Reading "Chicago Lightning"

I’m reading a book of private detective stories, Chicago Lightning by Max Allan Collins, and I’m hooked by the second age of the author’s introduction. Collins and I grew up on the same kind of television fare – and the same love for detective and mystery stories.

I watched westerns as a child – programs like Gunsmoke, The Rifleman and Bonanza – but it was the detective and mystery shows that I loved. Peter Gunn. Dragnet. Perry Mason (my Southern Baptist grandmother adored Perry Mason novels). 77 Sunset Strip. Hawaiian Eye (remember Connie Stevens as Cricket?). Mike Hammer.

My reading followed similar lines. From Trixie Beldon and the Hardy Boys I moved on to mysteries with real murders by writers like Agatha Christie. In the 1970s, there was something of a renaissance for the hardboiled detective novels, with new editions of books from the 1930s and 1940s. I read all of Dashiell Hammett’s novels, like Red Harvest, The Continental Op, The Maltese falcon and The Thin Man. I read Raymond Chandler’s novels, too, but preferred the almost literary prose of Hammett. Than I discovered S.S. Van Dine and the Philo Vance mysteries.

I moved away for reading almost solely mysteries but never abandoned the genre. After an extended romance with science fiction, I went literary and read the Latin Americans – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda and others. For about 10 years I was the Latin American and Spanish fiction reviewer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I still read some today, and have a novel by Carlos Fuentes waiting on the shelf.

The Latins, interestingly enough, led me to a popular Spanish writer named Arturo Perez-Reverte, who has written a number of semi-literary mysteries that are wonderful stories. Lately he’s been producing the Captain Alatriste novels, set in the declining Spain of the 17^th century.

But I still enjoy mysteries. I’m tending to stick more in the Christian mystery category, more because few mainstream mystery novelists seem to have to get too graphic with sex and violence. And despite my love of mysteries, I do not like violence. I don’t like it in movies or on television (which tells you how many movies I see and how much television I watch).

I like a number of British mystery writers, like Colin Dexter of Inspector Morse fame and Ian Rankin, who’s written the Inspector Rebus novels. But these days most contemporary mysteries are police procedurals or something similar, which are fine but don’t have the flare of those old private detectives, the guys who are tough as nails, pack heat and aren’t afraid to use it.

I enjoyed the stories in Chicago Lightning. They contain a few graphic scenes, but the scens seem to fit the stories. The hero, Nate Heller, is cut from that same cloth that produced Sam Spade, Nick Charles and Philip Marlowe. These aren’t the “solve the puzzle guys” so much as the “get the truth even if you have to beat it out of them” guys.

As odd as this might sound, reading these stories reminds me of my father. He grew up in that period when Hammett and Chandler and all the rest were at the height of their powers. He read a lot of them, too. And the stories he told of his experiences in working in the East Texas oil fields and the Depression-era newspaper business had that same kind of flavor to them. Although I can’t recall any murders or serious crimes in his stories, except for one he told about his grandmother that became part of the family legend. Did she or didn’t she?

I think I hold that story in reserve. It might make an interesting historical short story.

“Chicago Lightning” by Max Allan Collins

Tough guy private eye stories aren’t as popular as they used to be. They arced in the public mind in the 1930s and 1940s. Mickey Spillane kept them alive in the 1950s. But so much of the genre seemed to move to the police procedurals of Ed McBain and Joseph Wambaugh a little after that.

And then there is Max Allan Collins, who’s steadfastly ignored trends and fashions and published the Nate Heller private eye stories and novels since the early 1980s. And while few of us might ever know a person like Nate Heller, there were people like him – Dashiell Hammett was a Pinkerton operative before he turned writer, for example – and he is a representative of an American original.

In Chicago Lightning, Collins brings together thirteen stories published over the past 30 years that have two primary things in common. They are based on true stories, and they are great reads.

Real personalities walk these stories alongside fictional characters – lawmen like Eliot Ness, gangsters like Frank Nitti (Al Capone’s successor in Chicago). And even some of the fictional characters are based on real people.

The stories themselves are fascinating, and I had to keep reminding myself that I read stories in 2011 that were written in the 1980s and 1990s about events in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s to Collins’ credit that the reader is able to easily move back in time and see the era so clearly.

And the stories are quite a selection of crimes: a young man yearning to be a private detective dies during a stakeout of a department store; the “Blonde Tigress” is arrested for robbery and murder but the woman in question may or may not be the killer; a young wife is found murdered in the basement of a wealthy family’s mansion; a movie star hires Heller but finds herself the victim of “the perfect crime;” a doctor goes missing; a woman suspects her husband of infidelity; a serial killer is loose in Cleveland; and more.

While many of the stories are set in Depression-era Chicago, with its crooked politicians and police on the take, Collins includes Cleveland, Los Angeles and Miami as additional settings for Heller’s cases. And the settings and atmospheres are important – whether it’s the seedy side of town or the in-places of the Sunset Strip in L.A., the author convincingly tells the story of that particular place at that particular time.

Chicago Lightning (the name given to machine-gun fire) is a solid collection of hardboiled private eye stories, and earns a well deserved place in a long tradition of tough-guy hero stories.