Majic Man - Max Allan Collins

Majic Man (1999) is the tenth of Collins's Nate Heller series. If you think that's a lot, you seriously underestimate Max Allan Collins. A glance at the list on his website will soon put you right. For someone who has written so much, I am amazed at the standard Collins consistently achieves. Majic Man is no exception.


The thing with Heller is that he has been involved in every American major crime/unsolved mystery in the second half of the 20th century. Now, in retirement, he is committing his secrets to paper.


The stories are therefore based on fact. The fact comes from a reasonable amount of research - and Collins names his sources in quite a useful literature review at the back.


The year is 1949 and PI Nate is hired by James Forrestal, President Truman's Defense Secretary because he believes someone is out to get him. Certainly the powers-that-be are on his case. Very soon he is forced out of office on health grounds and confined to the psychiatric unit at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. Is this because he was a keen financier of Hitler before the war - or because of something he knows from his time in government?  And by the way, this much is all historical - that's Forrestal's photo on the cover.


The cover also gives away the second string of the novel. Is the Roswell Incident, the 'UFO' crash and possible military capture of a surviving alien, what Forrestal knew about? Nate heads for New Mexico to investigate. Nate  and presumably his author - reach fascinating conclusions. The entire novel is fascinating thanks to the way Collins combines history and (disputed) fact with all the tropes of postwar noir crime fiction.


I really enjoyed Quarry's Choice last year and I loved Majic Man. Fortunately there are heaps of Collins's mammoth oeuvre still to tackle.

Borderline - Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block is eighty years old and has been writing, at a prodigious rate, for sixty of them. Borderline is one of his earliest, from 1958, when he was twenty. It is what Block himself describes as 'mid-century erotica' combined with a significant slice of crime noir.

The border in question is that between Mexico and the United States, which makes the theme alarmingly current in Trumpland America. However it is not about immigration or drug smuggling. It is about a rag-bag of disparate characters who end up in El Paso Texas and get their jollies south of the border in Juarez. We start with Marty, a professional gambler. Then we meet Meg, newly divorced from an under-sexed but rich husband. There's Lily, a teenage hooker on the lam who forms a lesbian double act with stripper Cassie. And finally there's Weaver, the anonymous loser who suddenly finds himself on the front page after murdering a girl. We know they are all going to come together somehow. The how is what keeps us reading. That and the precociously brilliant writing.

The book also operates on a deeper level. Each character is confronted with a personal or moral border which he or she can either cross or not. Marty is smitten with Meg - who wouldn't be? - but he takes her to see Cassie and Lily's floorshow and lets her persuade him to cross his line. Lily is unmoved by sex, presumably because she gets so much of it; she's just stringing her various lovers along until she can get a stash of cash together and dump them all. Weaver can keep his head down, maybe disappear into South America, or he can embrace his new calling and go out in a blaze of notoriety. Guess which he goes for?

I was hitherto only familiar with Block's middle years, chiefly in the Eighties and Nineties. He was still a brilliant writer - talent like his will never fade - but I don't remember huge amounts of sex. That's a pity because he is extraordinarily good at it. I can't remember reading anyone quite as good, though I admit I've never been a huge fan of literary porn. I'm definitely a fan of Block's porn.

I'm also a huge fan of these retro reissues from Hard Case Crime. The covers alone are irresistible. Quarry's Choice, which I reviewed here last year, is one of them, and I'm reading their e-book of one of Max Allan Collins's Nathan Heller series at the moment. They even do comics, for pity's sake! I'm doomed.

Quarry's Choice - Max Allan Collins

I found this thanks to paperbackwarrior.com, which has fast become a Facebook favourite of mine. Max Allan Collins I vaguely knew as a prolific writer of contemporary pulp (although I had no idea how vast his range was before looking him up on Wikipedia) and Quarry rang a bell somewhere at the back of mind. I soon realised, on reading the set up chapter for this story, that the bell was the TV series Quarry which I had enjoyed last year but which had nevertheless got cancelled.

Anyway, the book series which Collins began at the time it is set (mid-Seventies) is about a Vietnam vet who returns home to find nothing waiting for him. No job, an antipathetic if not downright hostile citizenry and his wife having an affair with a local petrolhead, who soon suffers a nasty and highly memorable accident. Quarry (not his real name) is, however, exactly what the Broker is looking for - a hitman who can be relied upon to do the wet work efficiently and permanently. The Broker is the go-between. Quarry never knows who the client is or - up front - the reason the nominee needs to die.

Except in this case. The Broker is the client after Quarry saves him from an initial hit. The job takes him down to Biloxi where he signs up with the progressive wing of the Southern Mafia, which controls the casinos, bars and strip joints along the coast.


Turns out there is more wet work in Biloxi than anyone envisaged. Quarry's services are in high demand. He has choices to make - hence the title.


Collins writes with fluid grace. His phraseology is just sufficiently hard-boiled; it never even threatens to spill over into pastiche. His book, written in 2015 (39 years after Quarry's debut) but still set in 1972, is historically convincing with just the right amount of period detail. The twist, when it comes, is a great one. I did guess who it would involve but got nowhere near how.


Excellent. I want more.


And by the way, I love the cover.