Adapted from Ace Atkins’s 1998 novel that launched a series of Nick Travers mysteries soaked in the blues tradition of the Mississippi Delta, Image’s “Crossroad Blues” is a 12-Gauge production with a nice pedigree, but does the graphic novel measure up to the acclaimed genre mystery?
Written by Ace AtkinsCover by Chris Brunner
Illustrated by Marco Finnegan
Lettered by Troy PetteriAfter a New Orleans college professor goes missing while searching for the rumored lost recordings of bluesman Robert Johnson—who, as legend has it, sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads—Nick Travers is sent to find him. Clues point to everyone from an eccentric albino named Cracker to a hitman who believes he is the second coming of Elvis Presley. From the Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist turned New York Times bestselling author Ace Atkins, and artist Marco Finnegan, comes a thrilling tale of crime and mystery that brings the history of the blues and the Mississippi Delta to life on every page.
Even though “Crossroad Blues” was the first published prose work to introduce the protagonist, Nick Travers, it’s the second graphic novel adaptation of Atkins’s ex-football player turned blues musician, budding academic, and fledgling detective. The first was an adaptation of a forgotten short story “Last Fair Deal Gone Down,” that Atkins’s discovered on an old computer disk and added to a 10th anniversary edition of Crossroad Blues. The short story earned the prestigious Edgar award for short fiction before being adapted and published in 2016 by 12-Guage. Like “Crossroad Blues,” it also featured art by Marco Finnegan with whom Atkins clearly has a simpatico for telling dark noir-infused southern mysteries. Finnegan brings a spartan aesthetic to bear in this adaptation that drips with dark menace, echoing the conflicting stories surrounding the short life and mysterious death of blues musician Robert Johnson. It’s the result of an interesting creative collaboration where Finnegan works directly from an outline he derives directly from the prose which he then presents to Atkins for notes, streamlining and refining the longform fiction into a graphic narrative. In “Crossroad Blues” it’s a process that leads to largely enjoyable results in terms of the unorthodox style but yields some narrative shortcomings that rob the book’s promising fusion of blues and noir of its impact.
In a story that relies on the byzantine narrative commonplace in hard-boiled noir, “Crossroad Blues” feels too much like reading Cliff Notes. Readers will find all the necessary story beats, but the way this adaptation is forced to present them, it might elicit whiplash, moving readers from place to place with little warning or sense of setting. The choice to present the book in black and white allows for some powerful impressionistic imagery, but the lack of detail robs many of the scenes of a sense of place in a setting that is so rich with character. It’s an unfortunate side effect for a place as colorful as New Orleans (or the South in general) to be rendered thus, and even while the liberal shadows and streamlined rendering (almost to the point of iconography) maintains the book’s severe tone, it’s difficult not to wish for something more than white, black, and two mid-tones. While it’s certainly a deliberate choice to render the book in what might first appear a rudimentary way, there is generally more care taken with the human form and facial expressions that help provide some emotional weight in a script that runs fairly cool in spite of its hot-blooded themes entrenched in notions of loyalty, duty, and revenge, but it’s still as though the characters are doing pantomime albeit while delivering some pretty excellent dialogue lifted straight from Atkins’s prose.
Travers’s supporting cast members are given enough characterization to make them interesting in the first half of the book, but the second half suffers due to their under development throughout the balance of the narrative. Even the central character of Nick Travers remains a bit of an enigma, which is not an uncommon trope in noir protagonists, but he certainly lacks the laconic and self-serving detachment of those typical characters. Travers, whose prime is in his rearview mirror, seems to be cut more from the Jim Rockford mold, and Finnegan renders him as a rumpled but physically imposing child of the grunge era. He’s got lots of old friends too, and he’s still good with the ladies. Travers’s relationship with the woefully underdeveloped Virginia moves so quickly that it would put Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway’s romance in Three Days of the Condor to shame, but this is a minor quibble (as it too is a common noir trope). While Travers gets the lion’s share of the panel time, his motivations for what he’s doing are hazy to say the least. Is someone paying him or is he just a kind-hearted problem solver living off an NFL pension? While the omission of these details doesn’t necessarily detract from the narrative, it does call into question Travers’s willingness to risk life and limb.
The central problem with “Crossroad Blues” is in how perfunctorily it wraps up its plot threads. Decades old secrets are given short shrift in their resolution, and by the time the narrative turns confessional and flashes back to events in Mississippi in 1938, some key details seem to be missing or presented in a slapdash way. In the end, these omissions make Travers’s sleuth work appear to rival that of Hercule Poirot, but Agatha Christie at least shared her clues with readers. The book’s climax and denouement are also terribly rushed, and the events that take place over the final seven pages careen by in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-them blur that lack much wallop, dispatching the necessities of plot resolution in a way that makes the the whole story ring a bit hollow. In retrospect, readers might wonder how things escalated so quickly . . . so slowly.
Pacing is an interesting concept in the South. If you’ve ever spent any time there you know people do have a tendency to move slowly. I would contend that it’s largely due to the heat. Conserve your energy! Like its setting, “Crossroad Blues” seems to suffer from having moved too slowly to reach its destination on time. In the final analysis, it’s an enjoyable read insofar as readers might enjoy an almost experimentally-rendered dark journey with some crackling dialogue and old gumshoe narration. Getting there is half the fun right?
