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The Mighty Blockhead

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 3 months ago

Gruber, Frank - The Mighty Blockhead (1942)

 

The Mighty Blockhead (1941-1942) is the seventh Johnny Fletcher-Sam Cragg novel. It offers a background of an inside look at the fledgling comic book industry. American comic books had started in the early 1930's as a minor curiosity. The first Superman story (1938) changed comic books into a national craze, and huge commercial industry. Much of this industry was run by crooks who exploited the creative writers and artists. Gruber is well aware of this. In fact, his jaundiced, scathing and satirical treatment of the industry is the most knowing until such modern exposes as Gerard Jones' Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (2005). Artists continued to be naive in their dealings with crooked publishers for decades after The Mighty Blockhead appeared in 1942. In fact, in hindsight they would have been better off if they had read Gruber's novel, and taken its lessons to heart. Although The Mighty Blockhead eventually appeared in paperback, it seems to have been a relatively little known novel. It is not mentioned much by comic book historians, or for that matter, mystery experts.

 

The Van Dine school novelists of the Golden Age offered inside looks at New York City's intelligentsia, including Jerry North, the glamorous publisher-turned-amateur-sleuth in the novels of Frances and Richard Lockridge. Gruber also focuses on the publishing industry, in such mysteries as The Mighty Blockhead and the non-series The Fourth Letter. But Gruber's books target the lower depths of the publishing industry, not the prestigious, upscale literati featured by the Lockridges. Gruber had worked as an editor of a trade journal, and seems to have known the dark side of the publishing industry well. His books form an observant record of a creative but financially exploitative era of American cultural history.

 

The Mighty Blockhead shows good storytelling. Gruber keeps thickening the plot, adding new characters, situations and publishing industry detail to the story, in chapter after chapter. He pulls off a pair of decent mystery plot surprises along the way (see Chapter 8, and the start of Chapter 18). Unfortunately, there is nothing clever about the solution at the end of the novel. It is arbitrary, short, and does not offer a good explanation of why the corpse keeps getting moved around in the opening chapters.

 

The Mighty Blockhead resembles other Gruber novels, in that it offers retrospective looks back at the lives of its characters, and takes a side trip to the Midwest (here, Iowa).

 

Mike Grost

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