A gorgeously drawn, strikingly original graphic-novel murder mystery Private detective Fernández Britten is an old hand at confirming the dark suspicions of jealous lovers and exposing ugly truths of all varieties. Battered by years of bearing ill tidings, he clings to the hope of revealing, just once, a truth that will do some good in the world. It is a redemption that has long eluded him. Then Britten and his unconventional partner, Brülightly, take on the mysterious death of Berni Kudos. The official verdict is suicide, but Berni’s fiancée is convinced that the reality is something more sinister. Blackmail, revenge, murder: each new revelation stirs up the muddy waters of painful family secrets, and each fresh twist takes the partners further from Britten’s longed-for salvation. Doing good in the world, he discovers, may have more to do with silence than truth. A haunting story of love and grief, sharply written and luminously drawn, Britten and Brülightly is sure to establish Hannah Berry in the front rank of graphic novelists. Brighton-based Hannah Berry, twenty-five years old, has contributed numerous illustrations to U.K. magazines. Britten and Brülightly is her first book. A School Library Journal Best Adult Book for High School Students A Texas Library Association Young Adult Round Table Recommended Graphic Novel Private detective Fernández Britten is an old hand at confirming the dark suspicions of jealous lovers and exposing ugly truths of all varieties. Battered by years of bearing ill tidings, he clings to the hope of revealing, just once, a truth that will do some good in the world. It is a redemption that has long eluded him. Then, Britten and his unconventional partner, Brülightly, take on the mysterious death of Berni Kudos. The official verdict is suicide, but Berni’s fiancée is convinced that the reality is something more sinister. Blackmail, revenge, murder: each new revelation stirs up the muddy waters of painful family secrets, and each fresh twist takes the partners further from Britten’s longed-for salvation. Doing good in the world, he discovers, may have more to do with silence than truth. A haunting story of love and grief, sharply written and luminously drawn, Britten and Brülightly is sure to establish Hannah Berry in the front rank of graphic novelists. "The touchy-feely vibe of Britten and Brülightly, an elegant graphic novel by Hannah Berry, has something to do with its format—the tall, slim, inviting layout of a picture book—but just as much to do with the intimate, even claustrophobic, content of its narrative. Set in London during some uneasy period when it rains without end on men in double-breasted suits and women in berets, the story tracks the metaphysical crisis of Fernández Britten, a melancholy 'private researcher' who has earned the nickname 'the Heartbreaker' for confirming the suspicions of clients who hire him to spy on their cheating lovers. After a career of exposing the bestiality of human nature, Britten longs to uncover a higher truth, the kind that elevates the beast and confers nobility on his own sleazy trade. The morose P.I., whose shadow-rimmed eyes and tiny, pinched mouth convey his despondent state, thinks he’s found his means of redemption when an unhappy heiress hires him to disprove the police investigation’s conclusion that her fiancé’s death was a suicide. Instead of bringing her satisfaction or solace, Britten discovers a truth so ugly that his instinct is to suppress it. But what kind of hero would that make him? It’s the classic existential bind of the postwar detective: a cynical sleuth tries to redeem his soul through a selfless act, only to find that honesty conflicts with an ingrained code of honor. Although Berry has her bit of fun with the genre traditions—notably in the bizarre detail that Britten’s trusted partner, Stewart Brülightly, is (quite literally) a lecherous tea bag that, under stress, infuses in the detective’s waistcoat pocket—she writes in a darkly poetic vein about love and betrayal, deceit and despair, in a plot so complex it would give Raymond Chandler a headache. Unlike the generations of trend-hopping moviemakers and novelists who have reduced the bleak noir sensibility to brutal acts committed in picturesque alleys, Berry uses her pen to capture the spiritual desolation of the human figures in her landscape. The lines of her drawings are sharp and penetrating, the monochromatic colors diluted in tearful washes of blues and blacks as she leans in to catch the insanity in a smile, the mute anger in the snuffing out of a cigarette. But the bravura storytelling device is the perspective, the eerie sense of disorientation as she swoops in to examine a parade of toy cowboys in an empty apartment or draws back to watch the rain lash two faraway figures with a single umbrella. From whichever angle you look at it, the truth doesn’t bear telling in this cold and heartless world."—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review "It's not difficult to see why comics and crime suit each other well: brutal death invites a visceral response, and murder in pictures only amplifies that reaction further. Comics engage the reader with fast-paced stories and upped stakes, which fits perfectly within the boundaries of crime fiction's well-trod cadence of order from chaos. And at their best, comics and graphic novels create rich emotional landscapes through the artful mix of mood, color and line—the approximate equivalent of a Chandlerian metaphor or a terse phrase á la Hammett ripe for multiple interpretations. Such hopes are rare for crime in prose but are even scarcer with graphic novels, so when one comes along that hits the proverbial sweet spot of standout storytelling and ruminative reflection, the reader is advised to create a permanent space in his or her home library. That recommendation suffices . . . for Britten and Brülightly, 26-year-old Briton Hannah Berry's audacious, wise-beyond-years debut. Making a correlation between wisdom and age is deliberate, since Britten and Brülightly, with its 1940s setting and classic private detective setup, owes an obvious debt to Hammett, Chandler and the films noir that followed. But any expectation of straight pastiche dissipates with the very first panel, which depicts a dark-haired fellow hovering on the border of youth and middle age, his head lying against a neatly creased pillow with dark shadows circling his eyes, bathed in a kohl mixture of green, blue and gray that recurs throughout the narrative. For Fernandez Britten, the sun rises each day 'with spiteful inevitability,' a reminder of how far he's drifted away from his 10-years-earlier self "with the glorious aim of serving humanity and righting wrongs." It's hard enough to get out of bed for anything less than murder, burdened with a moniker—'The Heartbreaker'—befitting a man well used to confirming the worst suspicions of his paying clients. 'After a while every bombshell looks like the next,' Britten comes to realize, though that conclusion will ultimately doom him. Berry portrays Britten's lingering existential crisis beautifully, accentuating his tenuous grasp at a redemption he knows he cannot have by varying shades of gray and emphasizing London's infamous rainy mist at key moments of futility and despair. But she also lightens the mood at necessary points with the other half of the investigative team, Stuart Brülightly, whose Runyon-esque way with dialogue overcomes whatever handicaps ensue as a result of being, well, a teabag. (Britten: 'Don't be lecherous: you're a teabag.' Brülightly: 'I'm a teabag with needs.') This isn't an outright manifestation of id versus superego, but Brülightly's caustic bluntness serves as the proper counterpoint to Britten's beaten-down sense of righteous justice. Into the mix enters Charlotte Maughton, the diametric opposite of the Mickey Spillane villainess her name conjures up: too nervous to finish a whole cigarette, too enamored of her dead fiance Berni Kudos (and too convinced that his death by hanging was murder) to seduce Britten—and too invested in her version of her life as a daughter of a noted publishing scion to make sense of how Britten's investigation will render her careful illusions into minuscule shards of glass that can never be put back together in quite the same way. There will be beatings, blackmail, men who enter rooms with guns and women desperate to act in violent ways to protect those they love and secrets never meant to be shared, as befitting the best tales of the hard-boiled canon. But there will also be charming instances of eating flavored crumble, neighbors fervent in their belief in a religious road to salvation, a brutally comic loss of a finger ('the lingering ache a dull requiem for my chance of ever becoming a concert pianist') and a devastating one-page sequence that conveys the full emotional resonance of Charlotte discovering Berni's body—with only his dangling feet visible to the reader—in a single phrase, letting silence and lightened tones speak additional volumes. And so it should come as no surprise when Britten and Brülightly closes in full circle—Britten, again lying on a bed, his head against a neatly creased pillow, but now with his right hand holding an unfinished drink. Cycles repeat, mistakes are made again and again. Fernandez Britten may have saved at least one person from the truth, but what makes Berry's graphic novel linger long and move into a remarkable strata is how it understands the terrible price and awful sense of loneliness that comes to those seeking salvation when there is none to find."—Sarah Weinman, Los Angeles Times "Illustrated with rich, dark, broody ink and watercolor drawings in an oversize format, Britten and Brülightly by British author Hannah berry is a slender tour de force . . . The prose is witty and often poetic, as in this description of an all-night greasy spoon: 'an oily no-man's-land of drowsy static, caught between sleep and wakefulness.' Or witty, as in this description of a religious nut who works in the office next door: 'a mouth that speaks unimpeded by thought.' More than a comic book, this graphic novel gives noir a new dimension."—Hallie Ephron, The Boston Globe "Fernández Britten, the sunken-eyed P.I. at the center of Hannah Berry's first graphic novel, Britten and Brülightly, actually does want to do good in the world, but being a detective isn't really a way to accomplish that: All he does is tell people awful truths, and it has led him to develop something of a death wish. His horny, irritable partner, Stewart Brülightly, is a bag of tea—literally—which is both a gesture of surreal whimsy and a suggestion that Britten may not be an entirely reliable narrator. Berry's story grabs and gently wrings every noir trope within reach, beginning with the hard-faced babe who hires Britten to prove that her fiancé's death—which sure looked like suicide—was actually foul play. As the detective and his faithful teabag wander through a city where it's almost always drizzling, they encounter sleazy businessmen, uncover a blackmail-and-murder plot so Byzantine it threatens to collapse into a black hole, and sink into inescapable existential despair. (Berry's watercolor palette, heavy on the greens and blues, makes all of her scenery seem residually damp, musty and underlit.) The mystery story gradually inverts itself into an assault on the entire premise of mystery stories—that the discovery of truth brings disinfecting sunlight—as Britten comes to discover that enlightenment and clarity can cause nothing but heartbreak and calamity, and that 'absolute morality is a luxury for the short-sighted.'"—Douglas Wolk, The Washington Post "This spellbinding graphic novel is a page-turner that pays artistic homage to the noir aesthetic of yester-year . . . The author, Hannah Berry, paints a complex psychological portrait of a dejected man whose line of business has him constantly surrounded by heartbreak and death. Likewise, Berry's whodunit plot line is full of poetic twists that are as superbly crafted as the characters within it. The plot quickly thickens, yet this graphic novel should not be hurriedly thumbed through. Like a cup of warm English tea on a rainy day, this novel is best if you give it time to brew and take it in slowly."—Libby Zay, Bust magazine “'I don’t get out of bed for less than a murder. I don’t get out of bed much.' So begins Hannah Berry’s noir odyssey, a graphic novel in the muted tones of sepia, blue and grey, private investigator Fernandez Britten emotionally exhausted by the demands of clients whose lovers and spouses indulge in infidelity. Bored with his profession, nicknamed Heartbreaker and accused of being French, the Ecuadorian has decided only to stir when more is at stake than deceit. So when the daughter of a wealthy publisher asks for a meeting to discuss her fiancé’s recent suicide, Britten agrees. Charlotte believes Berni Kudos would never have killed himself before their impending marriage. Intrigued, Britten begins a search for the truth that will yield blackmail, revenge and murder, a complicated blend of selfish motives, broken promises and dark secrets. Accompanied by his acerbic companion, Brülightly—who is only ever revealed by the presence of a tea bag—Britten finds a web of purposeful deceit and violence, left finally with a bump on his head and the little finger on one hand amputated. Unwilling to submit to threat, Britten doggedly persists, unraveling piece by piece the fragments of the past that led to Berni’s untimely death. From rain-washed streets where menacing strangers lurk to the quiet corridors of the Maughton estate, from a hospital file room to a secluded restaurant booth, Berry’s dark images imbue the graphic novel with menace and dread, the investigator’s dour mien unchanged from event to event. From the sophisticated Charlotte to a gun-toting intruder in Berni’s flat, the story is peppered with eccentric characters, a devious plot hiding a painful secret. The pages filled with Britten’s haunted face and a series of unpredictable situations, this is noir fiction dressed in a fascinating costume, dark humor dressed to kill."—Curled Up with a Good Book "The distinctive tone of Berry’s first graphic novel is established in the first sentence: 'As it did with spiteful inevitability, the sun rose.' With somber, gray-hued illustrations and a running commentary that echoes Raymond Chandler, Berry delivers an inspired new twist on detective fiction . . . While the tragic denouement here does not bode well for any sequels, Berry is an exciting new talent whose further contributions are to be eagerly anticipated."—Carl Hays, Booklist