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| Review by Lily Fierro |
The word ragtag was made for the members of the Boswell and Flynn, Consulting Detectives organization.
Bozz is a giant, super-intelligent alien whose spaceship crashed, leaving him stranded in Victorian England. Amanda (a.k.a. Mandy) Flynn is a former prostitute turned full time private detective and full time Bozz supporter/sponsor. And to round out our crew, we have Salem Hawkshaw, a Texas man on an extended pitstop in England who provides the muscle, the gruffness, and the spicy foods of The Bozz Chronicles.
The Bozz Chronicles, now with all 6 issues collected into a single volume for Dover Publications, focuses on the development of these characters via the various supernatural mysteries our detectives investigate and solve; when there’s something extraordinarily strange occurring, Boswell and Flynn are the ones to call.
Each member of the organization contributes an advantage to allow them to handle the uncommon mysteries and clients who employ them. The team has the perceptiveness, the brawn, the cleverness, and the intellect required to take on any challenge.
As thus, the mysteries, while they drive the plot, serve only as a track for each issue to move on. Like a train track, a definite and expected start and end exist (after all, we know the crew will always solve the mystery at hand), but the most interesting part is what travels on it. In the case of The Bozz Chronicles, the personas of the travelers and their interactions with each other emerge in the foreground as the strongest and most memorable component of the series.
Mandy, as a former lady of the night, understands how to use her sensuality to her advantage; she’s a Victorian London era Jackie Brown, and with her sensuality, she also knows how to communicate and interact with the world around her. She is a mix of compassionate and severe, selfless and sycophantic, making her a complex and very human protagonist.
Bozz may be my favorite alien I’ve ever encountered in fiction. He openly talks about how earth bores him, but he has an immense vulnerability in his willingness to trust people, preventing him from ever seeming like a spoiled child. From a visual perspective, it also helps that he’s the height of an eight foot door and built like a heavyweight boxer. For a being far more forward in the evolutionary chain than humans, Bozz remains humble in his interactions with all creatures he encounters, ranging from other humans to birds.
Other Steampunk fiction would have replaced Bozz with a mad and quirky scientist type character or wacky sidekick, but David Michelinie and Bret Blevins’ representation of Bozz makes him a far more relatable and welcoming character in their Victorian England.
And last, but not least, we have Salem Hawkshaw, a Texan straight out of the American West. In Victorian London, Salem may look more aloof than Bozz, but he has an advantage that lies entirely in his physical strength and his courage. Salem, though coarse and probably considered vulgar in some circles, possesses a strong sense of loyalty and valor that he conveys through his protection of Mandy and Bozz. Salem, while brutish, also has a certain softness to him, seen often when he’s in the kitchen preparing dinner for the team or when he’s protecting Mandy from men he does not trust.
With three such vastly different characters, how exactly does The Bozz Chronicles congeal?
All three stand as outsiders to Victorian England society. Consequently, the work that they succeed in also exists at the fringe of society and also reality. As outsiders who really only have each other, the three form their own family unit and business team, making each mystery feel less like a hired job and more like a group of friends just hanging out but with lightning machines, sorcery, and alien crystals.
And though the charms of and bond between Mandy, Bozz, and Salem will force you to return to this series, the mysteries, while serving primarily as a framework for character development, contain outstanding imagination and just plain fun with a dash of magic.
The journeys the Boswell and Flynn agency go on lead them to encounter some amazing places and creatures. They encounter everything from demons to a man with an upside-down face, and similarly, their quests to find answers also takes them to multiple places ranging from the bowels (and accompanying underground canals) of London to Africa. Whether helping a wife figure out why her husband has become a complete recluse or preventing the Devil from emerging from a painting to take over the world, Mandy, Bozz, and Salem collaborate and work together on each mystery, weaving their personal and business relationships into each mission and thus creating issues filled with not only action but also a lot of heart.
The Bozz Chronicles, though inspired by Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who with a few glimmers of Steampunk, reminds us that genres can establish the setting and archetypes of a work, but, in the best genre fiction, the characters and their relationships attract and captivate us and keep our attention on their stories, even though their world is far different than our own, and they encounter far more aliens, demons, and sorcerers than we do.
