But while loss is central in The Black Diamond Detective Agency, it’s not the loss of some perfect or simpler time or the loss of innocence.  The book’s more complicated than that—more mundane, though it involves murder and sabotage.  People lose their lives.  Jackie loses his wife.  The past is now.

So many comics set in the past almost ache themselves with nostalgia.  Creators protect themselves from the heartbreak of the world now by creating a lost Eden or a cynically violent Armageddon with realism so gritty who can tell whether they’re crying or just have something in their eyes.  (Yeah, I’m looking at you, Frank Miller).  The Black Diamond Detective Agency is grounded in details of everyday life at the end of the Nineteenth Century, including a reference to The Yellow Kid, but it’s not escapist.  Though there are both heartbreak and devastation portrayed with stunning care, the book isn’t nostalgic or cynical. 

Beginning on September 3, 1899, The Black Diamond Detective Agency follows Jackie Hardin, a dead ringer for Steve McQueen, as he tries to discover who framed him for bombing a train in the center of Lebanon, Missouri.  The town had been crowded with citizens blockading the train. Hardin had allegedly riled them up against the railroads. The eponymous private detectives discover nitroglycerin boxes with Hardin’s name on them and they begin to track him. 

It’s fitting that a graphic novel set on the cusp of the Twentieth Century would balance between genres— gangster stories, Westerns, Hardboiled detective fiction and Cold War thrillers.  The elements all cohere and eras turn out not to be inherent in genre, or at least in The Black Diamond Detective Agency, which, if I had to choose, I would call a Western.  I won’t hold to that label too tight, though, since 1899 is a little late for most Westerns and a little early for Chicago gangster stories.  Is it the end of gunslingers, bounty hunters and desperadoes or the beginning of gangsters, private detectives and spies?  The divisions between genres make are convenient ways of framing material.  But this story won’t be fixed in place so easily. 

While it’s based on “the manuscript of a Kinematographic play by Mr. C. Gaby Mitchell,” I think that The Black Diamond Detective Agency is better as a graphic novel than it would be as a movie. Sometimes cinema forces a feeling on an audience and loses sentiment in sentimentality.   In a graphic novel, there’s less risk orchestral swellings as the camera focuses on blasted Lebanon or the glass embedded in Jackie Hardin’s face.  Campbell’s art provides the perfect, silent frame with thick black lines delineating some of the action, but not all of it.  And, in one crucial moment, a woman’s screaming mouth is surrounded by a sudden red panel.

I particularly liked Campbell’s use of bright red for blood, gunshots, explosions and anything violent.  The red is startling against his largely muted palette—not nostalgic sepia, but not drab either. FirstSecond publishing’s design for the book itself is Old Timey—possibly more whimsical than the book—including multiple typefaces and those little engraved gentleman’s hands pointing at objects of interest.  Even in the promotion, though, there are other times and media evoked.  Behold, The Black Diamond Detective Agency trailer. 

Ending on midnight, January 1, 1900, the book also prefigures the Twentieth Century with two detectives foreshadowing the next 50 years.  “Electric taxis.  Flying buggies.  It’s all moving too fast for me, Bob.” 

Bob responds, “You’re a nineteenth century man, Billy.” 

Hearing Scott Joplin’s “The Great Crush Collision March” performed in a bar, Billy says, “I don’t get it Bob—now they’re writing music that sounds like a cornfield meet.  Next it’ll be statues that don’t look like nobody and paintings with nothing in’em but your nightmares.” 

They greet the New Year with a toast, “Up yours modern times!” (137)

Despite all the irony in “paintings with nothing in’em but your nightmares,”—and a reference to the closing scene of The Graduate—The Black Diamond Detective Agency presents the Nineteenth Century with a sense of possibility and without the lines we draw now between now and then, us and them.  Which is probably why I don’t sense any nostalgic loss in the book.  There would have to be a clear lines around then and now, a frame to fix the past.

~~~

With the electric taxis, flying buggies and the ragtime, these modern times might be moving too fast for Carol Borden as well.  She does like statues that don’t look like nobody.

Tags: C. Gaby Mitchell , Chicago , detectives , Eddie Campbell , gangsters , heists , Missouri , mysteries , Nineteenth Century , noir , nostalgia , realism , screenwriting , spies , Steve McQueen , thrillers , Westerns