Back before Frank Cammuso went on to bigger and more lucrative work, he created Max Hamm Fairy Tale Detective wherein fairy tale and Mother Goose characters meet Hammett and Chandler. An excellent pastiche with wonderful hardboiled dialogue, charming artwork, and great cartoon femmes in the classic Warner Bros. cartoon tradition!

From the publisher:

There are a million bedtime stories in the naked city. This is one of them. When Max’s partner, Humpty Dumpty ends up dead. It doesn’t take a scratch and sniff to smell something rotten. And if Max learns the truth, alot of important people including Mother Goose, will end up with egg on their faces. Because in Storybookland dreams die hard. Fairy Tale Noir.

This collects the four out-of-print individual issues: The Big Sheep and the three-part The Long Ever After.

This book even garnered a review in Publisher's Weekly:

His name is Max Hamm, and he's the private gumshoe hired to dig out answers from the seedy underbelly of Storybookland in this charming, lavishly illustrated pastiche of the hard-boiled genre and nursery rhymes. A diminutive porcine Mike Hammer, Max is more than able to handle the plethora of tough guys and sizzling, deceptive broads who cross his path. In "The Big Sheep" Hamm investigates the suspicious demise of his partner, Humpty Dumpty, and discovers a web of intrigue involving Bo Peep, Mother Goose, Little Boy Blue and a flock of extremely disgruntled sheep. In the longer "The Long Ever After" Hamm is hired by old flame Snow White to discover the identity of the owner of a lost glass slipper. Tragic romance, sleazy extramarital shenanigans, shocking family secrets and a galaxy of tarnished storybook stars collide in this tightly written yarn. Cammuso's artwork expertly straddles the line between stark black-and-white comics art and lush animation-influenced wash illustrations akin to those found in children's books. Though it travels well-worn territory, this clever mix is solid entertainment and the Little Golden Book–inspired format is just icing on the cake.

Frank Cammuso is the author/illustrator of the graphic novel series The Misadventures of Salem Hyde from Amulet Books. He also created the graphic novel series Knights of the Lunch Table from Graphix/Scholastic. Frank drew the comic Otto’s Orange Day and Otto’s Backwards Day for Toon-Books. He also wrote and drew his self-published graphic novel Max Hamm Fairy Tale Detective, for which he received an Eisner nomination.

Frank is the former award-winning political cartoonist for The Post-Standard newspaper in Syracuse, NY. His cartoons have been reprinted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today and Newsweek.

He has written fiction and satire with his good friend Hart Seely. Their work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Slate, and on National Public Radio. He’s the co-author of 2007-Eleven and Other American Comedies.

Cammuso currently teaches Sequential Illustration part-time at his alma mater, Syracuse University. He lives with his family in frosty Syracuse, NY, where they enjoy all things comics!