The Reader is Warned

There’s an old saying that the third time’s the charm. Having read two of Donald Thomas’ Sherlock Holmes continuations (The Secret Cases of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice from the Crypt), I was hoping that this saying would apply to the third of these collections, The Execution of Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

My previous two Donald Thomas reviews went through each individual story, giving a brief plot summary and my opinion of the story in question, but I don’t much relish the prospect of doing the same with this book. So instead, I’ll go over the general premise of the book and just what has gone wrong.

The Dark Knight Rises

As I begin writing this review, it is 3:23 AM Eastern Standard Time. I got back from the movie theatre minutes ago, having seen The Dark Knight Rises at its midnight premiere in IMAX format. This for me is a first on a few levels: it’s the first time I’ve ever gone to see a movie at midnight, and it’s also the first IMAX movie I’ve ever seen. It’s also the most exciting movie I’ve gone to see in a while. I have awaited The Dark Knight Rises ever since I saw The Dark Knight. I looked forward to this movie more than The Avengers, more than Inception, more than The Dark Knight itself. So does the movie deliver or does it fall flat?

The Dark Knight Rises clocks in at an epic 2 hours and 45 minutes, but the movie doesn’t feel like it’s taking that long. There’s a lot of story to cram in, and although the first half hour or so is mainly build-up, when the action kicks in it does so with a vengeance, and everything builds up to the most spectacular conclusion I’ve ever seen in cinemas… and I’m choosing my words carefully.

Out of the Darkness

I have recently been doing a lot of Batman reviews as I prepare for the release of The Dark Knight Rises. Although initially I was hoping to see the movie on the Friday it came out, I just found out a few days ago that I won’t even be in town at the time. Luckily, this means that I can see the movie at midnight on Thursday night—so I look forward to going to my very first midnight IMAX screening in under a week!

This can only mean one thing: more Batman! And so, good readers, I give you The Black Mirror, written by Scott Snyder. Technically, this isn’t a Batman storyline—it initially appeared in Detective Comics—but it does feature Batman. Sort of. A lot of things have happened in the series since I last checked in (although thanks to the DC reboot, I suppose none of it ever happened after all—but let’s ignore that). Dick Grayson has taken up the Batman’s cape. Bruce Wayne apparently has a son now! And I’m sure there’s plenty of other continuity stuff I completely blanked out on. But as long as the reader knows that Dick Grayson is now Batman, they shouldn’t have a problem following the story along.

Knight of Darkness

By now, readers of the blog are probably well-familiar with my recent spate of Batman-related reviews: short Batman stories written by various authors and collected in book form by the late Martin H. Greenberg. These reviews are an opportunity for me to change genres a little bit without straying too far from the blog’s focus on mysteries. It’s also a neat way for me to count down to the release of The Dark Knight Rises.

But this led to a very serious existential question: why stop there? Why not go all the way and actually review a mystery comic book (preferably with Batman in it)? After all, I’ve criminally neglected comic books on this blog—my only previous comic book review was of an adaptation of Paul Halter’s The Demon of Dartmoor. Thus began my hunt for successful mystery comic books, as I asked around various places for suggestions. I got some really great, intriguing suggestions: Watchmen, Blacksad, 100 Bullets, Powers, Batman: The Black Mirror… and then there’s today’s book, Batman: The Long Halloween.

Batman, Riddle Me This!

Bruce Wayne, dressed in the Batman costume at a social function, runs into Commissioner Gordon, who confides in him that the Riddler is back in town, leaving a corpse in the river with a tattoo on its chest. Before long, the Riddler strikes again, vandalising a famous painting and leaving behind another riddle. This starts a chain of riddles and crimes, as the Riddler targets the “Wise Men of Gotham”. It’s up to Batman to solve the riddles and save the wise men.

It’s the promising plot of Edward Wellen’s Wise Men of Gotham, collected in The Further Adventures of Batman. I don’t know much about Wellen, and all I could discover about him was in obituaries that informed me that he was a mystery-SF writer known for his short fiction. (Why do mystery and sci-fi writers often cross over in genres? Seriously: Anthony Boucher, Fredric Brown, Robert Sheckley, René Reouven, and now Edward Wellen!)

Batman the Bird Watcher

The Penguin has just been released from prison on parole, but the Batman is not happy about this. So he’s sure to welcome the jailbird and warn him that one of his hobbies is bird watching. However, it seems that this time, the Penguin (whose real name is Oswald Cobblepot) has turned over a new leaf. There are no more crimes bearing his signatures: umbrellas and birds. But Batman isn’t quite satisfied, and for good reason…

That’s the plot of Max Allan Collins’ Robber’s Roost, a Batman story collected in The Further Adventures of Batman Volume 2: Featuring the Penguin. The Penguin seems like an odd choice to get his own volume of stories. He’s one of the more preposterous villains, a gentleman thief whose shtick is umbrellas and an obsession with birds. Which isn’t to say anything against the Penguin; he’s just one of the hardest villains to treat realistically, which seems to be what stories in these books try to do.

Batman Meets the Black Widowers

Yesterday I made the surprising discovery that Isaac Asimov contributed a short story to The Further Adventures of Batman— but not only that, this short story was one that reunited his famous Black Widowers! Entitled Northwestward, the subtitle reads “Black Widowers #61”. The story seems to have been an original one, and was only collected posthumously in the 2003 collection The Return of the Black Widowers.

It seems like explaining the Black Widowers is redundant to mystery fans, but there could be someone out there who is unfamiliar with the stories. (Indeed, I myself have only read a handful of them, despite meaning to read more.) The Black Widowers are a literary dining club that meets once a month. Each month, a different person plays the part of the host and brings along a guest to the meeting. Women are not allowed. When the brandy is served, the Black Widowers being the grilling of the guest of honour, who is asked to justify his existence. This is where the mysterious problem lies, and the Widowers fail to solve it. Henry, the waiter, is the one who comes up with the correct, and very simple, answer.

Batman and the Man Who Laughs

One day, as the citizens of Gotham City are watching the news, the broadcast is interrupted. A cloud of static invades the screen, and when it fades out, the Joker, that Clown Prince of Crime, is sitting there smiling. And then he makes a truly astonishing announcement: he is retiring from the criminal world! He says that he will sorely miss Gotham, and that it has been good to him, but that he now wishes to go away and live a nice, quiet, peaceful life.

Bruce Wayne – a. k. a. Batman – doesn’t buy it. Neither does Commissioner Gordon. In fact, all of Gotham City mistrusts the Joker’s announcement. But it seems he’s been true to his word! His gang has been disbanded, the Joker has apparently left town, and nothing unusual happens for several weeks. Phew! It’s a good thing that things are nice and peaceful for the arrival of a travelling art exhibition! Or is the Joker keeping quiet in order to plan out his attack on the exhibit?

Batman Triumphant

The Joker is dead. While fighting his legendary arch-nemesis, Batman killed him by accident, pushing the Joker into one of his own deathtraps and crushing the Clown Prince of Crime between two grindstones. But who does Bruce Wayne see the next day walking on the streets? After multiple encounters with the Joker, or his double, or whatever it is, Bruce Wayne decides to check into the finest hotel in Gotham City, the New Era, where something fishy seems to be going on.

These are the events of Death of the Dreammaster by Robert Sheckley, a Batman story collected in The Further Adventures of Batman. It is the first story of the collection, and it has got the most imaginative build-up of any Batman story I’ve read thus far. From what I’ve discovered, Sheckley was known for his science fiction output, but he wrote some novels involving mystery and espionage. And to be honest, if I didn’t look up Sheckley, I might have mistaken him for a hardboiled mystery novelist, because that is the best description I can come up with for this Batman tale.

Batman Returns

This is the second instalment in my unofficial series on Batman stories. To catch up on why I am doing this, feel free to read the first post in the series, which is also a review of Edward D. Hoch’s The Pirate of Millionaire’s Cove.

***

Although I have yet to read one of his novels, Max Allan Collins is no stranger to me, or to this blog. When I did a series of reviews of hardboiled mysteries, I kicked it off with one of his quotes and agreed with the general sentiment (though I expressed reservation at the generalisation of it). A while ago, he did a slideshow for The Huffington Post where he chose his “game changers” in the mystery genre—not necessarily personal favourites, mind you, but people who really transformed the genre in different ways. And this list was an interesting one! Kudos to Collins for praising Agatha Christie’s characterization and for including Ellery Queen on the list, and also for an excellent defense of Mike Hammer, although it is not a defense that makes me warm up to the character. (Also, the comments are frankly depressing, and if I hear one more person praise an author as “transcending the genre”, it’s to the guillotine for them!)

But I bring up Collins today because as it turns out, he too wrote a Batman adventure that was collected in The Further Adventures of Batman. Entitled The Sound of One Hand Clapping, this is a story that includes Batman’s arch-nemesis, the Clown Prince of Crime—The Joker!

Batman!

My name is Patrick and I have a confession to make: I freakin’ love Batman. Perhaps it’s a silly obsession. A multi-millionaire dresses in a dark blue costume and stalks the streets of his cities fighting crimes? (It’s particularly hard to believe in this day and age where you can be famous for doing nothing whatsoever— just ask the Kardashians!) Not to mention the Rogues’ Gallery, featuring such unlikely psychos as The Mad Hatter (who is my personal favourite), The Penguin, Catwoman, or The Joker.

But there is a poignancy to the Batman story. This is a man who saw his parents gunned down as a young boy, and so he dedicates his life to making sure nobody else has to experience the same thing he did. In the recent Christopher Nolan reboot film Batman Begins, an intriguing angle was added by making the young Bruce Wayne partly responsible for the death of his parents. It was indirect, of course, but it was another thing that could eat away at his psyche at such a fragile age, and which makes his determination to fight crime that much more believable.