What I'm Reading: The Fatal Bullet
I’ve been trying to read the whole set of Geary’s Victorian Murder but it’s been hard to track them all down. I actually found The Fatal Bullet and Famous Players at a nearby library. The Fatal Bullet was surprisingly good. So far, the quality has generally been dependent on the subject matter. Geary takes a similar approach to The Murder of Lincoln by showing parallels between the life of the murderer and the murdered.
The Fatal Bullet starts off excellent showing the lives of both its main characters with Geary’s typical inventive panel layouts. The opening panel of a bird’s eye view of Garfield’s casket surrounded by marble floor in the rotunda of the Capital is one of the best in the whole series. It starts to fall apart in the second and third part as the assassin, Guiteau, isn’t really crazy or scary enough to really drive the story, and as the layouts becomes more stock. Garfield is depicted well, as an intelligent and likable person, but thrust in slightly over his head. Here’s my ranking that I’ve read:
Jack the Ripper > HH Holmes > Bloody Benders > Fatal Bullet > Assassination of Lincoln> Lindberg Child > The Borden Tradegy
