Vertigo make another foray into the crime genre with Angeltown, a five-issue mini by Gary Phillips and Shawn Martinbrough.

Private eye Nate Hollis is hired to find Theophus Burnett, a star basketball player who's suspected of murdering his wife.  Meanwhile, he's also trying to find out who murdered his own father a year ago.  And if that sounds like a fairly generic crime story... well, yeah.  It is.

Of course, every crime story needs a unique selling point, and in this case, it's the Los Angeles setting.  In his "On The Ledge" piece to promote the story, Phillips talks about lineage a bit, and then explains how "Hollis' world is my world, or rather the one that is post the '92 riots in LA."  (That'd be the same as "my world", then, unless Phillips is living in a 12-year time bubble.)  Rather uninspiringly, he goes on to add that "Angeltown builds on the tradition of tersely written comic books and novels that have incorporated real-world events and that have at their centres the cynical yet idealistic protagonist in search of the truth."

What this means in practice is a fairly standard, but very efficient, exercise in crime writing, with Shawn Martinbrough providing similarly effective art.  With allusions to fame and OJ Simpson thrown in.  However, it doesn't really feel like a story about fame; Phillips seems more interested in the diversity of his home town.  Basically, he really, really likes LA, and he thinks it's an inherently fascinating place to set a story.  ("In the pages of this miniseries you'll find a city that you better know how to navigate lest you get lost and never come back.")  If you agree with him, and you like genre crime stories, then this is the book for you.

I'm not particularly a fan of crime stories, nor can I get all that worked up about Los Angeles.  Writers doing love letters to their home towns rarely do much for me.  In fact, I was going to do this as a Ninth Art piece some time, but I'll get it out of the way here.  Attention, writers.  Your home town is nowhere near as interesting or distinctive as you all seem to think.

I never, ever want to see another love letter to the deep diversity and soul of New York, another story about the living pulse of London Which Is Really Almost A Person, or another godawful BBC Scotland drama about the unique spirit of Glasgow.  If your home town is somewhere like Baghdad, Tripoli, Ho Chi Minh City or Kathmandu, then okay, I'd be interested in hearing about it.  If you live in LA... well, hey, it's a major western city.  It has local celebrities and some poor people.  Yes, it's a good setting for a crime story, but only because it fits so neatly into the genre standards; it doesn't become a unique selling point that transforms an average story into something more distinctive.

Fine if you like this sort of thing - it is a well told crime story.  But it doesn't stand out from the crowd.  And Caper #5-8 already did it better earlier in the year, come to think of it.

Rating: B-

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