Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies: A Novel - Hardcover

De Haven, Tom; Haven, Tom De

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805044450 ISBN 13: 9780805044454

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1996

Synopsis

Narrated by a fast-talking pulp fiction author, a darkly comic novel set amid New York City's tabloid press of the 1930s follows the frantic search for a replacement for the roguish creator of America's favorite comic strip.

About this title

Review:

In Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies, Al Bready ghostwrites a popular comic strip and struggles to get along with his boss and mentor, Walter Geebus. Set in 1930s New York, the novel is populated with characters who seem to have stepped straight out of a Damon Runyon story. While Mysterious Jones roams the city in a black mask, Marty Planet runs the Mafia, and an ambitious young cartoonist's assistant named Frank Sweeney rots in jail for lacing his boss's coffee with arsenic. He was trying to poison his way to a promotion, but it didn't work. Al Bready caught him, and although Walter Geebus survived the arsenic poisoning, he was never the same. This novel charts Geebus's decline and Bready's efforts to come to terms with the loss of the comic strip he clung to throughout his difficult childhood. Bready is a man of many routines who generally keeps to himself. He ghostwrites five or six comic strips and pumps out a pulp novel every month, but when he tries to write something personal, he feels stymied. He knows the story begins, "Derby's in a rowboat, it's night," but he can't fill in the rest. Bready yearns for the days of his youth, when reading the funnies aloud to his kid sister made everything seem all right. His story is not terribly moving, but it is quite funny, and he makes good company for a few hundred pages. This novel is a nostalgic, witty look back at the glory days of comic strips. --Jill Marquis

About the Author:

Tom De Haven teaches creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0805044450
• ISBN 13: 9780805044454
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 290