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.

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

"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