Review: Two fine books of secrets
Investigating with Arkady Renko, digging into comic books
By L.D. Meagher
CNN
(CNN) -- Attention, last minute shoppers: if you still have a couple of names on your gift list, swing by the bookstore. A couple of recent releases might just fit the bill.
"Wolves Eat Dogs," the latest novel by Martin Cruz Smith, is a murder mystery set against a unique backdrop -- Chernobyl. Investigator Arkady Renko, the Moscow detective who first enthralled readers in "Gorky Park," is back, and he's having trouble adjusting to the realities of the New Russia.
Renko is looking into the apparent suicide of a business tycoon. When he asks one too many uncomfortable questions, he is banished to Ukraine, where yet another Russian millionaire has turned up dead.
The scene of the crime is inside the Zone of Exclusion, the area surrounding the crippled Chernobyl nuclear reactor. It is a ghostly landscape, sparsely inhabited by people nearly as ghostly as the terrain. Among the scavengers and scientists and hangers-on, Renko finds a sort of grim determination to force the hand of fate. In the decade and a half since the accident, nature has begun to reclaim the towns and villages that housed Chernobyl's workforce. Giant fish spawn in the reactor's cooling ponds and wolves occasionally prowl the streets.
A haunting emptiness pervades Smith's storytelling. The investigation takes Renko to Pripyat, a Soviet-era "city of science" erected almost in the shadow of the doomed power plant.
"Pripyat was worse in the light of day," he writes, "when a breeze stirred the trees and lent a semblance of animation. Arkady could almost see the long lines of people and the way they must have looked over their shoulders at their apartments and all their possessions, their clothes, their televisions, Oriental rugs, the cat in the window. Families must have pulled the reluctant young and pushed the confused elderly and shielded babies from the sun. Ears had to close to the question 'Why?' "
Renko works slowly and methodically to solve the crime. In the process, he finds himself pulled deeper into the heart of the Ukrainian darkness toward a horrible secret buried beneath the concrete sarcophagus of Chernobyl.
Behind the panels
"Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book" is, in its own way, a story of secrets. Gerard Jones, whose resume includes a stint as a comic book writer, traces the roots of a publishing phenomenon and finds some unexpected truths buried among the four-color panels.
For example, the company now known as DC Comics started life as a purveyor of girlie mags and, occasionally, bootleg liquor. Its founder, Harry Donenfeld, boasted of friendships with the rich and powerful (he claimed membership in FDR's Brain Trust) as well as the infamous (gangster Frank Costello was godfather to Donenfeld's son). He amassed a huge fortune thanks to Superman, Batman and the other heroes who spurred millions of youthful fantasies. But his name is rarely mentioned in the corporate corridors of DC these days. (DC Comics is owned by Time Warner, as is CNN.com.)
Then there are the creators -- the young men, virtually all Jewish, who saw comic books as a way to express their inner desire for acceptance.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster -- long portrayed as Cleveland's teen geniuses that gave birth to Superman in a single night -- emerge instead as hard working, shy, somewhat naive guys desperate for a foothold in the new industry. The myth they constructed around their creation withers a bit under close scrutiny.
Jones digs into the stories behind all the Golden Age heroes, revealing -- among other things -- how Bob Kahn became Bob Kane and built his reputation largely on the work of others. The author also examines the bizarre psychologist William Moulton Marston, who turned his odd notion that "women enjoy submission, being bound" into a comic book that often featured its heroine in bondage -- Wonder Woman.
"Men of Tomorrow" is a briskly written, yet thoughtful, exploration of a commercial empire built on the creation of new mythologies. Jones weaves in threads of biography and social history to illuminate the all-too-human characters behind the super-human icons of American pop culture.
