THE TERRIBLE AXE-MAN OF NEW ORLEANS

At NBM Publishing in 1987 Rick Geary launched a series of true crime books under the heading, "A Treasury of Victorian Murder Mysteries." Geary has apparently exhausted the 19th century in about nine books, and the series has now morphed into "A Treasure of 20th Century Murder."

The most recent of these is The Terrible Axe-man of New Orleans (80 6x9-inch pages in b/w; hardcover, $15.95). Set in the Big Easy right after World War I, Geary’s tale traces, murder by murder, a series of slaughters of Italian grocers, who are killed in their beds in the middle of the night by someone who enters the premises by breaking a panel out of a door and then, appropriating an axe found in the house, goes right for the heads of his victims, leaving blood splattered all over the place for the police to cogitate over when they discover the crime. Among the puzzles: the hole in the door created by knocking out a panel is always too small for any adult-sized person to enter. The terrible axe-murderer is never found, but, as usual with his painstaking research, Geary offers some speculations at the end of the book.

Apart from the gory fascination of the tale itself, we delight, as always, in Geary’s treatment of his material. His flat, emotionless prose narrative captions are accompanied by his haunting drawings, copiously shaded with parallel lines and hachuring, in which victims (before their deaths) and neighbors and police are often depicted staring into the camera — as if in a police line-up, unspeaking witnesses to terror, frozen in dread of some sinister machination lurking in their future.

Geary deftly creates not only the horrifying atmospherics of the murders but the ambiance of the otherwise jumping jazz scene of New Orleans. It’s always a pleasure to see Geary in action.