Book Review: Seduction of the Innocent

It’s the spring of 1954, and comic books are king.  Four-colored panels tell tales of masked crusaders, gun-blazing mobsters, hatchet-swinging madmen, and barely dressed damsels in distress, sold for a dime at the corner drugstore to kids of all ages.  One of the leading publishers of these not-so-funny funnybooks is Starr Syndication, run by Maggie and Jack Starr a step-mother and son duo with street smarts and style to spare.
But their cartoon empire is threatened when Dr. Werner Frederick, a noted psychologist, releases his controversial new book, Ravage the Lambs.  Lambs accuses comics of being the instigator of youth crimes, that those spandex-clad heroes are homosexual influences, and that they might be making our kids dumber to boot.  His words stir up the pot, and Congress calls for public hearings, threatening to do something about this “ten-cent plague” in our midst.

When Dr. Frederick winds up dead thanks to a scheme ripped directly from the pages of a best-selling comic book, there are too many suspects to count.  Hoping to protect his industry and his cronies, Jack Starr takes on the investigation and follows a path that leads him to the seediest parts of the four-color publishing racket.

Serious comic book fans are probably quick to notice that Max Allan Collins’ Seduction of the Innocent takes its name from the 1954 publication of noted psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, detailing Wertham’s theories on the social and psychological impact of comic books on youth.  Similarly, Wertham’s Innocent sparked a Senate inquiry, as well as outrage among parents, preachers, and teachers who felt that comics’ depictions of graphic violence and depravity were creating little psychopaths on a monthly basis.  The resulting creation of the self-regulating Comics Code Authority limited the types of stories that could be told in comic books, setting back the artform for decades.  It also resulted in the cancellation of hundreds of publications, leaving the comic book industry in shambles.

Collins’ Seduction of the Innocent alludes to many of the real-life people, places, and events of this time period, making it a virtual game of “Spot the Reference” if you know your comic book history.  In addition, there are some fun illustrated interludes that help add to the book’s personality, including a full-on comic book line-up of the prime suspects just before the big reveal.  Unfortunately, beyond this and some snappy, hard boiled dialog, there’s not much else to really get the old blood boiling about his Innocent.

The central plot idea – that Dr. Frederick is murdered using a clever scheme from a crime comic – is great, but its execution is anything but scandalous.  With a bevy of classic comic book stories to draw from, like the famous cover to Crime SuspenStories #22  featuring a man holding a woman’s severed head and a bloodied axe, or nearly anything from EC’s Vault of Horror title, the method of the doctor’s death could have been something that really grabbed the reader’s attention.  Instead we get a lackluster crime scene that isn’t even definitively a murder until further evidence is found.  What a missed opportunity to give us a story as bloody and messy and in-your-face as the comic books the novel pays homage to.

In addition, I’m all for establishing the world and characters in a novel, but the longer I read, the more I began to wonder if anyone was actually going to die in this murder mystery.  It’s not until about the halfway point in the book before  Frederick’s body is found.  After that, the leads suspects aren’t so much investigated as spoken to briefly before Starr moves on to the next one.  The final resolution feels a little cheap because there’s no build up at all.  For once, I really would have liked to have seen more story to at least throw us off the track a little bit along the way.

Then again, as any young reader eventually learned, the cover of the comic was always more graphic than the story inside.  So, maybe Collins’ Seduction of the Innocent is in fact an accurate depiction of the crime comic books by promising more than it delivers.

Seduction of the Innocent is now available at Amazon.com and other fine booksellers.