Showing results by author "Max Collins" in All Categories

Crime fiction readers know Quarry - the ruthless killer for hire from Max Allan Collins' acclaimed novels - but where did Quarry's story start? For first time ever, the best-selling author of Road to Perdition takes us back to the beginning, revealing the never-before-told story of Quarry's first job: infiltrating a college campus and eliminating a professor whose affair with one of his beautiful young students is the least of his sins.

In 1935, Nate Heller is hired to escort Amelia Earhart on a speaking tour because of numerous cut-and-paste death threats against her life. Heller suspects the threats are a stunt by Earhart's publicity-hungry husband, and the detective’s growing closeness to the bisexual aviatrix leads to a steamy affair. Two years later, when Earhart embarks on her flight around the world - and mysteriously disappears over the South Pacific - Uncle Sam enlists Heller in a clandestine search of Japanese waters for the popular Earhart....

What’s a good mystery story without a beautiful blonde to set things in motion? When the femme sharing a bench with Mallory in the Port City, Iowa, bus station is accosted by a scar-faced, one-eyed thug, the aspiring writer stops minding his own business and leaps into the fray with nothing but his fists and a well-aimed Pepsi bottle.

On October 30, 1938, rising radio star Orson Welles boondoggles the American public into believing that Martians have attacked Earth. With his clever adaptation of The War of the Worlds, the great showman proves he can get away with anything - maybe even murder. Minutes before the fictitious invasion goes live on the air, a dead body is found in the studio and the polarizing Welles is the obvious suspect.

Nathan Heller is Chicago’s most celebrated private detective, hobnobbing with Hugh Hefner, getting written up in Life magazine, enjoying the fruits of a long career that began in a one-room office and now is a coast-to-coast agency. When he does a small favor for a friend - who handles PR for the Teamsters - Heller runs into an old West Side mob crony, a small-time hustler named Jack Ruby. And when that friend is found dead, warning signals start to flash. Suddenly Jimmy Hoffa wants to talk to Nate...and so does Hoffa’s arch enemy, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

Comics kill. Or so the esteemed Dr. Werner Frederick would have people believe - people like the Congressmen holding hearings on banning violent crime and horror "funny books". And when the crusade provokes a most un-funny murder, Jack Starr - comics syndicate troubleshooter - has no shortage of suspects. Was it the knife-wielding juvenile delinquent or the naked seductress? Perhaps a frustrated publisher or an outraged cartoonist. Or was it a comic book reader…?

Tough, cynical, and clever, Nathan Heller has been called "the perfect private eye", the best investigator that Chicago (where "lightning" means gunfire) has to offer. Created by New York Times best-selling novelist and Road to Perdition creator Max Allan Collins, the classic PI comes vibrantly to life in this collection of 13 stories, all based on real cases of the 1930s and '40s.

Taking a midnight stroll along the Hudson River, Mike Hammer gets more than he bargained for: a partial corpse on an ice floe. The body is that of a butler who spent the last years of his life working for a millionaire -- also now deceased -- and his notoriously privileged children. Were both master and servant murdered? Captain Pat Chambers thinks so.

Mallory is back and facing a two-fisted whodunit: Who’s responsible for the just-discovered “lost novel” by the celebrated author of The Maltese Falcon? Is it the master, Dashiell Hammett, himself, or a very cunning counterfeiter? And who’s behind the shocking, suspicious demise of Roscoe Kane, a hard-drinking, hard-boiled crime-novel pioneer? Aptly enough, this one-two punch of a puzzle is the talk of Bouchercon, the famed convention where mystery scribes gather to honor (and murder?) their own.

On a lively night at the Victory saloon in Trinidad, New Mexico, Sheriff Caleb York interrupts his poker game to settle a minor dust-up that raises the stakes into major trouble. The wounded miscreant he ushers to the hoosegow spills the secret behind the mysterious disappearance of a certain stage coach. Bound for Denver, the stage carried three important passengers - beautiful ranch owner Willa Cullen, lovely temptress Rita Filley, and wealthy banker Raymond L. Parker. But all are gone, with only the corpses of fellow passengers as bullet-ridden clues.

Los Angeles. The City of Angels. The perfect place for a honeymoon… and the worst possible time for a murder. Vacationing private investigator Nate Heller finds himself a suspect in the LAPD’s investigation of the notorious Black Dahlia murder case. Problem is the butchered starlet, Elizabeth Short, is an old Chicago flame of Heller’s — and only the P.I. himself knows she was blackmailing him for abortion money.

The course of true love never did run smooth for PI Mike Hammer. His secretary and partner, Velda, has walked out on him without explanation, and Mike is just surfacing from a four-month bender. But then an old cop turns up murdered - a cop who once worked with Velda on the NYPD Vice Squad. What's more, Mike's pal, Captain Pat Chambers, has discovered that Velda is in Florida, now the moll of gangster and drug runner Nolly Quinn.

A legendary and retired police chief lies in a New York hospital bed, visited by two strangers: the first is ex-cop-turned-PI Mike Hammer, whose life was saved more than once by the old man. To the detective, the chief gives a mysterious key. The second visitor murders the chief, mere days before he would have died from natural causes. Someone is trying to tie up loose ends, and Mike Hammer is the only one with the evidence and calculation to ferret him or her out.

Everybody has someone they’d secretly like to kill. For Mallory and his fellow professional mystery authors, that someone is caustic book critic Kirk Rath. And while that’s no secret, it’s certainly a surprise when a busload of writers takes part in a mountain resort’s Murder Mystery Weekend - and discovers their archenemy has been cast in the plum part of the victim. What’s more surprising is how well Kirk Rath plays dead - until Mallory discovers the most hated man on Mohonk Mountain isn’t playing.

Fall 1942. When her Hollywood private detective daddy is called back to uniform, Fancy Anders is issued orders of her own - answer the phone, make referrals, and keep the place dusted. But the 24-year-old Barnard grad - whose hobbies include shooting, flying, and jujitsu - isn’t having any. At Amalgamated Aircraft, a young female worker chosen to pose for patriotic photos and posters has met with a suspicious “accidental death”. Fancy takes the victim’s place on the swing shift, fitting in well with coworkers very much not from high society circles.

Ginnie Mullens was many things in her life: tomboy, hippie, businesswoman, and inveterate gambler. Now, she’s just dead - apparently by her own hand. But “apparently” doesn’t pass muster with mystery writer Mallory, because no matter what else she may have been, Ginnie was first and foremost his friend. There’s nothing Mal won’t do to prove she didn’t go into that good night willingly…and nothing that will stop him from coming down hard on her killer.

In "Dying in the Post-War World", Heller returns from combat to find his marriage in shambles and himself square in the middle of the notorious Lipstick Killer case of 1946. "Kisses of Death" follows the PI into the 1950s, when he is hired to guard Marilyn Monroe. Finally, in "Strike Zone", Heller is hired by baseball boss Bill Veeck to investigate the 1961 murder of a famous pinch hitter whose private life will pull Nate into a dangerous new world of little people and big sins.

Hedonistic socialite turned undercover detective and poster girl for the war effort, Fancy Anders is back to solve another case. The Hollywood Canteen has just opened as a refuge and nightclub to give enlisted men some nights they will never forget as they prepare to head into war. With Hollywood elite cooking food and tending bar, with beautiful young actresses and starlets serving as hostesses and dance partners, the Canteen is a wonderland indeed. But when a young hostess dies in a car accident, the entire club—and possibly the entire American military service—is in jeopardy.

The concluding Hammer novel begins with a 21st-century funeral before flashing back to summer, 1973. Nine years after the events of Dig Two Graves, Hammer takes another unlikely vacation—this time on Long Island to help look after his partner Velda Sterling’s seventeen-year-old sibling, Mikki. When Mikki gets hooked on heroin, Hammer—filled with contempt for dope dealers—goes on a rampage. He will find those behind the drug racket and teach them what shooting up is all about.

In an attempt to soothe growing Cold War tensions between America and Russia, Premier Nikita Khrushchev visits the US to see all that his “enemy” has to offer. Top of his to-do list? A trip to Disneyland and an introduction to sexual icon Marilyn Monroe. Thanks to the impossible security requirements, Disneyland is out of the question. Marilyn, on the other hand, jumps at the chance to put on a show for the Russian official. During her appearance, she overhears the details of an assassination plot designed to spark an atomic holocaust and devastate both superpowers.