Number 1026


Master of Murder Castle


The Dark Horse book, Blackjacked and Pistol-Whipped: The Best of Crime Does Not Pay, is available as of September 6. You can see a preview at Amazon.com. It looks like a must-have, double-bag item for me, a fan of crime comics, the more lurid the better.

And that's what we have today! "Master of Murder Castle," drawn by Fred Guardineer in his precise style, emphasizing the horrific story of a true serial killer, H. H. Holmes, who lived--and killed--in Chicago in the early 1890s.

As an add-on, I'm including some pages from Rick Geary's terrific book, A Treasury of Victorian Murder: The Beast of Chicago, published in 2003 by NBM. Geary, who has a real feel for the era, has done his usual superb job with his pen-and-ink drawings, evocative of steel engravings of that time. His story of H. H. Holmes is a not as lurid, but no less fascinating. Geary has a series of these books of famous murders and I highly recommend them.

I haven't seen the Crime Does Not Pay book, but I also recommend it based solely on the preview.

From Crime Does Not Pay #53, 1947:









From The Beast of Chicago, Part IV, 2003: