Two Dead by Van Jensen and Nate Powell

I'll probably be short here - my time is limited this morning and my old instincts in writing about mysteries (from doing reader's reports for a decade and a half for bookclubs) is to explain everything in order, using every character's name prominently. And that is, frankly, a lousy model for writing about mystery stories, as anyone can see.

Two Dead is a mystery, or maybe a thriller, since we know most of the details from the beginning. It was written by Van Jensen and drawn by Nate Powell, telling a story of cops and criminals in 1946 Little Rock - a city they both know well, though maybe not in that era. (They're both somewhat too young to have been around then - frankly, nearly everyone in the world at this point is too young to have been around eighty years ago.) It's a graphic novel, in an oversized format, which presents Powell's characteristic ominous chiaroscuro art well.

Like many stories about crime and criminals, it's a book of dualities - there are four main characters, in groups of two. Gideon Kemp is a young WWII veteran, who just joined the police force as a detective and is secretly working for the mayor to root out the organized crime that at least partially runs this city. He's mentored by Abraham Bailey, the haunted middle-aged Chief of Detectives, who is teetering on the edge of some kind of mental breakdown. (He sees visions of his original, long-dead partner all the time, for the most obvious manifestation.)

On the other side of one line in town - the color barrier - are brothers Jacob and Esau Davis. (Jensen may be just a bit too obvious with the names here.) Jacob is another WWII veteran, and head of the unpaid, volunteer Black police force that patrols their neighborhoods: it's a bit more than a neighborhood watch, since there's some backing from the government, but they are not cops and they are not equal to the White population and they seem to mostly try to keep things from exploding. Esau works for the criminal gangs that run Little Rock, and, as the book begins, has just attracted the attention of one of the leaders, Big Mike.

The story of Two Dead is what those four characters do - how Gideon and Abe try to stop organized crime, in their own ways (and what they find along the way, how that crime has infiltrated local government), and how Jacob and Esau are caught in the middle of it, pulled to one side or the other. And how Big Mike and his compatriots fight back, in the typically violent ways of organized criminals in an era when they could do nearly anything.

It's not a happy story: both Gideon and Abe are suffering PTSD for different reasons, the Davis brothers are Black in a deeply racist town a decade before the Civil Rights era could give them any serious hope. And the title is Two Dead. It's not quite noir, but it's in the same broad territory - crime fiction set in a world with only shades of grey, where everyone has an agenda and most of them are at least slightly unbalanced.

An afterword explains that it's all based on a true story - how closely isn't clear, but it sounds fairly close. So the ending was baked in from the beginning: this all happened, more or less, eighty years ago. Jensen and Powell turn it into fiction - into a story, with structure and weight and solidity, not just a series of things that happen - and do it compellingly.