Maggy Garrison by Lewis Trondheim and Stephane Oiry

I'm not sure how old Maggy Garrisson is. She's not just out of her teens, but she could be twenty-five or she could be close to forty. She's not old, yet, though -- she still has a lot of time in her life.

Well. Probably. If nothing else happens.

Maggy Garrisson collects three graphic novels about the title character in which a lot of things happen, all on the seedy side of London in the mid-teens. It all starts when Maggy gets a job, after a couple of years of looking, as secretary for a local detective, Anthony Wight. 

Wight is beaten up and ends up in hospital almost immediately, but not before Maggy meets a couple of people in his world and gets caught up in some of his not-entirely-legal activities. It turns out Maggy has a real knack for detective work -- for social engineering and inventive problem-solving in particular -- which alternately gets her deeper into that world and helps her survive it.

She finds a new best friend in a female cop, Sheena. And a new boyfriend in Alex, a trained IT expert working as an enforcer for a minor local crimelord. And a lot more money and trouble than she knows what to do with...or how to hide.

The three original albums follow on from each other, covering in all a few weeks or maybe a month, and this might be the end of the story -- maybe not, but it could end after any of these three without any trouble. These are crime stories, about small-time people in a small-time world who dream of more but scramble like scorpions in a pit to stab each other over the little they have. Maggy is a smarter scorpion than most, and possibly not entirely a scorpion at all -- but, still, she ends up in that pit, and has to sting her way through it.

The three Maggy stories are written by Lewis Trondheim, and this is yet another very different kind of book from him -- unlike the kid's stories like A.L.I.E.E.N., unlike his autobiographical comics like Little Nothings, much more serious than the light adventure of McConey, and maybe closest to the darkness in the fantasy Dungeon series he wrote with Joann Sfar. But this is a real-world darkness: these are crime stories set in a country he knows but doesn't live in, a world he can make a little exotic and different for his original audience, like a thousand French noir comics set in a dark version of America.

The art is from Stephane Oiry, whose work I haven't seen previously. He draws a lot of detail, working from mostly a twelve-panel grid, full of dialogue and tight rooms and close-ups of faces. It's art drawn for album-size, taking advantage of the large pages to do a lot of story-telling in small spaces, and I'm glad to see that this English-language omnibus (from the fine folks at Self-Made Hero in the UK) kept that size.

Maggy Garrisson is a pretty dark book: darker than you'd expect from Trondheim. But he and Oiry navigate the darkness well, and  keep the story in unexpected territory -- it's not a thriller, or even pure noir, but more of a slice-of-life story about a woman who falls into this world and finds that it both thrills and frightens her, that it gives her scope to use skills and insights that might have lain dormant before.