[Detective] Miller stood planted there like one of the lions in front of the Art Institute, only meaner-looking. Also, the lions were bronzed and he was tarnished copper.

I discovered, after I had bought True Detective, the first of Max Allan Collins’s Nate Heller novels, that it was one I’d already read, some time back. Nevertheless I didn’t regret the purchase. I’d forgotten what an extremely fine book this is—one of those few novels that lifts the hard-boiled mystery to a new level.

All the Heller books are good. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s impossible to keep a series from becoming formulaic after a while. With the Heller books, you have a series where the same private eye somehow manages to be on the scene for almost every important murder in America between 1930 and 1970. Each one is plausible individually, but they stretch credibility in the aggregate.

But this first novel deserves a place all its own. Collins’s own contemplation of the hard-boiled genre led him to want to write a book that stretched the limits and broke the rules, not with malice but for a reason. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe was an honorable man, trying to keep clean in a dirty world. Collins’s detective, Nate Heller, is a soiled man, trying to find a way to preserve some degree of integrity. He’s a tragic character, and True Detective is a genuine tragedy, with a plot that functions like the mechanism of a guillotine. Continue reading True Detective, by Max Allan Collins →

I just got in under the wire, acquiring Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe from Amazon. I went to link to it for this review, and discovered the Kindle version was not available. I puzzled over this, since the book is right here on my Kindle device now, and I knew I got it from Amazon. Turns out it’s one of those Overdrive books that got removed the other day. So you’ll have to either buy a paper copy, or go to Overdrive for the e-book.

What Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is, is an anthology, first published in the 1980s and expanded in 1999, of original Philip Marlowe stories written by current mystery writers. The contributors contributed their own Marlowe stories, and then added brief appreciations, telling how Chandler’s work had influenced their own.

The results are uneven, but entertaining. The authors all attempt to emulate Chandler’s style. Some do it better than others. The most interesting thing to notice, for me, was the personal indulgences several of them couldn’t seem to resist. Female writers (but not all of them) couldn’t help correcting Chandler’s portrayal of women, introducing the kind of female characters they wish Chandler had written about. A couple writers couldn’t resist injecting politics, something Chandler generally eschewed. “The Empty Sleeve,” by W. R. Philbrick, is interesting for having Philip Marlowe meet his own creator, Raymond Chandler, at a poker game. But he also injects, entirely gratuitously, a certain politician he doesn’t like in a sleazy role for which there’s no historical warrant I’m aware of. Roger L. Simon, still a liberal when the book was compiled, contributes a slashing indictment of the Hollywood Black List, “In the Jungle of Cities.” Continue reading Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (Anthology) →

The good news—almost wonderful news, except for the One Problem that I’ll detail at the end of this review– is that the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s delightful Toby Peters novels are being released for Kindle by Mysterious Press. I downloaded the very first book of the series, Bullet for a Star, and read it with pleasure.

The Toby Peters novels, if you’re not familiar with them, are light mysteries set in Hollywood. Toby is a very small-time P.I. who nevertheless keeps getting hired for cases involving famous movie stars (and a few other notables) of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

In this story, an executive at Warner Brothers (which fired Toby as a security man some time earlier) asks him to look into a blackmail scheme. Someone has sent them a print of a photo of Errol Flynn in a compromising position with a very young girl. Flynn admits the accusation isn’t out of the question, but in this case he’s never met the girl. The studio wants Toby to make arrangements to pay the blackmail anyway.

But instead of a simple exchange, there’s a fight, and Toby gets knocked out, and somebody gets dead, and then the action takes off. Continue reading Bullet for a Star, by Stuart M. Kaminsky →

The bright lights of Hollywood Boulevard took on a shimmering radiance, neon burning in the coolness of dusk, the hard, unpleasant edges of an ugly one-industry town blurred into blemish-free beauty. Like an aging screen queen with a great makeup artist, a gauze-draped key light, and a Vaseline-smeared camera lens, Hollywood didn’t look half bad.

Continuing my random-order reading of the novels in Max Allan Collins’s Nate Heller historical mystery series, I came to Angel in Black, his treatment of the Black Dahlia murder.

1947 finds Nate Heller newly married and honeymooning in Los Angeles. He’s riding along with a newspaper reporter when they follow a police radio call and become the first two people (after the murderer) to see the naked, bisected female corpse that will soon become a national sensation.

Heller, a former cop and well-known private eye, is invited by the chief investigator to help out. He agrees, for reasons he keeps secret. Continue reading Angel in Black, by Max Allan Collins →

I have to give T. L. Hines a lot of credit. In Faces in the Fire he has, first of all, broken with standard Christian genre fiction in making his message implicit, not explicit. You’ll search in vain here for a conversion moment or an explanation of the way of salvation.

Secondly, he’s messed with the form. It’s not that nobody has ever written a story out of sequence before, it’s just that Christian novelists, in general, don’t have the confidence to do something so experimental. Faces in the Fire begins with Chapter 34, and proceeds to tell the major characters’ stories out of sequence, showing us the consequences before we see the causes. He does this pretty well, with the result that the reading experience closely approximates the mystery that is all of our lives.

Also, it’s the rare Christian novel that features a hit man, an e-mail spammer, and a drug addicted tattoo artist as sympathetic main characters.

We’re talking grace here, not works.

The story begins with Kurt Marlowe, a metal sculptor and sometime over the road trucker, who hears ghostly voices (he calls them “spooks”) in the used clothing he buys at estate sales. He does not respond to the voices, but uses their messages as inspiration for his art. Then one day he picks up a pair of shoes that put a picture in his mind more compelling than any he’s seen before. It’s an image so compelling it scares him. So he tries to throw the shoes away. But they keep coming back to him.

He meets a woman in a truck stop, who gives him a ten digit number written on a napkin, in a plastic bag. Then the story switches to her background, and passes from her to yet another character…

It all comes together pretty neatly in the end. The plot strains a bit at points, I think, but that’s almost inevitable in a tightly woven story of this kind. All in all, a very good read.

Recommended, with cautions for adult subject matter.

Like the rest of the country, I’d seen in the papers that Huey had, on the floor of the Senate, accused FDR of aiding and abetting a murder plot against him; something about conspirators meeting at some hotel somewhere. But I’d really merely read the headlines, skimmed the stories. Nobody was taking it very seriously. After all, Huey made a habit out of such accusations. He was a wolf who kept crying little boy.

I’m delighted to have rediscovered Max Allan Collins’s Nate Heller novels. They’re textured and well-written, and something like George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels in providing entertaining, excellently researched history lessons. I knew almost nothing about the death of Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long before I read Blood and Thunder, but now I do.

The novel starts in 1935. Chicago private eye Nathan Heller has been persuaded by Senator Long (who met him on an earlier visit to the windy city) to become one of his bodyguards. After a visit to the Oklahoma State Fair they return to Louisiana, and Nate is introduced to the continual circus that is Huey Long’s presidential campaign. Formerly a supporter of the New Deal, Long has broken with Roosevelt, and dreams of taking his populist wealth redistribution campaign to a national stage. He entertains visitors and reporters in his hotel suite dressed in green silk pajamas. He writes music. He parties hard. He has connections with organized crime. Heller has about had his fill of it all (in spite of an enjoyable affair with one of Long’s ex-mistresses) when Long is shot to death. According to eyewitness reports he was killed by an angry dentist who was then riddled with bullets by Long’s furious bodyguards (Nate is off on an errand at that moment). Nate goes home. Continue reading Blood and Thunder, by Max Allan Collins →