Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies

In the 1930s and 1940s, before television, Sunday funny cartoonists were wealthy celebrities on par with movie stars. Tom De Haven's novel about the cartoon world during the Great Depression, Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies, is funny and achingly sad at the same time.

The narrator is a young man named Al Bready, a writer who cranks out the scripts for six newspaper comics and four 75,000 word trash novels each month for Thrilling Marriage.

Bready starts working for Walter Geebus, the fantastically wealthy creator of the Derby Dugan strip (sort of a male Little Orphan Annie). At age 60, Geebus is an unhealthy miserable bastard who is hell to be around. The plot rides along a murder mystery, taking Bready into the streets, bars, flophouses, chop suey joints, and offices of a seedy, romantic, hard-boiled, heartbreakingly nostalgic New York, populated with terrifically colorful characters.

In the end, the plot isn't nearly as central to the story as is Bready's struggle with the realization that he can't ever be anything more than a rapid-fire pulp fiction hack. $0.29 and up on Amazon