Unemployed Maggy lands a secretarial job at a private investigator’s office - except the PI turns out to be an incompetent boob so she takes over his caseload and pockets the fees once she solves them! But when the PI is brutally beaten and hospitalised over (what else?) a pile of hidden cash, Maggy finds herself caught in a dangerous battle between cops and robbers and no one is quite who they seem. How will her quick thinking get her out of this jam?
I really enjoyed Lewis Trondheim and Stephane Oiry’s Maggy Garrisson, which is a fun, amusing, and consistently inventive collection of entertaining escapades featuring their likeable amateur sleuth Maggy.
The cases are mostly interesting, the characters are compelling and become more complex over time, and the stories are told at a breezy clip so they never feel slow or dull to read. I loved how unpredictable the characters were - two in particular seem like classic “goodies” and “baddies” but turn out to be opposites as Maggy (and the reader) gets to know them better.
I liked how Maggy herself is no saint. Telling old ladies that she’s found their missing pets when really she just took a photo of them round enough pet shops until she found one that looked exactly like the missing pet, then getting the finder’s fee. She steals from people’s groceries nonchalantly, breaks into people’s houses to find answers - but you can forgive her these indiscretions as you see that she’s mostly a decent sort with a good heart/intentions, hustling to get by on what little cash she has.
Stephane Oiry captures modern London beautifully with his detailed art. You get a strong sense of place with a good idea of what life in London is like nowadays. The weird furniture arrangement (that jutting countertop) in Maggy’s flat is reminiscent of the strange layouts of converted houses into flats, and the pubs closing down and being replaced by boutique shops are all real aspects of London life.
Maggy comes up with some pretty ingenious solutions to problems she encounters. Like when she’s being tailed by a thug, she ducks into a pub and has the bartender send the thug numerous pints which the thug foolishly drinks; then, when he gets up to go pee, she leaves the pub and loses him. Or when she’s staking out a place, sees the thieves break in, then alerts the police, but realises they’ll get here too late, she breaks an empty bottle and puts the glass shards under the thieves’ tires, so they’ll drive away on flats and be easier to catch by the fuzz.
Which leads me to my only real (minor) criticisms of this book. Who IS Maggy Garrisson?! She’s presented as this ordinary woman drifting from temp job to temp job but she clearly has a unique skill set based on the way she solves this many complicated cases and handles herself in the London underworld. She should be the one with the private investigation business, not working an admin post in one! What - she just happened to pick up these skills on the fly? Come on. It doesn’t seem to me that someone as skilled and savvy as Maggy would be struggling to get by.
Also, she solves every case that comes her way, which is a bit pat. Even in the “impossible” (the PI’s word) case of finding out who in a funeral home has been stealing gold teeth from cremated corpses and selling them, she figures out a brilliant solution. Everything’s wrapped up a little too neatly - I would’ve preferred some cases to remain unsolved for realism sake. Trondheim’s insistence on closure each time hurts the final case with the photo album which has an absurdly melodramatic, rushed ending.
That said, those criticisms don’t get in the way of enjoying the book because the cases are entertaining and Maggy is such a likeable character that you want to see her solve them and walk away the winner.
This one was a blast - a great read with fine art. If you want to read an engaging and imaginative contemporary crime comic with a good sense of humour, check out Maggy Garrisson.
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