The Casebook Of Stamford Hawksmoor

By Bryan Talbot
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
ISBN:9781787335516

Nineteenth-century French illustrator Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, working under the name Grandville, drew satirical cartoons featuring anthropomorphic animals. British comic author and illustrator Bryan Talbot stumbled across the cartoons and was inspired to create a series of graphic novels using the same concept.

In the stories, France won the Napoleonic wars and England has been under French rule ever since. 

This new stand-alone book is set before the events of the previous five-book series, and doesn’t require you to have read them. Featuring a Sherlock Holmes-like detective in the eagle-headed form of Stamford Hawksmoor, it’s a story about murder, blackmail and corruption. And it’s very, very good. 

Talbot has painted the entire book in sepia-tinged colours, and his eye for costumes and architecture, not to mention his adherence to the rules that constrain his world-building, make for a gripping mystery. 

But it’s not just the illustrations that sell the story to the reader. Talbot’s writing is tight and well-paced, keeping a complicated – and very adult – plot simmering nicely, but the icing on the cake is his dialogue. Stamford Hawksmoor speaks with an intelligence and vocabulary that stands him above his peers, while other characters, from Walter (a pigeon) to Oswald (Stamford’s estranged son) are more than the sum of their parts through the words they speak.

It’s a weighty hardback, running to over 180 pages, and yet once I started it I didn’t want to break away from reading. I’m a big fan of the previous Grandvile books, but this stand-alone story is the best of them all. 

And if you liked that: Pick up the first Grandville book for more anthropomorphic, historical adventures.