Euro Previews: Dive Into The Adventures Of The American Sherlock Holmes: ‘Harry Dickson’

Billed as a series that’s “part Sherlock Holmes, part X-Files“, Harry Dickson finds a 1930s investigator being drawn into all manner of mysteries — it’s the beginning of a new Cinebook series to explore…

Harry Dickson comes from pulp dime-novel origins, his creator unknown, with the first German series being 230 issues long and running from 1907-1911. An obvious Holmes copy, even using Holmes’ name for the first few episodes, the series was hugely successful, with French and Dutch translations and new stories soon following.

By 1928, Jean Ray, the pen name of prolific Belgian writer Raymundus Joannes de Kremer, became involved. Initially meant to simply be one of a few writers charged with translating the series into French, he swiftly became frustrated dealing with terrible storylines. He added his own style, rewriting so much, introducing better language, more complex plots, effectively using the original as a mere starting point. When he decided enough was enough and told his publisher he was leaving, his very canny publisher persuaded him to stay with the promise of being able to write his own Harry Dickson tales. The only proviso was that, as there was no money to commission new art for the covers, the plot had to at least feature whatever was found on the original covers at some point. Ray’s series was incredibly successful and incredibly fast, with the author writing at least books 81 through to the final book, issue 178, although Ray remembers writing over 100, between 1933 and 1938.

Sure, the character may well be new to you — it certainly was to me — but it will be a very familiar thing, all very Holmes-like, taking so many of the master detective’s most famous tropes onboard but, fittingly with Ray’s horror writing, with the introduction of fantastical, diabolical, and mystical elements.

As for the comics, they came a lot later, with Dargaud publishing adaptations of the books from 1986-2003, written by Christian Vanderhaeghe and drawn by Pascal J. Zanon. There were also new stories written by Richard Nolane and drawn by Olivier Roman and published by Soleil between 1992-2014. However, Cinebook have taken the decision to go with the most recent comic series, the one from Dupuis that began with this album in 2023, the script by Luana Vergari and Doug Headline from a story by Jean Ray and illustrated by Onofrio Catacchio.

The first few pages you’ll see below just read quite beautifully, introducing us to author Delphina Cruikshank, living in her incredibly impractical home — all down to a vast inherited fortune — as she watches one particular room in neighbouring Wormwood Scrubs prison where they’re testing a brand new machine of execution.

What happens next is the mystery that has Scotland Yard at the door of Harry Dickson once more — Cruikshank has disappeared from her locked and inaccessible home, the corpse of the murderer executed by the machine she was viewing has disappeared, and the doctor who carried out the execution has been murdered. The game, as a certain someone famously said, is afoot!

Obviously, this is pure Holmesian stuff, unashamedly so. But there’s a profound joy in that – or at least there is when it’s all done as well as it is here. The mysteries of the disappearances and the murder all seem to be tied into Cruikshank’s latest novel, entitled Mysterion – and there’s the possibility that Mysterion itself may not be as fictional as once thought.

So, we have a murder mystery packed full of twists and turns with Dickson doing his Holmes-like best impression, elements of the dark arts involved, plenty of different locales – and all in all we have what is a grand page-turner. It’s one I’ll be impatiently awaiting the second part to!

Harry Dickson Volume 1 – Mysterion – by Luana Vergari and Doug Headline, from a story by Jean Ray; illustrated by Onofrio Catacchio. Colours by Hiroyuki Ooshima, translation by Jerome Saincantin

Published by Cinebook on 22 February 2024

Now, preview time…