Max Allan Collins is probably best known for having written the graphic novel on which the movie The Road To Perdition was based. I myself know him as the author of a very fine mystery novel, True Detective, set in Chicago in the 1930s. Turns out he’s written more books about his Jewish-Irish private eye, Nathan Heller, that I didn’t know about. These include Chicago Lightning, a collection of short stories covering a period of about twenty years.
Nathan Heller differs from the standard fictional private eye in that he’s ethical but not technically “clean.” He does occasional, cautious business with organized crime, and those associations are often useful to him in his investigations. His relations with the police are about as equivocal, as some of them bear him a grudge for helping to expose some crooked cops in the past. The assumption throughout is that both groups are about equally corrupt. Continue reading Chicago Lightning, by Max Allan Collins