Westfield: For those who are unfamiliar with the Blanche stories, what can you tell us about them?

Rick Geary: Blanche is a young woman from the Midwest who tours the world as a concert pianist during the early years of the 20th century. Along the way, she confronts mysteries, skirts danger, and meets many notable historical figures. The character is based ever-so-loosely on my grandmother, who studied piano in New York at the turn of the century and later taught music in her tiny Kansas town.

Westfield: What are some of Blanche's adventures in this collection?

Geary: The collection consists of the three stories that have been published previously as individual comics. In the first, she travels to New York to study piano under a famous instructor and finds a strange religious cult under the streets of the city. In the second, she finds work at a film studio in the early days of Hollywood. And in the last she finds herself stranded in Paris and is recruited to prepare a musical stage production with Picasso and Eric Satie.

Westfield: You tell the stories as illustrated letters that Blanche writes to her parents. How did you come up with that storytelling device?

Geary: Point -of-view is very important to me in both reading and writing stories, and I always prefer first-person narratives. I'm not sure why this is - probably because it limits and paces the output of plot information, much as in real life. In my non-fiction graphic novels about classic murder cases, I adopt a more omniscient point-of-view, as dictated by the subject matter. The Blanche stories, however, demand a more personal approach, and the letters - a time-honored fictional device - seemed perfect for this.

Westfield: These stories take place in very specific times and places with Blanche often encountering real people from history. How much research do you do for these tales?

Geary: I've always been a history lover, and I rely for these stories upon my general knowledge of the cultural history of the early 20th century. I haven't done any specific or detailed research, such as finding what exact dates DW Griffith filmed Intolerance, for instance, or where Picasso had a studio in Paris. Blanche's adventures are fictional, after all, and I keep the history somewhat loose and fanciful.

Westfield: There is a new story in the collection. What can you tell us about it?

Geary: The new material in this collection isn't strictly a Blanche story but a 3-page personal reminiscence about my visits, as a kid, to my grandmother's small town in Kansas. This introduction mixes fact and fiction to tell of how I came across the letters that form the narrative of the three stories.

Westfield: Looking at the Blanche stories and your Treasury Of Victorian Murder books, you obviously enjoy stories with a historical setting. Why is that?

Geary: To treat a subject with any amount of humor or irony, I believe, requires some distance and detachment, and nothing is better for this than a story from history. Besides, it's fun to draw the costumes, furniture, buildings, carriages, etc.

Westfield: Are there any other projects that you're working on that you'd like to mention?

Geary: I'm currently at work on the next two volumes in my Treasury of 20th Century Murder series. First to be published will be a account of the still-unsolved 1922 murder of the Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor. Next will be the saga of the Axe-Man of New Orleans, who dispatched several people in 1918-1919. In addition, I have two new Blanche stories plotted out: Blanche Goes to San Francisco in which she shares adventures with Dashiell Hammett and Harry Houdini, and Blanche's Murder Case, set in Kansas during the Great Depression.

Westfield: Any closing comments?

Geary: Nothing really, except to say how grateful I am to Diana Schutz at Dark Horse, whose idea it was to publish a Blanche collection and who expertly shepherded the project to fruition.

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