The Iron Wagon

Exactly three quarters of a century ago, Agatha Christie stunned the mystery-novel world with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, an Hercule Poirot novel whose final twist was greeted as either a brilliant trick or an appalling cheat. (More recent films and novels such as The Usual Suspects, Angel Heart, and Fight Club have used variations, but none has bettered the original.) As it happens, a Norwegian mystery writer who signed his work Stein Riverton beat Dame Agatha Christie to the punch by about 20 years, using exactly the same trick in his 1908 novel The Iron Wagon. An evocative murder mystery set in the Norwegian countryside, it, like all good murder mysteries, is a stew of passion, buried past crimes, revelations, and sharply defined characters who remain ambiguous to the very end. This novel has never been translated into English. Now, using a striking two-color drawing style and re-casting the story with his iconic animal characters from his previous graphic novel Sshhhh!, the acclaimed Norwegian cartoonist Jason has adapted The Iron Wagon into an original graphic novel that will appeal not only to fans of his work but also to mystery fans who will finally have a chance to experience Riverton's clever story. Surprisingly, this turn-of-the-century mystery thriller dovetails neatly with the concerns and obsessions of Jason's other comics (including the landmark Hey, Wait..., called the second best comic of 2001 by Time.com), and becomes a case of two wildly disparate craftsmen separated by a century merging their sensibilities for a unique work.