The big thing against Jack Staff the comic when it first came out was that it wasn't Kane, which was Paul Grist's previous comic, a brilliant hard-boiled, hilarious crime saga that was one of the best comics ever, and then he stopped doing it and started this, of all things, superhero comic. It didn't take long for Jack Staff to become the new best comic ever, but it was, and it is. Everything Used To Be Black And White is a big chunky book collecting all of the black and white issues published before Jack Staff moved to Image and glorious colour.

Twenty years ago, Jack Staff was Britain's greatest hero, but then he vanished and everyone forgot about him until today, Castletown, a north of England town where bodies have been turning up drained of blood. Becky Burdock, intrepid reporter, is one the case, and she's not the only one. Jack Staff is back, turning up whenever builder John Smith happens to be around. Department Q, who investigate question mark crimes are sniffing around, and so is Sergeant States, American hero,, on a goodwill tour of Europe. He and Jack had a weird and awful experience in Castletown Caverns back during the war, and it looks like the evil they encountered all those years ago is back.

The beauty of Jack Staff is that it's not just about Jack Staff: there's a large and engagingly quirky supporting cast, many of whom are recognisable homages to characters from old British ty shows and comics. Not knowing who they are won't spoil it for you, but it will add an extra layer of enjoyment to a comic already bursting at the seams with things to enjoy. Tom-Tom the Robot Man, Helen Morgan of Q, Inspector Maveryk the old fashioned copper, and the great Becky Burdock, one of the best female characters in all of modern comics.

Then again there's Grist himself, is humour, his style, his ability to make a page sit over and play dead. Jack Staff is comics at its cleverest, its funnest and its most creative. Utterly enjoyable.

Brian Garfield, perhaps best known as the author of the novel which inspired the infamous Death Wish films, seems like one of those forgotten authors now, which is a shame. As a craftsman he's up there with Westlake, Block, McBain, et al, those brilliant genre authors who never turned in a poorly written or badly constructed novel, who could take a plots or a characters apart and put them back together like a mechanic fine tuning an engine. Such books are always a pleasure to read.

Kolchak's Gold is framed as a spy thriller, but the historical investigation that makes up the bulk of it is the real heart of the novel. Harry Bristow is a historian working on a book about the destruction of the Black Sea port of Sepastopol during the Second World War. Despite many misgivings, he finds himself being directed down a side-path: the disappearance of a massive amount of gold belonging to the Russian Czar during the civil war. An interview with a dying emigre in Tel Aviv reveals the original fate of the gold. Research into archives in Russia has the potential to show him where the gold is now. Unfortunately, the KGB is almost literally looking over his shoulder, he has an old friend in the CIA and his lover may or may not be an agent of Mossad. And they all want the gold.

The book takes the form of a rather ragged manuscript delivered to Bristow's publishers, pieced together into something readable by his editors. Two sections cover the various adventures of the gold, and it is these that are the highlight of the book, combining historical notes for context and the personal account of a key witness to events. They are brilliant pieces of narrative dexterity, and I won't soon forget the account of the bullion train, fleeing the onslaught of the Reds through a refugee column of hundreds of thousands of doomed souls while the merciless winter closes in.

The cover blurb makes a big deal of comparing Kolchk's Gold to The Day Of The Jackal, but it's more like the Odessa File, really, and it certainly makes the cod-historical conspiracy thrillers of Dan Brown look like the weak sauce that they are. Garfield writes brilliantly, constructs his plots and mysteries and revelations like a demon. Don't be put off by the idea that this is just another cold war thriller. It's well worth rediscovering.

Slow, lovely, haunting tale.

Soldiers collects the first six issues of Jack Staff published through Image. It jumps straight into action, switching between the present day and twenty years ago with Grist's trade-mark expert playfulness. In the past, a military weapon called the Hurricane is accidentally unleashed on Castletown, and the only person standing in his way is Jack Staff. Today, violent attacks of uncontrollable rage are on the increase, and it won't be long before the whole town explodes.

Everyone's here: Jack, Becky, Tom-Tom, Maveryk, Morgan and the guys from Q, all running around ferociously fighting and exploding and making barbed comments at each other. The colours by Phil Elliot are a joy and the whole thing is so skillfully done and full of sheer unrestrained energy it leaves the reader giddy with happiness. Never mind Watchmen. I just wish more comics were like this.

Exquisitely constructed tale of mystery and revenge, a story that begins in 1929 at an exclusive boys' boarding school when three lives collide in a moment of ugliness and jealousy and confused adolescent sexuality. The story resumes after the fall of Burma, in the Changi prison camp and on the long march to the infamous Thai-Burmese railroad, and finally concludes decades later after a chance encounter on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Three men - the wealthy Butler, the weak Oliphant and Maitland the gardener's boy, endure appalling suffering at the hands of their Japanese captors. Hundreds of men die around them while they are caught up in their own strange triangle of need and hate.

This is extremely well-written, particularly the first-person present-day sections as the unidentified narrator expresses his own archly ironic distance from his pilgrimage through the Far East. The psychological tensions of the principal personalities is set against the epic scale of the horror and violence, the needless cruelty and apparently endless physical suffering. None of the characters are particularly likeable, but the personal drama they are caught in is utterly compelling while the wider human drama is flabbergasting.

I don't know much about the author, but to judge by the listings at the back of my 1991 edition paperback she had written two historical romances and two bawdy comedies, so this looks atypical. I wonder if she wrote any more like this? I wonder of her other work is as acutely, savagely brilliant as this?

The book that inspired the film, this is a slim, thoughtful meditation on grief and loss and anger that leads to violence as the only rational response to a dangerous world. Whether it's a moral response is left ambiguous. This isn't sleazy or exploitative or even sanctimonious. Mostly it's just sad story about a man transformed into his opposite by a horrible loss.