The Con Artist by Fred Van Lente Review

Some comics professional got murdered at San Diego Comic Con - whodunit?

The real question is: who cares? Because Fred Van Lente’s novel The Con Artist is utter rubbish - a failed attempt at a nerd-flavoured murder mystery that only ever bores.

The book is less about the murder mystery as it is about Van Lente droning on about the comics industry. How creators back in the day got screwed, toxic fandoms, how underappreciated comics pros are, the crass commercialisation of San Diego Comic Con, blah blah blah.

There’s definitely some weight behind it all as Van Lente has been a comics writer for many years, having written everything from his creator-owned indies to the heavyweight IPs of Marvel, but he focuses way too much on that aspect of the story to the point where it supplants it entirely. Also, as a lifelong comics fan myself, I’ve heard a lot of this ranting before so it came off as inane, repetitive and unoriginal.

I could’ve forgiven some of that if the murder mystery was any good - and it wasn’t. There’s zero tension as you already know our protagonist - comics artist Mike - didn’t do it, and the cops don’t really think he did either. There are no clues for the reader themselves to try and figure it out. Then nothing further happens until the final act when Mike happens to stumble across the actual murderer, who conveniently exposits enough to fill in all the necessary blanks just in time for the ending. Pointless, contrived, dull, uninspired writing.

None of the subplots went anywhere - the rickshaw driver was a half-assed attempt at romance, the uber-fan who might’ve done it, the two Aryan Brotherhood bikers who came out of nowhere - nor are any of the characters at all memorable or interesting. Tom Fowler pointlessly contributes some scratchy art that added nothing. The endless descriptions of the pop culture makeup of SDCC gave me flashbacks to that godawful novel Armada by Ernest Cline where Cline spent pages reeling off pop culture references for the tedious sake of it - it’s no better when Van Lente does the same thing. I get it, SDCC is pop culture at its most hyper-gaudy, stop describing it already and try to do something with the plot!

I was mildly interested in trying to figure out which real-life comics pros Van Lente was caricaturing - I think the murder victim was meant to be former DC editor Eddie Berganza, going by his sleazy past of sexual harassment of female co-workers - and it’s not hard to figure out which character is meant to be former Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter. But that only speaks to the inside baseball nature of this book. Its insularity means it’s not going to appeal to anyone uninterested in comics and not really to comics readers either as it’s not good! And, not that all comics readers don’t read “real” books, but quite a few don’t so the audience for this one is about as small as you can get!

The Con Artist is just a bad novel that’s not half as good as Fred Van Lente’s effort last year, Ten Dead Comedians, and even that was mediocre at best! He’s a fine comics writer but a good novelist he is not.