Target Lancer and Ask Not (The Memoirs of Nathan Heller, #15 and #16, 2012 and 2013)

By Max Allan Collins

These are the latter two acts in a trilogy that, at least at this time, bookends Collins’ most voluminous body of work, the Nathan Heller Mysteries, which began in the 1980s with “The Frank Nitti Trilogy” (set in the 1930s-1940s) and end, at least for now, with “The JFK Trilogy” (set in the early 1960s).  The opening tale of the latter-day trilogy was, of course, Bye Bye, Baby (2011).  Interestingly, the time displacement between historical setting and publication era has remained about fifty years, although the 1980s-2010s interim has seen publication of various other tales, both novels and short stories, set in more randomly ordered eras between the 1930s and the 1950s….  Collins has been spinning tales in the long career of Chicago detective Nate Heller for an equally long time; I’ve not been reading them nearly so long, only discovering them about a decade ago.  But I have thoroughly enjoyed the entirety of the series (well, except for one novel which inexplicably has remained unread on my bookshelf for several years – for some reason the opening of Damned in Paradise just hasn’t grabbed me the few times I have attempted starting it).

Bye Bye, Baby (The Memoirs of Nathan Heller, #14, 2011)

By Max Allan Collins

I discovered these novels about a decade ago, when I went through an earlier phase of reading “hard crime,” noir, “neopulp” (although I'd not encountered the term), mystery-type fiction. They may even be what drew me into that genre for the next couple of years, I'm not sure at this remove. I was familiar with the name of Max Allan Collins from his stint writing the Batman comic back during the '80s, as well as the fairly recent notoriety of the graphic-novel-become- Academy Award-nominated-film Road to Perdition, and luckily happened to stumble upon the first of his Nathan Heller books newly republished, with the subsequent two in the opening “trilogy” following hot on its heels – True Detective, True Crime, and The Million-Dollar Wound. Those three novels could almost be considered one long story in that they tell a sequential narrative establishing the fundamentals of Nate Heller's “homeworld” of 1930s-1940s Chicago, interweaving his story with a multitude of historical personalities and events.  I've sometimes seen them referred to as “The Frank Nitti Trilogy” in that Heller's relationship with Al Capone's … associate … provides something of an overall unifying arc. I ate them up, and 'round about the summer of 2003 (I think) I felt I grew to know Chicago (which I've never visited except for passing through the train station at the tender age of five or so, as well as flying into O'Hare on my way to a conference in Michigan about a decade and a half ago) like the back of my hand. The themes, style, and setting probably helped set me up for the Dresden Files a few years later, which are told in a similar first-person crime-noir style, largely in the same setting albeit in the present.