Four Color Comics

Ruse: Enter the Detective
CrossGeneration Comics
Reviewed by: Joel Miron
Reviewer’s grade: B


Three pages into the first issue of Ruse, the heroine Emma Bishop stops time. The damsel she is striving to save seems to be falling to her death through the glass roof of a mansion’s arboretum, and Emma feels that the young lady’s demise upon impact with the bougainvillea would be an improper conclusion to an otherwise successful mystery story. Even more improper, the damsel is falling due to an uncharacteristically rash act of Simon Archard, the world’s greatest detective, who otherwise displays the simultaneously attractive and deeply unpleasant trait of other world’s greatest detectives: that of knowing everything.

These all-seeing and all-deducing men are not expected to save their victims from criminals and then unceremoniously drop them down on dieffenbachia. But, then again, neither are their hapless assistants meant to possess magical control over time. The reader’s dismay over the intrusion of the supernatural into a promising Victorian mystery is both deepened and echoed by a disembodied voice reprimanding Emma: “Freezing the moment?” it lectures, “How very against the rules, Emma. You’re in great danger of forfeiting.” At this time, we are given to understand that the essential storyline of Ruse is this: Simon Archard is the smartest guy in this alternate Victorian England; accordingly he has no choice but to solve crimes in the mode of Holmes, and that Emma is tasked by some Other to “teach” him to use his heart rather than just his head.

It turns out dismayingly quickly, just after the conversation “between the seconds” with the disembodied voice, that Simon had a secret (and, keeping with classic mystery convention, deeply improbable) plan to save our plunging damsel, demonstrating that, although he is sort of a reptile, he is by no means heartless.

So? Job done? Does Emma turn her face to the skies and proclaim, “See! The guy’s a Care-Bear! I win!” Actually, no. It seems Simon has a great deal more to learn about being nice, and so our story continues.

As this website is about comics for grown-ups (look at the banner if you don’t believe me), a comic story set in a Victorian age in the mystery genre would seem an ideal example. After all, mystery stories seem to be the popular fiction most adults turn to after setting down their elementary primers, and the Victorian Mystery as written by Poe and perfected by Doyle sets the pattern for all subsequent comers. Here we have, then, an entertaining and engaging foray into the field that occasionally dares to deconstruct and mock the standard plot elements with which we’ve all grown so familiar.

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But then there’s this business of magic. It turns out that Simon’s first major nemesis, Miranda Cross, also possesses magical powers, perhaps greater and even less-well described than Emma’s. If these two can casually subvert the laws of nature, how then is a detective, even the world’s greatest, to detect? Did not Holmes lecture Watson in The Sign of Four, “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” If impossible acts are routinely committed by both our heroine and our villainess, it would seem that nothing can be eliminated by our detective on his journey to the truth.

The first four chapters of Ruse are better thought of as historical adventure, and can be thoroughly enjoyed with that mindset. The badinage between Simon and Emma is just intricate enough to rise above the standard clichés of heroic men and their Girls Friday, the language is rich, and the world well-populated with references to that time in the late-eighteenth century when science and spiritualism coiled so enticingly round each other.

Still, I couldn’t resist a sense of relief after the first four chapters allowed the struggle between our heroes and Miranda Cross to conclude. Ms. Cross never amounts to much of a villain, as her thirst for ascendancy over the alternate England is never explained and Simon and Emma’s triumph over her is equally slapdash and unsatisfying. The trade paperback includes two more single-chapter stories that begin to show promise of the series becoming more complete and deep. Perhaps best of all, no more mention is made of magic.

Ruse concluded as a comics series when its publisher, CrossGen Comics, imploded financially in 2003. The details of the rise and fall of CrossGen are well-described in this Comics Journal article. Copies of TPBs after volume two are not readily available via the standard online retailers, and they certainly aren’t thick on the vine in the South Dakota Library Network, on whose resources I rely heavily.