wordplay, double entendre. Readers unfamiliar with classic comics or the world of comics in general might be challenged by the swirling mix of realistic fiction and fiction-fiction-are Sunflower Sue and Dick Tracy for real? Artist Beatty provides enticing, stylized, comic panels to introduce each chapter, as well as a brief chapter of panels. Jack's voice is smarmy tough-guy; his observations bring smiles, even in a "strip for murder." Reviewer: Patti Sylvester Spencer

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