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Thursday, December 9, 2004

CRAIG McDONALD
ThisWeek Staff Writer

In 1983, crime writer Max Allan Collins published True Detective, a private eye novel set in the 1930s that launched a new genre within a genre, one for which the author has only recently found a label.

"The other day, one of the reviews, I forget where it was, but it used a term that I thought, 'Wow, finally somebody came up with a term to describe what I do,'" Collins recently told ThisWeek. "It was 'pulp fact-ion.' I thought, 'Yeah, that's it: that's what I do. I do pulp fact-ion.'"

True Crime appeared in 1984, and another 12 books featuring private eye Nathan Heller have followed.

In the Heller books, Collins' fictional private eye interacts with an array of historical personages on either side of the law: Amelia Earhart, James Forrestal, Bugsy Siegel, Mickey Cohen, Ian Fleming and Sally Rand.

The cases explored through Heller's "memoirs" include such historical crimes as the murder of Sir Harry Oakes (Carnal Hours), the Lindbergh kidnapping (Stolen Away), the murder of Elizabeth Short (Angel in Black) and the 1935 assassination of Huey Long (Blood and Thunder).

"No one had ever done a private eye novel that dealt with a real mystery and the private eye was essentially the only character in the book who wasn't real," Collins said. "I felt it was the logical step after Chinatown and City of Angels and what Stuart Kaminsky was doing. To say, 'Okay, let's do a real crime' and obviously raise the bar for myself because I had to do all of this research."

In 1998, Collins and artist Richard Piers Rayner published the graphic novel The Road to Perdition.

Perdition, like the Heller books, takes a couple of fictional characters and pitches them against historical figures including Al Capone, Frank Nitti and former Untouchable and Cleveland Safety Director Eliot Ness.

Perdition tracks the bloody road trip of Michael O'Sullivan Sr., nicknamed "The Angel of Death," an enforcer for Irish Chicago mob-boss John Looney, and Michael's young son.

When Mike Jr. witnesses a gangland execution, things goes to pieces for the O'Sullivans: young Mike's mother and younger brother are viciously murdered and father and surviving son set off on a path of Depression-era bloody vengeance.

Road to Perdition, Collins said, was originally projected as a 900-page illustrated novel. Unfortunately, he said, the line of noir graphic novels it was a part of was pending cancellation before his first installment even appeared.

"I was to only finish what I was on, to wrap it up, basically," Collins said.

He compressed his tale and 10,000 softcover copies were printed. Those sold through and no second printing was ordered.

Collins, who is also a successful comic book writer, independent filmmaker and who revived and maintained the Dick Tracy comic strip for more than 15 years, moved onto other projects.

Hollywood, however, discovered Perdition and mounted an acclaimed film adaptation starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman. The original graphic novel was reprinted and cracked The New York Times bestseller list. Collins also penned a novelization of his original work.

This month, Max Allan Collins returns with two sequels to Road to Perdition: a new graphic novel, Road to Perdition 2: On the Road (DC Comics) and a prose sequel, Road to Purgatory (William Morrow, 288 pages, $24.95)

"With the graphic novel follow up that I did (Road to Perdition 2), I basically did what they call in comics a 'continuity implant,'" Collins explained. "I said, 'Okay, let me try to flesh this out more.' One of the things that I did was to explore the father and son relationship between Looney and O'Sullivan Sr. a little more fully."

Road To Purgatory, on the other hand, Collins' narrative novel, is a more traditional sequel: It picks up Michael O'Sullivan Jr.'s saga in the year 1942. O'Sullivan is fighting in Bataan: a model soldier. Following heroic action that costs him an eye and earns him the nation's first Congressional Medal of Honor for actions undertaken in the Second World War, O'Sullivan Jr., now known by his adopted name of Michael "Satariano," is returned home.

He is quickly recruited by Eliot Ness and tapped to infiltrate the Chicago mob empire now run by Frank Nitti.

Nitti, recently widowed, is posing as a stand-in for ailing mob boss Al Capone. Nitti is hiding the fact that Capone, barricaded in his Florida mansion, is in the advanced stages of syphilis ... little better than a vegetable.

Collins' Heller fans will particularly appreciate the author's treatment of World War II combat, hearkening back to his 1986 novel, The Million Dollar Wound.

"Million Dollar Wound was a favorite of mine because it was the most complicated thing I've ever pulled off artistically," Collins said. "It does things I don't think any private eye novel has ever done." That novel also tracks the last days of Capone heir Frank Nitti.

Heller's histori-fictional world is now sufficiently sprawling and complex to require a kind of concordance to avoid internal contradictions:

"I did make a timeline," Collins said. "There was fan who made a more detailed one which I actually refer to. I had to be very careful, particularly with Nathan Heller. I didn't want him to be two places at the same time.

"There are Nathan Heller books that take place over three or four different time periods," Collins said, "and I really have to keep track, to say, 'Where was he in August of 1937?' So that I don't have him meeting Huey Long on a day that he was on an airplane with Amelia Earhart. I'm trying to maintain the illusion that these are actually memoirs. I was real loose about it for a while, then all of the sudden it was just like, 'Whoa, these things are starting to collide.'"

In addition to his own novels, Collins also writes a number of successful novelizations of film and television projects, including Saving Private Ryan, Maverick and In the Line of Fire. He currently writes a series of novels based on the hit television series CSI.

"I may be a little different from some writers in that I don't hide behind a pseudonym when I do that stuff," Collins said. "I was advised that I should, but I said, 'I'm a comic book writer ... you don't get any less respect than that. So why should I hide when I'm going out and doing this work?' And, for example, the CSI books: the last two have made The New York Times bestseller list. So why would I not want my name on it?"

Collins' first two novels, written when he was in his early twenties, were republished last month in a single, softcover edition. They are collected under the title, Two For the Money (Hard Case Crime, 383 pages, $6.99). When he was approached about the reprint, he said he agreed provided that he didn't have to read any galleys for the repackages.

"I said, 'Look, I'm perfectly happy and proud of those books, but please don't ask me to revisit them,'" he said. "'Because all it'll do is upset me and I'll want to rework them and tweak them. I'll want to do things that I really shouldn't do. I'm not who I was when I was 21 and wrote those books. So they need to be what they are.'

"It tickles me that 30 years later they would be back out in print. I mean, they're pretty ephemeral and here they come back.

"And it may be distressing that they are so similar to what I do now," Collins concluded. "It's father and a surrogate son ... the guy is like robbing banks and has a feud with a mob guy from Chicago. It's like, 'Hmm, so much for progress.'"