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Exploding The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor By Bryan Talbot

Exploding a Grandville prequel, The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor by Bryan Talbot ahead of Thought Bubble this weekend #grandville

Three years ago, Doctor Bryan Talbot told me, "As a fan of Grandville, you might be interested to know that the book I'm planning to draw after Mary's next is a Grandville prequel, set 23 years before the first book, at the time of the French withdrawal from Britain – "The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor". Already scripted!" Well, three years later, it has come to fruition, launching at the Thought Bubble Comic Art Festival in Harrogate this weekend.

Although I read my copy in London, a city in which much of the book is set. Here's me reading a scene set in Seven Dials… while in Seven Dials. In the comic, it is a place for sex workers to ply their trade, but I was only going for cheese. Grandville is – or was – an anthropomorphic steampunk, alternative history and thriller series of graphic novels, set in a world in which France won the Napoleonic Wars, and invaded Britain for a time. The lead character is Detective Inspector Archibald "Archie" LeBrock of Scotland Yard, a humanoid badger police detective who combines the roles of Lestrade and Sherlock Holmes. Initially published in 2009, the first Grandville book saw LeBrock visit Grandville, the series' name for Paris, where he investigated a murder that led him to uncover a political conspiracy aimed at harming Britain. A second, third, and fourth volume followed, with Grandville Mon Amour in 2010, Grandville Bête Noire in 2012, and Grandville: Nöel published in 2014. The fifth final volume, Grandville: Force Majeure, was released in 2017. In that last volume, we got flashbacks to explore the origin of LeBrock, discovering what – and who – made him the badger he became.

And that included meeting LeBrock's old boss, Stamford Hawksmoor, the hawk who dragged LeBrock up from being a general plod with a chip on his shoulder over the old school tie network, and made him the feared detective he is in Grandville. And now we have his own stories to be told: The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor, published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Canada, and Delirium 77 in France; it seems to be only available digitally in the US. But really, this is not a book you want to read digitally. It is a sumptuous hardcover, made all the more like an artefact in and of itself by touches like this.

"County library withdrawn from circulation" usually the mark of a book that has gotten too tatty and has been sold off, but here, it suggests a far more sinister and totalitarian reason why this book may have been removed from polite society. This is the story of the man who made a man out of the badger, in a world undergoing the greatest of changes. A London, colonised by the French, now on its way to independence, as former terrorists are moving into government, well, some of them at least. And what do you do with the statues?

The scenario bears resemblances to the aftermath of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the South African Emancipation and, of course, Brexit. As Napoleon's column, placed where Nelson is in our world, is taken down from its plinth in what would be our Trafalgar Square, with no lions around the base, here Napoleon is – or was – the lion. The palette is one of knocked-back sepia throughout the book, which adds to the historical artefact of the whole thing.

And within all this political upheaval, there is a murder, of a commoner, for mysterious reasons, by someone who might be a Ripper. And in the dodgier parts of town… mixing actual and invented history into a brand new whole.

But given the similarities to Sherlock Holmes, or indeed the real-life physician Joseph Bell, from whom Conan Doyle bases much of his initial inspiration, it's not just mental gymnastics; it gets rather physical as well.

The differences in histories, as well as physicalities, are eked out, Shakespeare forgotten by all but the most literate, replaced in consciousness by French playwrights… English itself has all but gone as a language. We are reading the comic using the literary device of literal translation. We read in English, but it is meant to be in French. The French language version will have no such disconnect.

The case sees Hawksmoor travel across London and beyond, traversing class from the highest to the lowest, and the hidden places that both interact, where sex is for sale in its multitude of varieties, and a knowledge of the polari of the day, without ever having to have even listened to Round The Horne or Beyond Our Ken.

And all with the backdrop of a fight for independence, even if there is no prize, no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, just flags and national anthems, that might feel very familiar right now.

Because, yes, there are plenty of aspects of Brexit and recent nationalist fervour in England that get reinterpreted and reintegrated into this detective story, as the world is changing, but Hawksmoor's mission to uncover the truth remains the same. And when the first starts to explain the second, Hawksmoor remains committed to hunting his prey, whatever level of power it takes him to. And it informs the plot of Force Majeure; those who read that will know some of what is coming, and where this has to go; those who haven't will just enjoy it unspoiled.

And I am a sucker for a good prequel, and I entirely blame C.S. Lewis for setting that frame with The Magician's Nephew, giving explanations for things that were entirely mysterious, gaining a deeper understanding of a world and then blowing out the doors and the walls as to where this could all go next.

Oh yes, and as with Grandville, everyone is an anthropomorphic humanoid animal, reflecting personality traits in the form they take. No wonder Phillip Pullman, who gave us the daemons of His Dark Materials, writes the forward, recalling Rupert the Bear. It's always surprising how easy I slip back into this world and treat it as usual, even when they are eating pigeon, without acknowledging that some of them are pigeons. Force Majeure was my favourite comic of 2017; Stamford Hawksmoor is definitely in the running for 2025.

The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor by Bryan Talbot will be on hand at Thought Bubble, in Harrogate, England, this weekend at the Jonathan Cape stand at Comixology Hall D16, and Gosh Comics in London has signed copies available right now.

The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor by Bryan Talbot published by Jonathan Cape
With top-hat and cane in hand, Scotland Yard's DI Stamford Hawksmoor shadows the murky backstreets of London on the hunt for a sadistic serial killer. In the dying days of the French occupation of Britain, through gaslit, cobbled streets and squalid alleyways, stalks the great eagle Detective Stamford Hawksmoor in search of the homicidal manic whose killing spree claims dozens of seemingly unconnected victims, from random murders to targeted political assassinations.The deeper he delves, the more he puts himself in mortal danger, pitting himself against unknown antagonists whilst under the scrutiny of the feared anti-terrorist squad, and the more he is forced to resort to working outside the law. A prequel to Talbot's pioneering Grandville series, The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor is also an intriguing, labyrinthine stand-alone mystery graphic novel set in a world of hansom cabs and pea-souper fogs, where explosive violence can erupt at any second – and does!

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