The Iron Wagon

By Jason

2002

First Published

3.64

Average Rating

Number of Pages

2H13M

Audio Length

One of Europe's most celebrated cartoonists updates a turn-of-the-century mystery novel. Exactly three quarters of a century ago, Agatha Christie stunned the mystery-novel world with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, an Hercule Poirot novel whose final twist was greeted as either a brilliant trick or an appalling cheat. (More recent films and novels such as The Usual Suspects, Angel Heart, and Fight Club have used variations, but none has bettered the original.) As it happens, a Norwegian mystery writer who signed his work Stein Riverton beat Dame Agatha Christie to the punch by about 20 years, using exactly the same trick in his 1908 novel The Iron Wagon . An evocative murder mystery set in the Norwegian countryside, it, like all good murder mysteries, is a stew of passion, buried past crimes, revelations, and sharply defined characters who remain ambiguous to the very end. This novel has never been translated into English. Now, using a striking two-color drawing style and re-casting the story with his iconic animal characters from his previous graphic novel Sshhhh!, the acclaimed Norwegian cartoonist Jason has adapted The Iron Wagon into an original graphic novel that will appeal not only to fans of his work but also to mystery fans who will finally have a chance to experience Riverton's clever story. Surprisingly, this turn-of-the-century mystery thriller dovetails neatly with the concerns and obsessions of Jason's other comics (including the landmark Hey, Wait..., called the second best comic of 2001 by Time.com), and becomes a case of two wildly disparate craftsmen separated by a century merging their sensibilities for a unique work.

Avg Rating

3.64

Number of Ratings

652

5 STARS

16%

4 STARS

41%

3 STARS

33%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Jason

Author · 23 books

John Arne Sæterøy, better known by the pen name Jason, is an internationally acclaimed Norwegian cartoonist. Jason's comics are known for their distinctive, stone-faced anthropomorphic characters as well as their pace reminiscent of classic films. Jason was born in 1965 and debuted in the early 80's, when still a teenager, in the Norwegian comics magazine 'KonK'. His first graphic novel Pocket Full of Rain (1995) won the Sproing Award, one of the main national awards for cartoonist. In 2001 Jason started a fruitful collaboration with the American publisher Fantagraphics, which helped him gain international notoriety. Besides Norway and the U.S., his comics have appeared in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil. Jason's stories feature a peculiar mix of dry humour, surrealism and tropes from a variety of pulp genres, such as noir novels and monster movies. His most celebrated works include: Hey, Wait... (2001), a tale of childhood and trauma; You Can't Get There from Here (2004), a re-telling of the myth of Frankenstein; The Left Bank Gang (2007), featuring fictional versions of Hemingway and other writers living in Paris in the 1920s; I Killed Adolf Hitler (2008), a story that mixes romance and time travel; The Last Musketeer (2009), a love letter to old sci-fi imaginary featuring king's musketeer Athos; Low Moon (2010), one of his many collections of short stories; Werewolves of Montpellier (2010); Isle of 100,000 Graves (2011), a pirate story co-written with French cartoonist Fabien Vehlmann; Lost Cat (2013), a thriller with a surreal spin. Jason won a Harvey Award for best new talent in 2002 and Eisner Awards in the category 'Best U.S. Edition of International Material' for three consecutive years (2007-2009). He has lived in Denmark, Belgium, the U.S., eventually setting for Montpellier, France in 2007.