This one’s a heartbreaker.



Yet another Nate Heller mystery from Max Allan Collins here. Flying Blind is all about the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. I’ve always steered clear of the Earhart business myself, because I don’t much care for stories where the girl dies (though I’ve written some, come to think of it). Most of what I know about the Earhart mystery came from an old episode of Unsolved Mysteries, and this book actually fitted in pretty well with the speculations on that show.

This story starts in 1935, when Chicago private eye Heller is hired by Earhart’s slimy husband, P. G. Putnam (of the P. G. Putnam and Sons publishing house), to be her bodyguard on a lecture tour. She’s been receiving threatening letters, Putnam says (although there’s some suspicion he created them himself, to garner publicity). Privately, he asks Heller to find out if Earhart is having an affair. Though he feels guilty about it because he despises Putnam and likes Earhart, Heller agrees to do the job. He ends up having an affair with her himself.

The job ends and some years pass, and then Heller is called out to California again by Paul Mantz, Earhart’s flight instructor and technical advisor. Mantz is convinced that Putnam has gotten Earhart into something fishy with her proposed around-the-world flight. Heller discovers that the government has installed spy equipment in her plane, but he gets hauled in by military agents and warned off on national security grounds. So Amelia and her navigator take off, and the rest, you might say, is mystery. The later part of the story involves a desperate solo mission by Heller to rescue Earhart from the Japanese, and a final, much later retributive visit to Saipan.

Amelia Earhart, whom I myself never thought of as a particularly attractive female, comes off as very appealing in this book. Sweet and vulnerable, yet ambitious and full of determination, she’s not as good a pilot as her reputation says, and her fame is largely the construction of her on-the-make husband. It might be that she was doomed to come to grief one way or another, but Heller has genuine feelings for her and is both frustrated and guilty over not being able to do more for her. This is one of the more emotional installments in the Nate Heller series, and I think the author carried it off extremely well.

Cautions for language, violence, and fairly graphic (and adulterous) sex (including the lesbian kind). Cautions also for a great deal of historical speculation. This is fiction after all, as I’m sure Collins would tell us. (And very likely will.) Recommended, especially if you like a good cry.