The Fatal Bullet by Rick Geary

Rick Geary's most obvious oeuvre consists of a sequence of small-format books about historical murders, spanning three decades from Jack the Ripper in 1995 to The Black Dahlia in 2016. [1] Each one is meticulously crafted and deeply researched before drawn with Geary's complex illustrative line, and they usually feature maps and diagrams of murder scenes alongside traditional comics panels.

The Fatal Bullet was fairly early in that sequence; it was published in 1999. Unlike most of Geary's choices, there's no mystery in this one, nothing central still unknown today. Geary here tells the story of Charles J. Guiteau's 1891 assassination of President James A. Garfield, which was done in public and has nothing mysterious about it at all.

Well, other than why Guiteau did it. And that's what Geary looks to explain here: he explicitly sets a 19th-century moralizing tone - somewhat tongue-in-cheek - in the front matter, with a chart depicting "The Two Roads" - the "happy, prosperous life" of Garfield and the "downward path" of Guiteau. And the book follows in that mode: pitched somewhere between penny-dreadful and serious-newspaper, sounding largely like an account from the time period, Geary outlines the lives of both men to show how they came to their fatal encounter.

The one thing this doesn't allow him to do is diagnose Guiteau, who clearly had some kind of mental disorder - he was found sane and guilty at trial, of course, but he was driven to the murder by a monomania about factions in the Republican Party and and vastly inflated sense of his own importance. Any serious modern psychological profiling of Guiteau would break that historical model, and that may be why Geary avoids it. Or maybe no one knows what Guiteau's problem was. 

In any case: he was a nut. A "frustrated office seeker" - he had no qualifications besides a stump speech he wrote supporting Garfield that was never actually used and his own boundless faith in himself - who wanted to be made ambassador to a major, cushy European capital and had been bugging Garfield and his Secretary of State for months. With no luck in that direction, he got it into his head that killing the president would miraculously make everything better and get him the job he wanted.

It didn't work, obviously. Guiteau was immediately arrested, held until Garfield died, then speedily tried and executed. But murders are about people doing extreme things for extreme reasons; that's what this whole long series of books by Geary are about, in the end. And this is somewhat atypical in its lack of mystery, but otherwise right down the middle of the style. Geary's art is lush and immersive as ever, the words are energetic and carefully researched, and the whole thing told excellently. What more could you want out of a murder tale?

[1] And he's self-published a small shelf of similar books since then, actually.