Max Allan Collins

This is one of the most horribly-written books I have ever read. Max Allan Collins is just a bad writer to begin with, then he doesn't research/think out consequences and destroys established canon.

Let's start with the bad writing. In the first chapter, I put down the book and yelled "this stupid book is written by a boy." Yes, I did not take the time to look at the author, because these books are the only way to get the answers to the cliffhangers. If it is good writing, you can't identify show more the gender of the writer by reading. I also say "boy" because, despite being a grown man, a mature male should have had more insight into human character. I want to say he can't write a woman, but it actually felt like he couldn't write a human. Now, the main character Max (coincidence, since Max Guevara is from the series) unfortunately fits into that '90's stereotype that strong women have to be emotionally stunted in order to be physically strong; he takes her from emotionally stunted to describing her as an emotionless automaton - even when she verbalized how she felt in the series, he removed it. He thinks it makes sense that she feels nothing as an engineered soldier but it now leaves plotholes because an emotionless automaton wouldn't need to run from her Manticore slave masters because she wouldn't be affected by their abuse. Yeah, that's right: he destroys the very first opening scene by making her escape and not care what is going on.

If she didn't care what was going on and felt no emotions nor bonds, what is her motivation seeking out her brother, which is the premise and plot of the entire book?!?

It's not just Max. He does the same for every character in the book. Logan Cale is an emotional man (he even writes poetry) who is driven by his empathy for others into activism; you wouldn't know it by this book. Lydecker is actually a complex man who was doing these horrible things to these "kids" he loves and is proud of, because he thinks it will make them stronger and save a nation. No depth. Even the character of his own creation, Seth, is blank: all he feels is the instinct to survive and frustration with those who do not share his rules for survival. Does Collins not have any emotions and drives himself? He couldn't empathize enough with his characters to make them feel alive, one of his very tasks as a writer.

The boy also cannot do colour, also known as scene setting, build, or, for specific contexts, foreshadowing. He inserts random details at ill-places narrative plot points that add nothing to the scene composition or augmentation of plot. To give an example, towards the end of the book he describes one particular guard in great detail, from physical features to personality and motivation in a very pointed paragraph. Rolling my eyes at heavy-handed display, I surmise that we are suppose to care about this kid more than any other guard in the group because something is going to happen to him that is different from every other guard in his group and in every other action scene (I assumed we were suppose to care because he either gets killed or gets spared for some reason). What happens to this kid who Collins yammers about for a full paragraph? He gets his ass kicked like every other guard in every single scene with guards. It's not like Max kills people, just immobilizes them in some way. Why am I suppose to care about this kid as opposed to any other guards in this book? Nothing changed, and I didn't actually care about him anyway, just the writing.

In another "has he watched the show" moment, he speaks early in the book of Max desiring to go straight. It comes out of left-field because (a) he had no build-up, and (b) she doesn't even talk about that in the show! She never gave up on theft, despite that she demonstrates a developed moral code on the show, and he has her speak (narrative-wise) on the advantages of PI Vogelsang being a part of that shady world. Even if she was thinking of going straight, at least some of it would be because constant thievery doesn't help her lay low - he doesn't give her any logical reason, just shoves it in there. Any editor should have seen it was out of place. Towards the end of the book, he gives a plausible reason with proper build: she slips up and wonders if hanging with normals is making her soft. That's believable!!! This earlier reference doesn't add to her questioning herself and only serves to break the fourth wall (again).

I am also going to share a pet-peeve of mine throughout the book: his constant description of clothes. Okay, not constant because he doesn't describe every character. However, he uses it as his random bit of colour to open far to many scenes, without using it effectively. He is even repetitive in his descriptions of clothing. Don't tell me Lydecker is wearing black jeans and a black tee yet again - show me that his civvie "uniform" screams ex-military G-Man in a crowd because he can't pull off that punk attitude. Why do I care that Logan is wearing a sweater and jeans (even if he did in the show and looked hot)? Tell me it brings out his boyish looks, or illustrate that there is a pull in the sweater, making him look beaten, but all it really is comes from him being unable to get it repaired post-Pulse (knitting and tailoring isn't lucrative) but he still loves the sweater he wore in his first Eyes Only broadcast. Heck, I don't understand why you are telling me that a woman who opened a door is in a linen pantsuit; did the crime boss manage to land a classy lady or did his sugar-baby girlfriend dress in designer linen with blue eye-shadow, in a Trump-esque inability to emulate class? Why am I suppose to care about her linen pantsuit?

Honestly, if I plagiarized one of his chapters and submitted it in my piddly college-level writing program, and not be caught for plagiarism, my professors would still fail me!

I have mentioned before that it seems like he didn't perform any research because he doesn't know the characters (OMG it is so wrong that she is in the gang - that isn't Max's personality at all and her attachment to them doesn't make sense because pre-Seattle, her loss of her siblings that she cares about makes her not want to form attachments that she could lose, which she loses the entire gang anyway!). He doesn't even know things established in the pilot, and then literally makes significant changes to scenes he stole from the show - like Max's experience the day of the Pulse. What, is this some sort of alternative reality? If it is, why do I believe that the future books tie the lose ends of the series? Why did Collins write out the abusive foster family if he's not going to stick with what happened in the show? The book was published far to late for the writing to pre-date the show.

However, he doesn't even do research in to references he makes to the "past." This guy is relying on his bad memory of high school history rather than researching. In the Stock Market Crash, only OLD MONEY was screwed as they relied on the market to just take care of their fortunes (and, even then, we're not as bad off as the rest of us with physical assets to sell). The new economy has entrepreneurs as the rich - even older money still does business. Even without bank accounts, they would still own business and all of its materials. While some would die, more business would either restore or adapt. Heck, if you had watched the show, you'd see a prime example in Logan Cale's family! His example of Bill Gates is flawed, as Gates would not only have his property and company to attempt to re-establish himself, but Gates is a prepper: he could return the States to an agricultural society with his Seed Bank alone. Besides, the rich always end up ahead because they have property and material possessions. Idiot!

Not only did he make bad references to the Depression, he had no understanding of post-war economies and daily life. He didn't understand the make-up of cities changed by war, nor the changes in black market activity and supply and demand (and you know it's bad when I can notice it without researching, having lived a comfortable North American life with only the minimum high school history class). Max says it herself in the series: "That's what I don't understand about this whole economic breakdown thing. We have this huge toothpaste shortage but you can buy peppermint oil."

By the time this book was being written, I had already recovered from an Internet addiction. So I know he could have done this research on the Internet. The Internet also wasn't as huge and inundated with information back then, both accurate and inaccurate (you could rely more on the Internet then because, if someone took the time to write a webpage -which was difficult - it was because they really knew the topic). Also, back then, libraries were still great research vehicles, as publishers were still fact-checking informational books before they went to print (nowadays, just because it is published doesn't mean it's true). The information was available for him and, in many ways, research was easier back then!

Collins is a bad writer who doesn't do his research and destroys canon. Why is he so prolific? Why do they keep publishing him? The only good thing about this book is how it increased my confidence in my own writing. If publishers keep publishing his crap, I have hope of getting my novels published - even if I submitted a first draft.

Why read the book at all? I wanted to stop reading, but I kept going because I need the conclusion of the mystery of the series. There's no reason to read this book if you don't need to read the series (actually, I am going to try to see if you even need this book for the series). This is not a good post-apocalyptic book; it is badly thought out, not researched and badly written. show less

To read Collins' Nathan Heller series is to step back into Twentieth Century American history and actually live through events along with all the colorful characters. Heller is, of course, a fictional character - a sort of Sam Spade Chicago-based detective who finds himself linked to all kinds of historical figures including Frank Nitti (True Detective), Bugsy Siegel (Neon Mirage), The Lindbergh Baby (Stolen Away), Marilyn Monroe (Bye Bye Baby), JFK (Ask Not), and now Senator
McCarthy show more (Better Dead).

This novel (which is really two interconnected novellas) drops Heller
into the height of the McCarthy era, the Red scare, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the Atom secrets, the Kefauver Commission, Roy Cohn, a young Robert Kennedy, and the CIA and its experiments with LSD.

Along the way, Heller pals around with Dashiell Hammett and does more than just pal around with sexy Bettie Page.

What's really irresistible about this series is how the characters from history are humanized with all their foibles. These are chapters of history not as well known today and many of the details about the
hearings and the Rosenberg prosecutions are absolutely factual even if Heller's presence isn't. There is quite a lot to learn here, particularly when you look up the names and events and see how much of it really happened.

The book shines best when Heller goes into action, rescuing kidnapped damsels and pounding hoods and other tough guys.

Overall, the book depicts excesses of an era and the careers that were built on those excesses and those which were destroyed by them. But it doesn't loose sight of the fact that there were real Soviet spies and that there were real threats to freedom.

Heller may be a private eye but that is really just the vehicle for telling the story, not the central point of it. Thus, it's denser than most hardboiled PI fiction and it's not really about solving the case so much
as traveling through the events. show less

Today, I wanted some light entertainment to get me through a disappointingly rainy August afternoon so I spent three and a half hours listening to an 'enhanced audio' performance of Max Allen Collins' 'Fancy Anders Goes To War: Who Killed Rosie The Riveter?'. It was exactly what I'd been looking for.

It's a delightful confection that sets an improbable story of murder and sabotage involving a cast of characters finely balanced to respect early Twenty-First Century sensibilities, against what show more seemed to be a reasonably accurate portrayal of women working in a warplane factory in California in late 1942.

Almost all of the interesting characters, good or bad, are women. Almost all the women are exceptionally good-looking, with comparisons being drawn to well-known film stars of the period. They also come from ethnically and socio-economically diverse backgrounds and are comfortable climbing on gantries and riveting and bucking metal together to make warplanes.

The main character, Fancy Anders, (who is, of course, very good-looking) is a twenty-something rich, white, college-educated socialite who wants to work as an investigator in her father's well-connected Confidential Investigations company. He recruits her as a secretary but leaves her in charge when he's recalled to military service setting up an intelligence unit in DC.

When the CEO of Amalgamated Aircraft, a man she's known all her life and who she calls uncle, needs someone to investigate the allegedly accidental death in his factory of the worker selected to be the real-life model for the Rosie The Riveter propaganda campaign, Fancy jumps at the chance to go undercover at his factory.

What follows is a fast, fun, uncomplicated but engaging romp as Fancy, who is not very good at being undercover, tries to find out what happened to Rosie and in the process gets herself into a great deal of trouble.

This was popcorn but the good kind of popcorn with just the right amount of melted butter and salt.

The 'enhanced audio' turned out to mean that appropriate background noises were added to the narration. To my surprise, the sound effects lifted the story by adding a retro Saturday Morning Matinee At The Cinema ambience that I enjoyed.

Gabrielle de Cuir's narration was perfect. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

https://soundcloud.com/skyboat_audiobooks/fancy-anders-goes-to-war show less

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Chicago, September 1964. Beatlemania sweeps the nation, the Vietnam War looms, and the Warren Commission prepares to blame a “lone-nut” assassin for the killing of President John F. Kennedy. But as the post-Camelot era begins, a suspicious outbreak of suicides, accidental deaths, and outright murders decimates assassination witnesses. When Nathan Heller and his son are nearly run down on a city street, the private detective wonders if he himself show more might be a loose end...

Soon a faked suicide linked to President Johnson’s corrupt cronies takes Heller to Texas, where celebrity columnist Flo Kilgore implores him to explore that growing list of dead witnesses. With the blessing of Bobby Kennedy—former US attorney general, now running for Senator from New York—Heller and Flo investigate the increasing wave of violence that seems to emanate from the notorious Mac Wallace, rumored to be LBJ’s personal hatchet man.

Fifty years after JFK’s tragic death, Collins’s rigorous research for Ask Not raises new questions about the most controversial assassination of our time.

My Review: I am a big believer in Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation that fits the facts is almost always the correct one. In the case of the JFK assassination, the simplest explanation isn't the Warren Report one, it's the conspiracy theory. I suspect we'll all be dead before the truth comes out, and even then it most likely won't be the whole truth, but eventually the zombies of the facts will rise and stink up the Body Politic. Usually I think conspiracy theories are silly, for one major reason: The Gummint can't keep secrets it *wants* to keep very well. So all the leaks and the murders and deaths surrounding the assassination, in my mind, make it more not less likely that they're still trying to keep a lid on whatever really happened.

Okay, so that's out of the way. This novel is the third by Max Allan Collins, an incredibly prolific writer, dealing with JFK's assassination. (As a side note, it's extremely weird to me that the publisher AND Amazon do not make it easy to find the other two titles, and not one database groups the titles in a convenient, easy-to-reference way.) It's amazing to me that Nate Heller, Collins' Forrest-Gump-esque PI character of what, thirteen or fourteen novels so far, who is at every single important crime anywhere ever, isn't the star of a movie serial franchise a la Bond or TV series by now. In a world that gobbles up Mad Men it would seem to me to be a no-brainer.

Go know from this.

As I read along, I realized that I was being fed an angled view of the motivations and purposes of the assassins, a slant on the facts that brought certain facets and shapes into sharper relief than the Official Version would have us look at. As any actor can tell you, lighting matters. The same face, the same lumps and bumps, look very different seen from an angle and spotlit as opposed to head-on and strobed. I kept looking stuff up. I mean to tell you, my Google history is causing fantods at the NSA data farm even as we speak. I am amazed at the sheer breadth of Collins' scope. I am impressed at his precise eye for which piece of what conspiracy theory to use in weaving his tale. This is some intricate construction, folks, and deserves its own round of applause separate from any other praise merited by the book.

Does the book itself merit some praise? Yes. It's a given that Nate Heller will be a self-deprecating wisecracking noir hero. You like that trope or you don't, and I do. What's not a given is the way that the fictional exploits of Nate Heller enhance and augment the historical record of the day and time under discussion. Collins does that job very well.

The book is a beaut. The story is one central to our country's image of itself. The long, long tail of conspiracy theories proves that. And now, fifty years after that hideous, agonizing day, the perspective of a people who went through Watergate, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the sheer passage of time provide us with a new angle from which we can view the idea that our government can lie, cheat, steal, and kill in our names while pursuing selfish, disgusting, wrong, and venal aims.

Will Nate Heller bring to mind Edward Snowden or Pope Francis? No, more likely he'll bring to mind Bond and company. He's got a lot of knowledge about stuff that scares powerful people. He's willing to trade silence for comfort (his and ours). But that's not a surprise. This isn't a character whose morals we're in doubt about at this late date in the series. But he's our eyes and ears on the scene, and he's invaluable to us as readers because he's got no illusions at all. So he blows our comfy little illusions all to hell.

Where they belong, and where clinging to them will lead us. Go on this trip. Collins takes us to the heart of one of the most important moments in twentieth-century US history very very plausibly.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less