In the shadows of the reflecting fire, her face was lovely, but she looked tired, and sad—or anyway melancholy, which is the wealthy’s way of feeling sad.

I have a memory of the first time my parents ever mentioned the Lindbergh kidnapping. To them, it was almost like a tragedy in the family. Charles Lindbergh was not only a national hero, he was a Minnesota hero, a Swedish boy from Little Falls. My father, a frustrated aviator, idolized him.

Max Allan Collins’ Stolen Away is a fictionalized account of the investigation, starring his private eye character Nathan Heller (I said I’d come back to this series, and I have). It’s a long and convoluted book, because it was a long and convoluted investigation. Judging from the author’s overview of source materials at the end, it appears one could do worse than come to this book first, if one were in the market for a comprehensive account of the whole thing (always taking fictional elements into consideration, of course).

The story starts in Chicago in 1932, when young Nathan Heller, a police detective, sights a suspicious woman carrying a baby through the LaSalle Street railroad station. Because police all over the country have been keeping their eyes out for the missing Lindbergh baby, he follows her, which leads to a gunfight and the recovery of the kidnapped baby—of a bootlegger.

Still, the incident sets off a train of events that gets him called in by his friend Eliot Ness, who asks him to go to New Jersey as a representative of the Chicago police in the case. There’s a theory that Al Capone, now in prison, had engineered the kidnapping in order to “help” in recovering the little boy, and negotiate a reduced sentence for himself.

So Nate goes out to the Lindbergh home, and walks into procedural chaos. The chief investigator (New Jersey State Police Col. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the Iraq War general) is incompetent, and generally defers to Col. Lindbergh, who is understandably more concerned with recovering his son than with solving the crime. Lindbergh also refuses to suspect any of his household servants, a big mistake. Leads followed (generally pretty clumsily) include a couple of psychics, one of them Edgar Cayce (I wasn’t happy about the positive portrayal of Cayce’s powers, but if I understand correctly a lot of that was a fictional plot device), and fully three different outside parties who present themselves as negotiators for the kidnappers. Eventually Nate gets sick of the whole unprofessional thing, and goes back to Chicago. Some time later, having become a private detective, he is called back to testify at the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the child’s murder, and he goes home convinced the man is, if not innocent, at least a minor player.

Then he gets a call from the governor of New Jersey, who holds much the same opinion. A wealthy benefactress, (Evalyn Walsh McLean, owner of the Hope Diamond, with whom Nate has already had an affair during his first visit) has offered to pay for Heller’s services to save Hauptmann’s life.

The whole thing is doomed, of course, but it’s worth the ride for the wide-ranging portrayal of one of the great mysteries of the Twentieth Century. This is not a fun book, but Heller is a smart and sympathetic guide to the past. I recommend it as a first-rate historical novel.

Cautions for violence, rough language, and adult situations.