Max Allan Collins

• Born: March 3, 1948
• Place of Birth: Muscatine, Iowa

TYPES OF PLOT: Hard-boiled; private investigator; historical

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Nolan, 1973-; Quarry, 1976; Mallory, 1983-1986; Nathan Heller, 1983-; Eliot Ness, 1987-1989; Disaster, 1999-2005

Contribution

Max Allan Collins is an innovative writer whom many critics credit for being the first to write hard-boiled historical detective stories and shape the genre for other writers. His most significant protagonist is private investigator Nathan Heller, who appears in works frequently lauded by reviewers. Collins created a female private investigator, Ms. Tree when Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky introduced their women detectives. Collins gained popular acclaim when he wrote the Dick Tracy detective comic strip. His prominence increased with the release of the film Road to Perdition (2002), based on his graphic novel by the same name published in 1998. Collins also wrote two companion novels for Road toPerditionRoad to Purgatory (2004) and Road to Paradise (2005). In addition to writing a large collection of mystery novels, Collins enhanced scholarship of the genre with his nonfictional essays and books.

Collins’s peers have recognized his writing with awards. The Private Eye Writers of America (PWA) presented Collins a Shamus Award for outstanding novel for True Detective (1983). He received his second Shamus for Stolen Away (1991). Many of his other works were also nominated for Shamus awards. In 2006, the PWA honored Collins with its most notable prize, The Eye, recognizing his lifetime contributions to the private investigator genre. The Mystery Writers of America presented Collins with an Edgar Allan Poe Award for his critical book, One Lonely Knight: Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1984; with James L. Traylor). In 2014, Collins received the Shamus Award for Best PI Short Story for his "So Long, Chief" (2013). Many of his works garnered myriad award nominations, including Quarry's Blood (2022), The Big Bundle (2022), and Quarry in the Middle (2009). Reviewers have had mixed opinions of Collins’s mysteries. Many critics praise his plotting and action, while others consider his narratives weakened by superfluous details. Some reviewers dislike his occasionally unrealistic and sometimes demeaning characterizations of historical characters.

Biography

Max Allan Collins, Jr., was born on March 3, 1948, in Muscatine, Iowa, to Max Allan Collins and Patricia Ann Rushing Collins. His parents encouraged artistic expression. Collins’s father was a music director for Muscatine High School and Muscatine Community College. When Collins was a toddler, his mother read Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy comics to him. Later, Collins used his allowance to buy Dick Tracy issues. After Collins’s mother sent his drawings to Gould, the cartoonist mailed Collins a letter for his eighth birthday, praising his artistry.

Collins read books by , , and other detective authors. He began writing fiction in junior high, submitting his work to publishers. At Muscatine High School, Collins acted in plays, ran track, and lettered in football. His senior profile in his high school’s Auroran yearbook stated his ambition was to become a professional writer. After graduating in 1966, Collins studied at Muscatine Community College, completing an associate of arts degree in 1968. On June 1, 1968, he married Barbara Jane Mull. Their son Nathan was born in 1982.

Collins was a Muscatine Journal reporter from 1968 through 1970. He enrolled in creative writing workshops at the University of Iowa, receiving a bachelor of arts degree in 1970. He was accepted to that university’s graduate writers’ workshop and earned a master of fine arts degree in 1972. From 1971 through 1977, Collins taught at Muscatine Community College. He attended Boucheron conventions, meeting PWA founder Robert Randisi, who became a supportive colleague. In 1977, when Gould retired from teaching, Collins submitted his successful proposal, “Dick Tracy Meets Angeltop,” to write Dick Tracy. A contract dispute ended Collins’s employment in 1993.

Collins experienced an epiphany in the 1970s when he read The Maltese Falcon (1929-1930) and noticed its copyright, realizing that private investigators had existed throughout the twentieth century. Fascinated by unsolved crimes and mysteries, he envisioned stories set during the Depression and into the 1960s, featuring private eye Nathan Heller investigating crimes associated with famous events and people. To develop his idea, Collins researched in archives and libraries and interviewed eyewitnesses. His first Heller novel, True Detective, appeared in 1983.

Collins began writing screenplays in 1994. In 1998, his graphic novel, Road to Perdition, was published, securing international attention for his writing. Publishers hired Collins to write novels based on films and television shows. Collins edited anthologies of Mickey Spillane’s short stories and finished Spillane’s novels in progress after his death. Collins also coauthored mysteries with his wife. In 1999, Collins contributed a chapter to the serial mystery, Sixteen Thousand Suspects: A RAGBRAI Mystery, written by Iowa authors to honor the Des Moines Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa.

Collins has served on the board of directors for the Mystery Writers of America and PWA and has judged nominations for Shamus and Edgar Awards.

Analysis

Max Allan Collins perceives himself as a storyteller who writes primarily to entertain readers. He shapes his stories to appeal to his audience by incorporating cultural references, jargon, and attitudes. Themes of violence and corruption resonate in Collins’s writing. He uses dark humor and irony to establish sinister tones. His stories are often set during the 1930s Depression or wars to intensify ominous themes and suggest characters’ jaded, pessimistic outlooks. Characters, both male and female, are prone to narcissism and hedonism, with men frequently displaying misogynistic behavior.

Collins focuses on depicting unsolved twentieth-century crimes in the United States, appropriating historical persons and events for his stories’ foundations. Because he manipulates history, he prints disclaimers and historical notes to distinguish fact from fiction, emphasizing that his protagonist, Nathan Heller, presents original, factually sound hypotheses to solve infamous cases. Name-dropping in these provocative mysteries, thick with historical casts, is often overwhelming and distracts from the crime-solving.

Collins creates unreliable, flawed narrators who are often angry and dishonest and survive on the periphery of society. Truth and memory are constant themes as characters lie, create stories and identities, and withhold or divulge information according to their perceptions, motivations, loyalties, and weaknesses. He frequently casts his characters as being more accurate than standard historical accounts, and Heller reveals that recorded facts are untrue. Collins enjoys surprising his readers with unexpected plot twists and variations on clichés.

Family and home are themes that contrast with horrific images in Collins’s works. He presents characters’ positive attributes, noting people and places to which they have emotional ties, to reveal their vulnerabilities and humanity, no matter how brutal they are to others. Collins emphasizes father-son relationships. Settings in Iowa and Illinois, places familiar to the author, add a sense of realism to his stories and enhance his strong visual writing style.

True Detective

In True Detective, Collins introduces Nathan Heller, living in 1933 Chicago. Describing Heller’s story as a memoir, Collins implies that his investigator, using first-person narration, is recalling an incident from his past, and his memory might not be completely accurate. A police officer, Heller refuses to lie while testifying in a murder trial involving police and gangster Frank Nitti, Al Capone’s associate. After relinquishing his badge, Heller establishes a detective agency, traveling to Atlanta to meet with imprisoned Capone, who hires him to stop Nitti from killing Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak. Returning to the Midwest, Heller interacts with his friends, Eliot Ness and Dutch Reagan (whose comments are humorous because Collins knows Reagan’s future presidential election). Heller witnesses Cermak’s assassination, which the press believes was intended for visiting President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as has been explained in history texts.

Collins states that he presumes histories of infamous crimes are usually incorrect, so he reveals the truth, supported by research, through Heller’s eyes as a witness. This premise continues in his second Heller memoir, True Crime (1984), which states that John Dillinger has survived federal agents’ attempts to kill him. Collins’s innovative concept applies private-eye genre elements with various mystery structures. His short story “The Strawberry Teardrop” pairs Heller and Ness as they identify a serial killer, which inspired Butcher’s Dozen (1988) and Collins’s Ness series.

Stolen Away

In Stolen Away, the fifth novel in the Nathan Heller series, Heller locates a bootlegger’s abducted son in Chicago, resulting in speculation that he can find a kidnapped toddler, Charles Lindbergh, Jr. After traveling to the Lindberghs’ Hopewell, New Jersey, estate, Heller meets Lindbergh; his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh; and Colonel Schwarzkopf, who is in charge of the investigation. Examining the crime scene, Heller evaluates the evidence, including ransom notes, and interviews the staff. Near Washington, D.C., he encounters Gaston B. Means, who claims he knows where the Lindbergh child is, and Heller assumes Means is a con man. Heller flies with Lindbergh, searching for a boat that the ransom notes state the boy is aboard; their searches are unsuccessful. Heller leaves, disgusted by how the Lindberghs permit Means to manipulate them.

Following the case in newspapers, Heller learns that a child’s body, recovered near Hopewell, has been identified by Lindbergh as that of his child. While attending accused kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann’s trial, Heller realizes that the man did not abduct the Lindbergh child. He develops a theory that Lindberghs’ son lives on an Illinois farm and travels there. He meets the farmers’ adopted boy before violence erupts and assassins attack, wounding Heller. Decades later, a middle-aged man named Harlan Jensen visits Heller, and they discuss the possibility that he is the kidnapped Lindbergh toddler. Having constructed a detailed account, Collins explains why his alternate ending is plausible. Themes of hope, despair, and deceit reinforce Collins’s depiction of Heller’s investigations, which convinced many reviewers and readers that they were reading a nonfictional account in what is often considered Collins’s strongest novel.

Collins continued the series with more than ten subsequent novels, including Do No Harm (2020), The Big Bundle (2022), and Too Many Bullets (2023).

Road to Perdition

Family, loss, loyalty, and betrayal are the primary themes in Collins’s best-known crime novel, Road to Perdition, which explores the mysterious and deadly world of gangsters from their viewpoint. In 1930, Michael O’Sullivan, Jr.’s innocence is shattered when he observes his father killing a group of men. Michael learns that his father is a hitman for the Irish crime boss John Looney in the Tri-Cities stretching across the Mississippi River into Iowa and Illinois. Because of family allegiances, Michael O’Sullivan, Sr., is loyal to Looney, who calls him the Archangel of Death as he performs any hits Looney orders. O’Sullivan intensely loves his wife and two sons and has kept his profession a secret until his son observes him. John Looney’s son Connor kills Michael’s mother and younger brother Peter, mistaking him for Michael, whom John had ordered silenced.

Michael and his father flee, heading for safety with relatives in Perdition, Kansas, because they know they are targeted for death in the Tri-Cities. During their travels, which take them first east through Illinois, Michael watches his father kill enemies to avenge his family, then confess his sins to priests. Michael is devastated when he kills a man to save his father’s life and is confused about his religious obligations both to honor his father and not to kill. Michael arrives in Perdition only to lose his father to a hitman. He seeks a priest to perform his last rites, absolving his father of his crimes. Confession strengthens Michael, who becomes a priest, wanting to tend souls, not destroy them. However, Collins’s later novel, Road to Paradise (2005), depicts a middle-aged Michael O’Sullivan, Jr., who is reluctantly involved in violent Mafia activity and longs for a normal life with his wife and daughter.

The London Blitz Murders

Notable authors of classic detective novels become sleuths in the fifth novel in Collins’s Disaster series. In The London Blitz Murders (2000), set in February 1942, Londoners fear both the Blackout Ripper and German bombing raids. During the Blitz, several women are slain and mutilated. Detective Edward Greeno of Scotland Yard investigates, summoning forensic expert Sir Bernard Spilsbury to examine the bodies. Novelist Agatha Christie Mallowan works in a hospital pharmacy while her second husband is stationed in North Africa. Mallowan, the name she prefers, competently handles her duties, writing in the evenings and awaiting a play based on her writing to be staged in London.

Admiring Sir Spilsbury, who also works at the hospital, Mallowan accompanies him to murder scenes, which intrigue the novelist. She recognizes one of the victims, Nita Ward, as an actress who had auditioned for her play. Mallowan provides names of theater people who might divulge information about Ward. She alerts detectives to clues they have overlooked. As evidence accumulates, Mallowan considers who the most likely suspects are and discovers proof, which results in the murderer’s capture.

Collins’s disaster mysteries are less hard-boiled than his Heller novels. With a style reminiscent of Christie’s cozy mysteries, this book does not fully convey the tension and stress that wartime Londoners constantly experienced. Some reviewers praised Collins’s appropriation of Mallowan as a sleuth, while other critics thought her presence at crime scenes was unrealistic and doubted that she would have contributed directly to solving such horrific crimes.

Other novels in Collins’s Disaster series include The Titanic Murders (1999), The Hindenburg Murders (2000), The Pearl Harbor Murders (2001), The Lusitania Murders (2002), and The War of the Worlds Murder (2005).

Principal Series Characters:

• Mallory, a former police officer and Vietnam veteran, lives in Port City, Iowa, where he both writes and solves mysteries. Modeled after his creator, Mallory is law abiding and helpful to people in his community, although the books he aspires to write tend to feature hard-boiled characters and plots.
• Nathan Heller, a native Chicagoan and former police officer, recalls famous people he knew while investigating unsolved crimes. He created the A-1 Detective Agency after leaving the Chicago police force because he was disgusted by corrupt practices with which he had complied, such as lying while testifying in court, to advance professionally. Heller served with the U.S. Marines during World War II.
• Eliot Ness, a fictionalized depiction of the real Ness when he was in his thirties and public safety director in Cleveland, Ohio, combating corrupt police, politicians, and organized crime during the Depression. In short stories and novels, he frequently allies with Heller to solve cases and apprehend criminals.

Bibliography

"Books." Maxallan Collins, 2024, maxallancollins.com/books. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Breen, Jon. “Murdering History: How the Past Became Fair Game for Detective Stories.” The Weekly Standard, 3 January 2005, pp. 31-34.

Crouch, Bill, Jr., editor. Dick Tracy: America’s Most Famous Detective. Citadel Press, 1987.

Hoffman, Carl. “Return to the Primal Noir: Two Modern Authors on the Black Dahlia.” Journal of American Culture, vol. 26, no. 3, Sept. 2003, pp. 385-94.

"Max Allan Collins." IMDB, www.imdb.com/name/nm0172523. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Pronzini, Bill, and Marcia Muller. 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado’s Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction. New ed., The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.

Randisi, Robert J. Interview of Max Allan Collins. The Armchair Detective, vol. 11, no. 3, July 1978, pp. 300-04.