Max Allen Collins Mystery Novels

Max Allen Collins Books

Kisses of Death: A Nathan Heller Casebook by Max Allan Collins

The private eye is as American as mom, apple pie - and gangsters and bootlegging. A child of the Roaring Twenties and the Depression Thirties, he is a genuine American hero with his poetic slang and his attempt to make things right as he goes down Mean Streets.
Max Allan Collins has recreated the great era of the P.I. in Nathan Heller. "I wanted to do the traditional P.I.," Collins writes in his introduction to Kisses of Death, "the tender tough guy in the trenchcoat and fedora with a bottle of wry in his bottom desk drawer. I didn't want to update him, and I didn't want to plop him down in contemporary times like a drunk who fell off a time machine." In novels and short stories, Collins has traced Heller's changes, and America's changes from the early thirties to the sixties, and in doing so has received a record nine Private Eye Writers of America "Shamus" nominations for his the series, winning twice. Each story investigates a genuine unsolved crime of the past.
Kisses of Death contains the previous unpublished title novella, in which Heller becomes associated with Marilyn Monroe and solves the famous Bodenheim murders. In other stories, he finds a solution to the death of actress Thelma Todd, becomes associated with Eliot Ness, and discovers who killed the midget that Bill Veeck had come to bat in a major league baseball game.

Stolen Away by Max Allen Collins

When Charles Lindbergh's baby son is kidnapped, one man searches for the truth against an historical backdrop peopled with such figures as Al Capone, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and Eliot Ness.

The Pearl Harbor Murders by Max Allan Collins

Many believe a war with Japan is imminent, but author Edgar Rice Burroughs is too busy basking in the Hawaiian sun to pay the rumors much mind. That is, until he finds a young Japanese-American woman murdered on the beach.

Angel in Black : A Nathan Heller Novel by Max Allan Collins

The newspapers dubbed her The Black Dahlia. Nathan Heller knew her-intimately- as Elizabeth Short. To discover the identity of the fiend who destroyed her, Heller must lay bare the terrifying truth behind Hollywood's make-believe facade.

The Titanic Murders by Max Allan Collins

Before the tragedy, there were the murders. Jacques Futrelle was among the many famous passengers on the R.M.S. "Titanic". One of the most celebrated American mystery writers of his time, he was also one of the over 1,500 people who didn't survive the ship's disastrous sinking. But what if Futrelle's crimesolving talents were engaged before it went down? Inspired by actual people, events, and historical details, this unique mystery is a masterpiece of fact, fiction, and foul play.

History of Mystery by Max Allan Collins

Footprints, a smoking revolver, broken glass . . . Whodunit? Get to the bottom of things with Max Allan Collins, who puts the enigmatic, endlessly fascinating world of the mystery genre under the magnifying glass in THE HISTORY OF MYSTERY. Starting with Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional detective Dupin, Collins tracks the modern detective story from its birth in Allan Pinkerton’s Memoirs to its fullest flowering in the fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross MacDonald. Collins widens his scope to explore the rich narrative and visual history of detective comics and the legacy of mystery in radio, television, and film noir. This stunning volume presents a magical selection of pulp and dime-novel covers of the thirties and forties, gats-and-gals paperback covers of the fifties and sixties, the Sunday strips’ yellow-trenchcoat-clad Dick Tracy, and portraits of the terribly proper and totally astute television dynamos Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Jessica! Fletcher. En route, Collins reveals true tidbits about some of mystery’s leading lights, like the little known fact that Dashiell Hammett was persecuted during the McCarthy era and opted for jail over betraying a friend, and that Nancy Drew posed for Playboy magazine. Arguably the most comprehensive survey ever published, THE HISTORY OF MYSTERY is sure to please the most discriminating sleuth.
About the Author
MAX ALLAN COLLINS has earned nine Private Eye Writers of America “Shamus” nominations for his Nathan Heller historical thrillers, winning twice for True Detective (1983) and Stolen Away (1991). A Mystery Writers of America “Edgar” nominee in both fiction and non-fiction categories, Collins has been hailed as “the Renaissance man of mystery fiction.” He lives in Iowa.

Flying Blind by Max Allan Collins

Amazon.com
"Now it was the next morning and the gas was in the plane. The tall, slender woman I'd lusted after the night before was standing next to me on the tarmac, near her ship, buckling a tan helmet under her chin, flashing me that gap-toothed grin she hid from photographers...." The woman, of course, is Amelia Earhart, and the man describing her is Nate Heller, ex-Chicago cop and private detective to the rich and famous. One of the most original characters in the historical mystery area, Max Allan Collins's Heller has jousted with Al Capone, helped out Clarence Darrow, and probed the killing of Huey Long--taking all his cases very personally. But a bad experience with a sadistic Charles Lindbergh has left him leery of flying, and it will take all of Earhart's charm to get him into a plane from St. Louis to Albuquerque, and then to Los Angeles. It's 1935, and Heller has been hired by Amelia's husband (the conniving publisher G.P. Putnam) to both guard her body and search out possible lovers on a book tour. A warm relationship grows up between the flyer and the detective, and when Earhart disappears a few years later, an overage Heller enlists in the Marines to search for her on the island of Saipan. The story is framed by scenes of a retired Nate in 1970 being persuaded to revisit Saipan by a persistent Earhart researcher, and the conclusions that Collins offers about her fate are as convincing as they are moving and exciting.

Majic Man by Max Allan Collins

The nation is wrapped up in postwar Commie paranoia as Nathan Heller follows a lead from Washington, D.C. to a strange place called Roswell....

OxfordBooks.com / Oxford, MS

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