Warren Ellis came in on that wave of British comic book writers (Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison and Peter Milligan among them) who specialized in "revisionist" comics with dark themes and more mature storytelling. Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Doom Patrol and others were some of the notable titles in that mid-80s-mid-90s heyday. But with DC Comics' Vertigo line and more the taste for this trend has never really died out. Some comic purists have embraced these revisionist stories (me, for instance) and some hate them (my brother, for instance). Ellis' Planetary is, in my mind, his cornerstone work, though I have liked streaks of Authority/Stormwatch and Transmetropolitan, among others.
Crooked Little Vein is Ellis' first novel, a darkly comic (verging on absurdist) take on the hard-boiled PI genre (with a dash of world-spanning espionage chucked in). Our tarnished hero is sent by a shadowy government figure to find the Lost Constitution of the United States, sending him on a sordid--and I do mean sordid--tour of America's underbelly. Ellis takes fairly obvious swipes at big-hatted Texans, la-la Californians, and button-down Midwesterners, but surprises with a number of shocks, leaving no taboo unturned from bestiality to child molesting to a few practices that--suffice to say--are hard to describe.
Although with the strong caveat that Ellis' writing is not for every taste, and at some points wasn't to mine, I enjoyed the humor and energy of the work and found it very readable. I will look forward to more of his fiction.
Having a hard time finding this one, I bought if off of ebay and read it at a pretty good clip.
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