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Reviewed by Edogawa Ranpo
| Opening lines...
The two pieces of her lay porcelain-white in the ankle-high grass and weeds of a vacant lot on South Norton Avenue, like the upper and lower sections of a discarded marionette. No strings could ever reanimate this disassembled figure, however- a sadistic puppeteer had made certain of that.
''Jesus frig,'' Fowley said, as ashen as the bisected corpse that lay, bizarrely posed, alongside the sidewalk. ''Where's a fuckin' photographer when you need one?''
We were in a neighborhood of Los Angeles called Leimert Park, an area where development had been stalled by the war, and the weedy lots retained sidewalks, driveways and fire hydrant, as if the houses had been whisked away by a particulary tidy tornado.
''Yeah,'' I said. ''Richardson wouldn't want to leave entertainment value like that just layin' around.'' |
Welcome to the real world. The world of Nate Heller, private dick. The place: Los Angeles, California, 1947. Where the gangsters thrive, the cops are corrupt, the newspaper men are as manipulative and callous as can be, and all the desperate little people are just trying to make a living.
Newlywed Nate Heller is vacationing in Los Angeles with his starstruck wife Peggy. It's a working honeymoon for both of them - Peggy has a bit role in a Bob Hope flick, and Heller is opening up a new branch of the A-1 Detective Agency, and trying to ensure good newspaper press for the fledgling business. The first case for the new office is a horror - Nate and a newspaperman discover the brutalized, severed body of a woman in a vacant lot...just a block away from the home of a notorious gangster.
Nate's problems are immediate. He knew this girl, Elizabeth Short, who the newspapers begin to call 'The Black Dahlia.' As a matter of fact, just a few days before her death, on the same day his wife tells him she's pregnant, she'd called him up on the phone, telling him he was pregnant by her. So he has a motive for her murder and believes he'd better solve the crime quickly, before anyone finds out he knew her.
Nate enters the world of Hollywood, interviewing suspects like Orson Welles and Arthur Lake; the world of gangsters like Micky Cohen and the cops who protect them. Eliot Ness helps him on the case, but in the end it's Heller alone against the killer.
This is Max Allan Collin's eleventh 'Nate Heller' mystery, and its a good one. An R-rated film noir put to paper, the prose leaps out at you alive from every page, from the tragic life and death of Elizabeth Short to the desperate people trying to survive in the land of dreams...or delusions.
Collins is a master of solving the 'historical mystery.' In fact, Collins claims to have founded the 'historical mystery' - as opposed to the 'period mystery.'
| From an interview in January Magazine:
''I have been chastised for making this claim, but I do feel I invented the historical hard-boiled detective novel. Not the period private eye novel ([Stuart] Kaminsky and [Andrew] Bergman and Robert Towne and maybe a couple others pre-date me), but using a fictional noirish protagonist in a story that is otherwise solidly based on fact. That's my contribution.''
[Perhaps Edgar Allen Poe deserves a mention, with his The Mystery of Marie Roget.]
Collins goes on to give a description of Nate Heller:
''Nate Heller is a former Chicago police detective turned private detective; his cases take place in the 1930s, 40s and 50s (so far). He is not adverse to a dishonest buck, but there are lines he won't cross. He is a randy son of a bitch, but also a romantic, quite prone to falling in love. He is capable of violence, even murder (particularly after his experiences on Guadalcanal in the Second World War), but he's not sadistic -- just capable of rough justice, having no faith in the system to be anything but corrupt. Oddly, he doesn't really mind that corruption, as he's quite adept at swimming in murky waters.
Probably the key to his character is the death of his father: Nate's old man was a dedicated leftist, an old union guy, who committed suicide after his son lied on the witness stand, in order to climb in the police department. The gun Heller carries is the nine-millimeter with which his father committed suicide -- Nate terms it "the closest thing to a conscience I've got."
The concept of the novels is for my Marlowe/Hammer-ish tough detective to solve various great unsolved mysteries of the 20th century. Early on, the novels concern mostly Chicago gangland, but [beginning] with Stolen Away (dealing with the Lindbergh kidnapping) the books have opened into broader subjects, most recently Amelia Earhart's disappearance (Flying Blind) and the Roswell Incident (the current Majic Man).
With the help of my researcher, George Hagenauer, I prepare each book as if I was going to write the definitive non-fiction treatment of that subject...and then I write a mystery novel instead.''
For the complete interview, see the external website: http://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/collins.html.
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Collins has researched this case exhaustively (there's a 6 page description of his researches and sources at the back of the book) and evokes the era of 1949 Los Angeles with tremendous skill. Heller is a likeable guy, a guy who is not afraid to walk down the mean streets, and to bring justice to those who deserve it.
Has Collins solved the mystery of who killed Elizabeth Short? You decide.
''Who killed the Black Dahlia'' is one of the most famous unsolved murders in the United States. James Ellroy has written a fictionalized version of the case as well, and there are several non-fiction books out there. There are also several websites devoted to this crime.
The Shakespeare Game
On page 253, Nate is talking to gangster Mickey Cohen, who is getting dressed in his bedroom. Heller tells us: ''I stood in the doorway of the bathroom as Cohen - finally convinced his hands were clean, all damned spots out, for now - used a handheld electric chrome hair drier on his wispy locks.''
Author Collins is referencing a famous Shakespearean play in this scene. Which one? |
Max Allan Collin's books, including his Nate Heller series, are extremely popular. Collins maintains his own website: http://www.muscanet.com/~phoenix/
This review uploaded December 24, 2002.
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