In The Area of Critical Commentary......

Today we shall reflect upon a really old movie and a relatively new book.....

"Prehistoric Women" (1950)

This movie came to my attention when some classic movie guy posted about it on Facebook, and my buddy and Classic Movie Maven Lou Sabini posted a trailer for it in the thread.  As soon as I saw that trailer, I knew that this was one that I just HAD to see.  Well, thanks to the world of streaming, I was able to snag this on Amazon Prime for a mere $3.99.  I figured that it would be campy (it was), and bad in an  "it's-so-bad-it's-good" sort of way.  

It wasn't.  It was just bad.  

As for the plot, such as it was, let me turn it over to Wikipedia for a summary of it:

Tigri and her Stone Age friends, all of which are women, hate all men. However, she and her Amazon tribe see men as a "necessary evil" and capture them as potential husbands. Engor, who is smarter than the rest of the men, is able to escape them. He discovers fire and battles enormous beasts. After he is recaptured by the women, he uses fire to drive off a dragon-like creature. The women are impressed with him, including their prehistoric queen. Engor marries Tigri and they begin a new, more civilized, tribe.

Yes, folks, we see the discovery of fire in this movie!  It was directed by the great Gregg G. Tallas (no, I had never heard of him either), and the only member of the cast of whom I had ever heard was Joan Shawlee, who went on to pay Pickles Sorrell, Morey Amsterdam's wife on the Dick Van Dyke Show.  She also played Sweet Sue, the bandleader in "Some Like It Hot", so this movie wasn't a career killer for her.

There was one thing that I did learn from this movie though, and that is that prehistoric women somehow managed to maintain clean shaven legs and armpits.

It is quite possible that "Prehistoric Women" has some kind of cult following somewhere out there in the dark, but for The Grandstander. it gets ZERO Stars.

"Too Many Bullets" (2023) by Max Allan Collins

If you are a regular reader of this blog, then the name of author Max Allan Collins and his series of detective novels featuring private eye Nate Heller are familiar to you.  Just type in either Collins' of Heller's name in the search box and you will see many posts singing the praises of the series.  Because I have enjoyed this series so much, I feel bad to report that I just didn't enjoy this one quite so much.

The Heller novels are written as "memoirs" of the fictional Nate Heller in his retirement years.  All of Nate's cases involved famous historical figures and crimes in which, somehow or another, Nate found himself tangled up.  This one concerned the 1968 assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy, a guy that Nate had previously done some work for in other cases.  You guessed it, Nate was in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel on the night that RFK was killed, and now, one year after the killing, he finds himself investigating the crime.  Was there a conspiracy to kill the Senator with Sirhan Sirhan being merely a patsy and a fall guy?  We spend 300 pages watching Nate puzzle this all out.

Somehow, this was the first time in reading the Heller chronicles that I felt that Collins was reaching just a bit too far to come up with a story.  Maybe it was because unlike Nate's cases involving folks like Charles Lindbergh and Al Capone, this killing of Robert Kennedy was something that I lived through, watched on television, and read a lot about at the time.  I have always accepted the fact that the Collins/Heller stories are fiction, but with twist that could have, possibly actually happened that way.  I didn't feel that way with this one.

Still an interesting read, and I will look forward to the next Heller memoir, if there is to be one, but, sadly, The Grandstander can only give this one Two Stars.

"Girl Can't Help It" by Max Allan Collins

Back in the early 1980's, the rock band Hot Rod & The Pistons, out of Galena, Illinois, were the hottest things on the the western Illinois/eastern Iowa rock and roll circuit, and they even became a one hit wonder nationally with a cover version of "The Girl Can't Help It", which was the title song from a 1956 movie that starred Jayne Mansfield. As it usually happens, the band broke up, one member passed away, and for the most part, the guys got on with their lives.  However, it is now 2020, and Hot Rod & The Pistons are about to be inducted into the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and, yes, there really is such an institution.  Their induction into the Hall is marred when one of the members dies suddenly of an apparent heart attack, and a few months later, just as a reconstituted version of the The Pistons is about to embark on a summer reunion tour, another member commits suicide.

This is the premise for "Girl Can't Help It", the second in a new series by one of my favorite mystery/thriller/detective authors, Max Allan Collins, that features Krista Larson, the 29 year old Chief of Police of Galena, Illinois, the "youngest female police chief in the United States."  The reader, of course, knows that the former bandmates were actually murdered.  The motive for the killings is known early on, but the identity of  the murderer is not, and that makes for nifty little whodunit for Krista - and the reader - to solve.

Author Collins, 72, is a native of Iowa and has played in rock bands for most of his life.  He actually IS a member of the Iowa Rock & Roll Hall of Fame!  As such, he brings to this novel a bunch of delightful kitschy pop cultural references to the American rock & roll scene from the 1950's through the 1980's, when The Pistons were the darling of the Iowa rock scene.  He also wonderfully evokes the tourist town of Galena.  I have never been there, of course, but I have been in many other similar places in my life, and I can perfectly  picture the restaurants, parks, bars, and touristy junk stores of the town that he describes.

To assist her in solving the crime, if indeed there really has been a crime committed, Krista enlists the aide of her father, Keith, a widowed and retired police detective.  As we learned in the first novel of the series, Krista lives in and now owns the house in which she grew up, but she has invited her father to move back in with her when she worried that he was experiencing depression over the recent death of his wife and her mother.  As was the case in the first book, Keith, who had some ties to Hot Rod & The Pistons back in the day,  is  enlisted by Krista on  pro bono basis to help her and the Galena PD get to the bottom of things.

It is apparent that while Collins calls these books "Krista Larson Mysteries", it is really going to be a "Krista and Keith" series of books.  Personally, I would like to see more of Krista and less of Keith, but this won't stop me from reading future novels in the series.  And as a humorous sidebar, Collins touches upon the somewhat delicate issues of how a daughter, who is just getting involved in a romantic relationship, has to deal with her widowed Dad who is now dipping his toes into the dating/relationship waters once again himself.  With both of them living in the same house, no less!

Like I said earlier, the murderer is not revealed as the crimes are committed, but it is apparent that it is someone that everyone, not only in the band, but in Galena, too, knows.  I figured it out about about halfway through the book, but that doesn't lessen the fun of reading how Krista and Keith resolve the matter.  Also, while I figured out the WHO, I had no clue as to what the eventual denouement would be, and it was both surprising and satisfying.  All I will say is that the lesson of how sins of the past can come back to haunt you is the very effective moral of "Girl Can't Help It."

I give it Three Stars on The Grandstander's reliable Four Star scale.  I will anxiously await the next Krista Larson adventure, as I also await the release, later this Spring, of Collins' "Do No Harm", a new Nate Heller mystery wherein relentless Private Eye Heller tackles the Sam Sheppard case.

And if this post piques your interest in the previous Krista Larson story, "Girl Most Likely", I will refer you to this:

http://grandstander.blogspot.com/2019/04/girl-most-likely-by-max-allen-collins.html

"Girl Most Likely" by Max Allan Collins

Regular readers of The Grandstander know that I am a big fan of mystery/thriller author Max Allan Collins.  His series of private eye novels featuring Chicago based PI Nate Heller are among the very best of the genre.  So I was excited to see that Collins is launching a new series of thrillers that feature Galena, Illinois Chief of Police Krista Larson, "the youngest female Chief of Police in the United States."

As the first novel in the series, we are introduced to Krista and to to her father, Keith, a recently retired and widowed police detective.  After he experiences some depression over the death of his wife, Krista asks her Dad to move back into the family home, where Krista now resides and from which she recently kicked out her live-in boyfriend.

The story of this novel revolves around Krista's Ten Year High School Reunion (told you she was young!), where Astrid Lund, the Girls Most Likely to Succeed, returns as the star attraction of the reunion, because she is (a) extremely beautiful, and (b) she is now a highly successful television news reporter in Chicago.  She also had a habit in high school of stealing, it seems, every other girl's boyfriend, so not everyone is all that happy to see this little vixen return for the reunion.  Lots old old wounds get opened at the Galena High School Reunion.

As you might guess, Astrid ends up getting herself killed, and Krista now has a homicide to investigate in her sleepy little tourist town.  It also happens that another female member of the class was murdered in a similar fashion if Florida several months before the reunion.  Krista enlists the aide of her Dad on a pro bono basis to help determine if the two homicides were related (the reader knows that they were), and if anyone else in danger from this killer.

Although I didn't love this book as I love Collins' Heller and "Disaster Series" mysteries, I liked it and am glad that this will be a series (the second book is already written and in the editing stages).  I like the character of Krista, although I hope that she will come to rely less and less on her Dad as the series moves along.  "Girl Most Likely" had one plot element that involved Keith that seemed unnecessary (I'm not going to spell it out as I don't want to give  a quasi-spoiler).  However, a personal matter involving Keith seems to be left wide open for development in future books, so I'm guessing that this series will revolve around the father as much as it will the daughter.  

All in all though, I found "Girl Most Likely" to be enjoyable and eminently readable, and I look forward to future stories about Chief Krista Larson.  It gets Two and One-Half Stars from The Grandstander, and I see the potential of these books getting better as the series moves on and the character of Krista continues to develop.

To Absent Friends - Jerry Lewis

Jerry Lewis

1926-2017

So I am at the ball game the other night and my pal, Jim Haller, asks me "Aren't you going to do an Absent Friends write up about Jerry Lewis?"

I was forced to ask myself why I was delaying doing such a write up about someone who was obviously one of the biggest stars of the mid-twentieth century.  After all, when the landmark comedy team of Martin and Lewis broke up, it was Lewis who got the big deal from the movies and television, and people would say that it would be poor Dean Martin who would never be heard from again.

Truth is, I was never that great fan of Jerry Lewis.  Yeah, I would watch some of his movies, and yeah, I would laugh at them, but his was a type of humor that got old for me quickly. And I never could figure out why the French hailed him as a genius.  I can remember once hearing someone say, "I'm in the mood to watch a good Jerry Lewis movie", whereupon he was told "There aren't any."  A little too harsh perhaps, but a good line.

Still, who among us, and I plead guilty to this, hasn't gone into a non-sensical Jerry Lewis shriek in their lives in order to get a cheap laugh?

Lewis deserves his Absent Friends post, regardless of my own thoughts.  I ran across this appreciation of Lewis while perusing the website of Max Allen Collins, one of my favorite mystery writers.  He sums it up pretty well, I think, so it might be worth your time to click on this link and read it.

http://www.maxallancollins.com/blog/2017/08/22/goodbye-jerry-hello-nashville/

And how can we write about Lewis without hearing one "Laaaaadyyyyyy" from him.

RIP Jerry Lewis.

Book Review - "Better Dead" by Max Allan Collins

Back in March, I touted you all to the news that Max Allan Collins would be releasing a new Nate Heller novel this spring, "Better Dead".

http://grandstander.blogspot.com/2016/03/closing-book-on-nate-heller-or-so-i.html

I just finished reading this newest Heller "memoir", and I am happy to report that Collins and Heller have teamed up for another terrific story;

As in all of the past Heller chronicles, our hero gets himself involved with real historical figures and real historical crimes.  "Better Dead" takes place in 1950, and among the people that Heller encounters in this one are Senator Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Robert Kennedy, Drew Pearson, Dashiell Hammett, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Senator Estes Kefauver, Bettie Page, and Frank Olson.

The thrust of the book concerns the case of Frank Olson, a real life person with whom I was unfamiliar.  He was a scientist who worked for the CIA back in the post-WWII era in the development of biological and chemical weapons. I the course of these events, Olson was "slipped a mickey" one night at a CIA retreat that contained LSD, a relatively new and unknown drug at the time.  Olson reacted badly to the drug, and developed paranoia and mental illness.  One night, while the CIA was attempting to get treatment for him, Olson committed suicide by leaping from the 18th floor of his hotel in New York.

Or did he?  There is a lot I could write here about the Frank Olson case, but I will not do so.  No spoilers. Better you should read "Better Dead" and other resources on this case.  It is really quite fascinating.

That is the thrust of the second half of the book, and Collins wraps things up nicely in the final chapter with a sort of "whatever became of..." segment about what happened to everyone, how each of the strands of the story worked out, and how Collins' alternate theories of  history actually could have been true.  Even the names of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield pop up in here.

I don't know how many, if any, more Heller stories Collins has left in him, but I sure hope that there will be more.  "Better Dead" proves that Collins has not lost a thing off of his metaphorical fast ball when it comes to the Memoirs of PI Nathan Heller.

Oh, I mentioned Bettie Page.  Yes, Collins always seems to include a real life pretty dame in these stories, and yes, as with all of the others, Miss Page and Nate become an "item" in this one.

Yep, that is the famous 1950's pin-up model Bettie Page above in one of her, ahem, more inhibited poses.  Why am I including it in this post?  Well, why not!!

Closing the Book On Nate Heller (or So I Thought)

While on vacation in Florida last month I finally got around to reading "Chicago Confidential" by Max Allan Collins.  This novel featured Collins' fictional private eye, Nate Heller.  I have written of Collins and Heller often in this blog (just type their names in the search box of this blog and see), and regular readers know how much I love these stories.  

I had "Chicago Confidential" downloaded on my Kindle for over a year and was reluctant to read it because, you see, once I did, I would have read all of the Heller novels that Collins had written, and I just didn't want to think that there were no more Heller adventures awaiting me.  However, a nice vacation was a good opportunity to surrender to the inevitable, and the book did not disappoint.

"Chicago Confidential" takes place in 1950 and it opens with Nate working out of the A-1 Detective Agency's west coast office in Los Angeles.  In the first chapter, Nate takes on as a client a beautiful young UCLA coed named Vera Jayne Palmer, who is seeking protection form an abusive boyfriend, who is actually he husband, Paul Mansfield.  Yes, Vera Palmer turns out to be Jayne Mansfield, and, yes, as readers might guess, Nate does end up working, shall we say, extremely close  with Miss Mansfield, long before she became a star, during the course of his investigation.

Jayne Mansfield is not the real star of the book, although she does end up playing a key role in the case as it unfolds.  Real historical figures such as Estes Kefauver, Joseph McCarthy, Drew Pearson, Frank Sinatra, a trio of Chicago mobsters named Fischetti, Sam Giancana, Jack Ruby, and assorted Chicago politicians and hoods also play a role in the tale.  It is another terrific yarn from Collins, and fans of Nate Heller - and I know that I have tipped a few of you out there to this series - will know what I mean and really like the book.

As I said, I was sad when I finished the book, because I knew that there were no more Nate Heller memoirs left for me to read, but lo and behold, while checking Mr. Collins' website in preparation for writing this post, I learned that there will be another Heller novel that will be released on May 3 of this year.  Talk about an early Christmas present!

The book is called "Better Dead" and it will center around the anti-Communist witch hunts of the early 1950's.  In this one, Heller will once again tangle with Senator Joe McCarthy, and will also become involved with such historical persons and Robert Kennedy, Roy Cohn, Dashiell Hammett, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.  I can't wait, and the only question is, will I read it right away, or will I wait for another vacation later in the year in order to savor the anticipation.

In case you are interested, I thought I would give you a list of all of the Heller cannon:

• Nate Heller Chronology
• Novels:
• Better Dead (2016)
• Ask Not (2013)
• Target Lancer (2012)
• Bye Bye, Baby (2011)
• Chicago Confidential (2002)
• Angel in Black (2001)
• Majic Man (1999)
• Flying Blind (1998)
• Damned in Paradise (1996)
• Blood and Thunder (1995)
• Carnal Hours (1994)
• Stolen Away (1991)
• Neon Mirage (1988)
• The Million-Dollar Wound (1986)
• True Crime (1984)
• True Detective (1983)
• Short Story Collections:
• Triple Play (2012)
• Chicago Lightning (2011)
• Kisses of Death (2001)
• Dying in the Post-War World (1991)

I cannot say enough, and God knows I've tried, about these books as far as terrific and entertaining stories.  While it isn't necessary to read this books in order, I would suggest that you read the first three - True Detective, True Crime, and The Million-Dollar Wound - sequentially, as these were Collins' so-called "Capone trilogy".  Likewise, Bye, Bye Baby, Target Lancer, and Ask Not comprise Collins' "JFK Trilogy" and should also be read in order.  As for the others, pick them up and read them any time in any order.  You won't be sorry.

Mr. Collins himself has recently undergone some serious surgery, but is recovering according to plan as he reports on his website, www.maxallancollins.com.  That is good news for him, his family and his fans.

A Movie and A Book from 1999

In recent days I have aught up with an old book and an old movie, both of which hit the marketplace, coincidentally, in 1999.

The first was the following movie...

My long aversion to prison movies long outweighed my liking of Tom Hanks, so I had never seen this Academy Award nominated movie (it didn't win).  However, at the urging of my friend Bill Montrose - he loaned me his DVD of the flick - I finally watched this, and, yes, I liked it.  It was long and leisurely (three hours), and well acted.  Like "The Shawshank Redemption" (another prison movie that I finally got around to watching thanks to Mr. Montrose), it was directed by Frank Darabont and based on a story by Stephen King.

I thought Shawshank was a better movie.  Green Mile leaned a bit too heavily on mystical or supernatural elements for my tastes, but that's Stephen King for you, and I've never been a fan of his.

Still, the movie featured Tom Hanks and that can never be a bad thing.

After one has seen an older movie like this one, it is interesting to go on line and read reviews off the movie that came out when the movie did.  "The Green Mile" was far from a unanimous hit with the critics back in 1999.  It has, however, stood the test of time fairly well, thanks in large part, I believe, to the performance of Tom Hanks.

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The book that I read was "Majic Man" by Max Allan Collins. This was another in his series featuring private eye Nate Heller, and if you read this Blog, you know I love these stories.  

This one takes place in 1949, and finds Nate working for real life Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.  Along the way, Nate also gets involved with muck-raking Washington DC columnist Drew Pearson, the supposed UFO landing at Roswell, NM in 1947, has dinner with Harry Truman, gets beat up and kidnapped by the Air Force, almost gets killed, has sex with a beautiful woman (of course, he does!), meets up with several other real life historical figures, and offers an alternative theory to Mr. Forrestal's suicide in 1949, and a theory of what REALLY happened in Roswell.  Like all of the other Heller novels, it's a really fun and terrific read.

Max Allan Collins has written fifteen Nate Heller novels, and, I am sad to say, that only one, "Chicago Confidential" (2002), remains for me to read.  I think I will put of reading that one for awhile, because I know that there will be no more Heller stories left once that one is done.  

The "Disaster Series" Novels of Max Allan Collins

Back in May, 2013, I wrote about having just read a novel called "The Titanic Murders" by Max Allan Collins.

http://grandstander.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-titanic-and-thinking-machine.html

I mentioned in that post that this was first in a series of novels, what he termed the "Disaster Series", by Collins, an author that I have written about many times on this blog.  In the post linked above, I mentioned that I would like to read all of these novels, and on my recent vacation, I accomplished that fact by reading This book,

the last of the six that I had not read.

To summarize, here are the six novels in question:

The Titanic Murders (1999) (Jacques Futrelle)
The Hindenburg Murders (2000) (Leslie Charteris)
The Pearl Harbor Murders (2001) (Edgar Rice Burroughs)
The Lusitania Murders (2002) (S.S. Van Dine)
The London Blitz Murders (2004) (Agatha Christie)
The War of the Worlds Murders (2005) (Orson Welles)

The hook or gimmick to each book is that Collins uses a real life person, usually a mystery writer, or, in the case of Welles, a writer/actor/director, as the main character in the book who ends up as the investigator of the murders that have been committed.  I have listed each of them above.  There is a thread of truth in each story.  For example, Futrelle really was a passenger on the Titanic (he did not survive), Christie did work as a nurse's aide during the Blitz, and Charteris and Van Dine did travel aboard the Hindenburg and Lusitania, respectively, although not on the final voyages of those vessels.

These books are great entertainments and I highly recommend them to anyone who likes a old mystery yarn.  You will be impressed with the extensive research that Collins and his team does to put these books together.  For example, an entire chapter is devoted to the less-than-sixty seconds it took for the Hindenburg to burn up and it is compelling. Did you know that there were survivors of the Hindenburg explosion?  I didn't.  And Collins uses a device of several different families listening to Welles' famous "War of the Worlds" broadcast simultaneously and their differing reactions to it. Terrific writing.

In each novel, Collins adds a Where Are They Now-type of final chapter or Afterword that makes you wonder "By God, just how much of this story is fact, and how much is fiction?

Really, really good stuff.

On the Fourth, Smart Phones, Collins, the Pirates, St. Vincent College, and Go USA!!

Cleaning out the Mental In-Box.....

Happy Fourth of July, everyone (one day late).  Hope you all had a safe and happy day with family and friends.  Our day ran late yesterday, so we were sorry to have missed out on seeing a Holiday Tradition - watching A Capitol Fourth from Washington DC on PBS.  I saw today that the featured performer was Barry Manilow.  Didn't feel quite so bad then.  Actually, I wouldn't have minded listening to Manilow perform.  He's just hard to watch these days after all that bad plastic surgery.

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There was another Fourth Tradition that we did not miss - the Hot Dog Eating Contest from Coney Island.  In case you missed it, eight time defending champion Joey Chestnut was upset by young Matthew Stonie, 62 dogs to 60.  The King is dead; long live the King.

I saw in the paper that both Chestnut and Stonie are from San Jose, CA.  What, if anything, to made of that?

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After years of resistance, Marilyn and I finally succumbed to inevitable progress and purchased smart phones last month.  I swore up and down that I would never become one of "those" people, but since getting the gadget, I confess to having done the following:

• Taken selfies on the golf course
• Taken a picture of a pizza I was eating for lunch and posting it on Facebook
• Having my cute ringtone ("My Girl" by the Temptations) go off during a meeting I was having with some executives at Highmark
• "Checked In" while eating at a restaurant
• Texting.  Lots of texting. Including pictures.
• Probably several other things that I said I would never do, but can't think of at the moment.

I will admit, however, that while I could live without it, it is a nice thing to have.

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I have often written about one of my favorite authors, Max Allan Collins.  The last time I did, I gave a less than favorable review of the last book of his that had read.  Well, in checking out Collins' website (www.maxallancollins.com) a few weeks ago, he mentioned and hyperlinked my Grandstander post of the review.  I was stunned!  I responded to him on his site, and we had an interesting and thoughtful exchange.  He mentioned that he pays close attention to less than favorable reviews (unless they are just all out, hate filled hatchet jobs).  It was a very interesting experience.

The lesson here is that authors, DO pay attention to what is written.  Also, they very much value reviews that readers post on sites such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble,  Goodreads, and other such sites.

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As I am typing this, the Pirates are playing their 81st game (the literal halfway point of the season), and are leading the Indians 5-3 in the bottom of the seventh inning.  Should the score hold, they will have a record of 47-34, and be either 5 or 6 games behind the first place Cardinals.  Seven games will remain before the All-Star Break, including a four game series with the Cardinals next weekend.

There is not  a lot to complain about (although plenty of people ARE finding such things).  The team has the second best record in the NL and the fourth best in all of MLB.  Unfortunately, the team with the best record, the Cardinals, are in the same division.  All the more reason that series next weekend looms large.

The pitching has been outstanding.  The hitting could be better, and it will be interesting to see what Neal Huntington will do as the July 31 trade deadline approaches.  In the past, it has often been pitching that the team has sought, but it seems to me that the acquisition of a hitter, or "a bat' as the current lingo goes, would be the priority.

I will probably reflect more on the first half performance over the Break.

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Marilyn and I did something a little different this past Wednesday night.  We drove to Latrobe, specifically St. Vincent College, to take in a play at their Summer Theater program. The play was "Tuesdays with Morrie", Mitch Albom's one act play based upon his best selling book of the same title.  If you are not familiar with the book, it is about the weekly visits that Albom made to Morrie Schwartz, his college sociology professor who was dying form ALS.  Like the book, the play was a very profound and moving experience.

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This was my first visit to St. Vincent College since, I am going to say, 1980 or -81, when I visited a Steelers training camp.  The campus has changed A LOT in those thirty-plus years, and it is one of the most beautiful ones that you will find anywhere.  

A visit to Steelers Training Camp used to be a regular summer trip for my Dad and I, but since those days, it has become a real extravaganza, and I have really never had the desire to fight the crowds and do it again.  I did, however, pay proper homage to the Hallowed Ground before entering the St. Vincent Theater:

Memory can be selective, but I can definitely say these practice fields were NOT this nice back in the early 1980's.

Those photos, by the way, were taken with my new smart phone.

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I am looking forward to watching the Championship Game tonight of the Women's World Cup.

Go USA!!!!

Book Review - A Swing and a Miss for Collins and Heller

Well, you all know what a big fan I am of the Nathan Heller detective novels by Max Allan Collins.  I've written about them before - Chicago cop turned private eye Nate Heller writes his "memoirs" about all of his cases that have involved famous people from throughout the twentieth century.  Al Capone, Huey Long, Charles Lindberg, Sally Rand, John Dillinger, Bugsy Seigel, the Black Dahlia, Marilyn Monroe, and even Jack and Bobby Kennedy...Nate Heller has been involved with all of them, and all of the novels have been terrific, in my opinion.

In "Flying Blind", however, Heller details his involvement with famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart (and those of you who have read any of these stories know exactly what I mean when I talk about Nate being "involved"), and the circumstances of her disappearance while on a round-the-world flight in 1937.  While you always have to accept with a grain of salt how one guy could have touched so many famous crimes in the twentieth century, with "Flying Blind" I felt for the first time that Collins was really reaching when putting this story together.  Hey, it happens. Even Sandy Koufax pitched a bad game every once in awhile, and even a disappointing Nate Heller adventure still makes for a pretty decent yarn.

With the reading of "Flying Blind", I have finished thirteen of the fifteen Heller novels that Collins has written.  Only "Majic Man" (1999) and "Chicago Confidential" (2002) remain, and I suspect that I will knock those off sometime over the summer.  The completion of this goal will leave a bittersweet feeling: What am I going to do when there are no more Nate Heller novels left to read?

Book Talk - Nathan Heller and Charlie Chan

 While on our recent trip to Hawaii, one of the books I chose to read was Max Allan Collins' 1996 Nathan Heller novel, "Damned in Paradise".  I chose this one because it just so happens to take place in Hawaii, so why not read it when we are actually there, right?

Like all the Heller novels, this one is based on an actual crime, the so called "Massie case" that took place in Hawaii in 1931-32.  In involves the alleged rape of the wife of an American navel officer stationed in Pearl Harbor by a gang of native Hawaiians, and the subsequent murder of one of the suspects by the mother and husband of the victim.  The actual defense attorney in the case was the famous Clarence Darrow, and, of course, for the purposes of this story, Darrow has hired Nate Heller, at the time still a young member of the Chicago police force, as his chief investigator as he prepares for trial.

As he does with all these stories, Collins sticks to the main facts of the actual case, but manipulates history just enough to create a fun and entertaining story.  Another story in the Nate Heller series that I would highly recommend.  And as with all of these stories, there are many real historical figures included.  Besides Darrow and the principals of the Massie case, the story also features a Honolulu police detective named Chang Apana, and the interesting thing about Apana is that he is said to have been the inspiration to author Earl Derr Biggers for his famous fictional detective, Charlie Chan.

Upon finishing "Damned in Paradise", I was prompted to search Amazon for this book, "The House Without a Key" which was the first Chan novel that Biggers wrote.  In fact, Biggers wrote only six Chan novels.  "The House Without a Key" was published in 1925, and the style of the writing is a bit, shall we say, dated.  Charlie Chan himself is also almost a minor character in the novel, but it is set in Hawaii, so it was a fun read while vacationing there.

Reading this also made me remember the great "Charlie Chan Theater" which ran for a couple of years as a late night movie on Channel 4, WTAE, in Pittsburgh, and was hosted by Dave Crantz back in the early 1970's.  The fact that Hollywood cranked out dozens and dozens of these Chan movies in the '30s and '40s made for easy and no doubt cheap programming for a Saturday late night movie.  The movies starred Warner Oland and, later, Sidney Toler as Chan and were lighthearted and fun movies, although probably so politically incorrect (as were, no doubt, Crantz' introductory and commercial break commentaries) that they are seldom shown today.

Anybody else out there remember watching those movies on Channel 4?

The Books of 2014

One of the (many) joys of retirement is having the time to read as many books, and as many kinds of books as you want.  In 2014, I read 43 books.  Yes, I actually keep track of such things.  And, yes, I will confess that there were some, but not many, among those 43 books, that I either skimmed, or never finished, because, I am doing this for my pleasure, and if I find I'm not enjoying it, I toss it!

Anyway, looking back at the list one more time, here are some recommendations for you, just in case you missed them the first time around, or if perhaps I didn't mention them in an earlier Grandstander post.

Non-Fiction

"Their Life's Work" by Gary W. Pomerantz.  A book about the Pittsburgh Steelers dynastic teams of the 1970's.  If you are a life-long Steelers fan and think that there is nothing more that could possibly be said about these teams (as I did), think again.  It has been called the football version of Roger Kahn's classic "Boys of Summer", and a higher compliment could not be paid.   You will gain new respect for Chuck Noll and Joe Greene after reading this.  A definite MUST READ for football fans in general and Steelers fans in particular.

"One Summer - America, 1927" by Bill Bryson.  The always entertaining Bryson takes a look of momentous and (seemingly) mundane events that occurred over the course of the summer of 1927.  Fascinating, informative, and immensely readable.

"Pedstrianism" by Matthew Algeo.  A look at a spectator sport that swept America in the late 19th century, made celebrities of the athletes, and even led to the use of performance enhancing drugs, but then disappeared from the landscape of the American sporting scene almost as quickly as it appeared.  

"Where Nobody Know Your Name" by John Feinstein.  A look at life in baseball's minor leagues over the course of one season.  Feinstein focuses on about a dozen minor league folks: players, managers, an umpire, and even a broadcaster.  Fabulous book that will reinforce your knowledge, in case you've forgotten it, that ANY player who makes it to the Major Leagues has truly earned it.


"FDR's Funeral Train" and "The Hidden White House" by Robert Klara.  Remarkably detailed and endlessly fascinating books on Presidential history by Klara.  The first one describes the funeral train that left Warm Springs, GA in April 1945 with the dead body of President Roosevelt and traveled to Washington DC and Hyde Park NY and back to Washington in the space of four days, and how one Presidency ended and another began.  The second describes the renovation and rebuilding of the White House that took place during the Truman Administration from 1949-52.

Fiction

I read a number of novels over the course of the year, including those from perennial favorites Jonathan Kellerman, John Sandford, Jeffery Deaver, Carl Hiaasen, and even Agatha Christie, but I want to focus instead on the works of Max Allan Collins.

I have written about the incredibly prolific Collins in this space on many occasions.  I first discovered him in 2013 when I read one of his "historical mysteries" called "The Titanic Murders", and I have been hooked ever since.  He has written literally hundreds of novels and short story collections, and, frankly, not all of them are to my taste, but I enjoy his aforementioned historical mysteries, and I absolutely love his series of of private detective novels involving the character of private eye Nathan Heller.

Heller started as a Chicago police officer in the early 1930's and then became a PI. The stories are written as first person "memoirs" of Heller's, and they recount his numerous cases involving real historical figures such as Al Capone, Frank Nitti, John Dillinger, Huey Long, Bugsy Siegel, Charles Lindberg, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Ruby, and Jack and Bobby 
Kennedy (yes, Heller gets involved in the JFK assassination!).  You have to suspend disbelief when you consider that ONE guy could be involved in the investigation of seemingly every major crime of the twentieth century, and even Collins agrees that this is ridiculous, but once you do, you are in for some very entertaining reading.

In 2014, I read ten books by Collins.  Six of those were Nate Heller novels.  In all, Collins has written fifteen Nate Heller novels and published three collections of Heller short stories. I have read all but four of those novels and all of the short story collections, and my goal for 2015 is to finish reading the Heller Canon in its entirety.

You don't have to read these novels in order of publication, but if you want to start, I would suggest that you start with the first one, "True Detective", wherein Nate gives you a lot of his biographical detail which is helpful as you read subsequent novels.  After that, you can pretty much dive in anywhere along the way.

If you like mystery and detective fiction, you won't be sorry.

Here's to great reading for everyone in 2015!

The Books of 2013

I have always included a year end post in The Grandstander about the books that I read during the year, but I just never got around to doing so before this past New Year's Day.  So, before 2013 retreats too far in the rear view mirror, here are some thoughts coming from among the fifty-five books (yes, I keep track of such things) that I read in 2013.

Among my favorite authors who released new books in 2013: Jonathon Kellerman, Sue Grafton, Jeffery Deaver, John Sandford, Carl Hiaasen, and John Gresham.  None of these offerings disappointed.  

One non-fiction book from 2013 that I would recommend to anyone is this one....

Hugh Aynesworth was a young reporter for a Dallas newspaper who was in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was shot.  He immediately went to work reporting and covering this story, and he has been doing that pretty much for the last fifty years. This book was published in connection with the 50th Anniversary of the JFK assassination.  If you lived through it, this is a great book to read, but it might be an even better book to read if you are under than age of fifty and your only knowledge of the Kennedy assassination is an Oliver Stone movie, Cyril Wecht, or a bunch of goofball conspiracy theories (none of which, by the way, have ever been proven!).

As far as fiction is concerned, and in addition to the offerings of the authors listed above, I want to touch upon the work of Max Allen Collins, a writer that I had the good fortune to "discover" in 2013.

Collins has been writing mystery and detective fiction, in one form or another (he wrote the Dick Tracy comic strip for a number of years, for example) , for over thirty years and he is incredibly prolific.  This past year, I read nine of his novels and two collections of short stories.  My favorites concern a series character of his, private investigator Nathan Heller.  The stories are told in the form of Heller's memoirs, and begin in 1930's and lead up to, most recently, the 1960's.  The hook to these stories is that they involve real historical figures like Al Capone, Elliot Ness, Frank Nitti, Sally Rand, John Dillinger, Marilyn Monroe, Hugh Hefner, Jack Ruby, and Jack and Bobby Kennedy.  In an introduction to one of the short story collections, even Collins says that one must suspend disbelief a bit to think that Nate Heller was involved in EVERY major crime investigation of the twentieth century!   I have read five novels of the Heller series, and I plan on reading more.

Collins has also written a series of historical mysteries that he calls his "disaster series". I have read three of those that have taken place on board the ship Titanic,  in London during the Blitz in WWII, and in Pearl Harbor in the days leading up to December 7, 1941.  Like the Heller stories, real historical people (Jacques Futrelle, Agatha Christie, Edgar Rice Burrougsh) are characters in these fictional novels.  As with the Heller stories, the research that Collins puts into these stories is incredible.  And even if you don't buy the premise of some of the stories (for example, Collins is big into JFK Assassination conspiracy theories), they are very entertaining reading.

Collins is also a disciple of the late Mickey Spillane, and he has another series of books involving a hit man named Quarry that is written in the same style as Spillane's hard boiled stories from the 1950's.  Now Spillane was never my particular cup of tea, so I probably will not be reading any other Quarry stories, but they're out there for you if that is what you are into.

One problem is that Collins is not real "mainstream" so his books are not always available at your local Barnes & Noble, but you might find them at used paperback stores, and you can definitely find them at the library and at Amazon, where they are relatively inexpensive if you buy them for your Kindle.

So, if you are looking for some entertaining reads, check out any number of the works of Max Allen Collins.  Start with the Nate Heller stories.  "True Detective" was the first of the Heller novels.  I don't think you will be disappointed.

Book Reviews: "Bye Bye, Baby" and Bad Monkey"

Back in May, I wrote about a book, "The Titanic Murders" and its author, Max Allan Collins:

http://www.grandstander.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-titanic-and-thinking-machine.html

I mentioned in that post how Collins wrote a series of mystery novels that surrounded actual historical events.  Collins is an incredibly prolific writer, and he has another series that features a Chicago based private investigator named Nathan Heller.  I finally got around to reading one of these novels as well. and it's fascinating.

Heller, it seems, always involves himself in cases that involve, you guessed it, actual historical people and events, and the stories are told as first person "memoirs" by Heller himself. The plot of "Bye Bye, Baby" (2011) concerns the events surrounding the death in 1962 of Marilyn Monroe.  Heller, of course, is a fictional character, but this book is populated with real people. In addition to Miss Monroe, you will encounter people like Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Hoffa, Peter Lawford. Hugh Hefner, J. Edgar Hoover, Joe DiMaggio, and, oh yeah, Jack and Bobby Kennedy.

As he did in "The Titanic Murders", Collins spins a yarn that comes up with a somewhat plausible explanation of the circumstances that led to Monroe's death.  The research that Collins had to do to write this book is incredible.  Do I accept it as historical fact?  No, I don't, but it is entertaining, compelling, and maybe, just maybe, events could have happened the way they did in this book.

There are other Heller novels that involve our hero with Al Capone, Elliot Ness, and Amelia Earhardt, and in 2012, Collins published a Heller novel called "Target Lancer" about the JFK assassination.

I plan on reading more of them, and so should you.

I also recently read the newest novel by Carl Hiaasen, "Bad Monkey".

The book opens when a honeymooning couple on a fishing excursion off of Key West hooks, not a game fish, but a human arm.  A Key West detective who is on suspension for assaulting his mistress' husband is told by the sheriff to pawn the arm off on the Miami PD.  Of course, that doesn't happen.....

Sounds crazy, doesn't it?  Not if you are familiar with and a fan of Hiaasen's fiction.  This is no exception.  Strange and goofy characters, hilarious dialog, environmental statements, voodoo curses, a hurricane, a movie star monkey, and lots of oddball romance add up to another winner.  

Read it!

The Titanic, Jacques Futrelle, and "The Thinking Machine"

While on my vacation last week, one of the books I read was an interesting little bit of mental junk food (and I do not use that term as a negative) called "The Titanic Murders" by Max Allan Collins.  Collins is one of these incredibly prolific writers who has written hundreds of novels, short stories, screenplays, even comic books and comic strips over the course of his career, and he's still going strong.  This book was a part of what he terms his "disaster series" wherein he takes an actual historic event (Pearl Harbor, the London Blitz, the Hindenburg crash), uses actual people who were there at the time, and fashions a fictional mystery story.

This 1999 book, obviously, takes place on the ill-fated first voyage of the luxury liner, Titanic.  Collins comes up with a story about two murders that took place upon the ship during that voyage, and how the crime was solved before the ship hit the iceberg, and how the story came to light so may years later.  The "detective" who solves the crime is mystery writer Jacques Futrelle.

Now you have to be really old, or a real mystery story nerd to know the name Jacques Futrelle, but in the first decade of the twentieth century he authored a number of short stories and at least one novel featuring a character named Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, a man of such towering intellect, that he was able to solve crimes merely by using his incredible brain.  So great were his abilities in this area that he was dubbed "The Thinking Machine".   At the time, Futrelle was seen as the American rival to Arthur Conan Doyle, and Van Dusen as a rival to Sherlock Holmes.  Well, Doyle's Holmes' stories continue to be read to this day, while Futrelle and his Thinking Machine have been pretty much forgotten, but 105 years or so ago, he was pretty big stuff, and one of his Thinking Machine stories, "The Problem of Cell 13" is to this day almost always included in any "Best Mystery Stories of All Time" anthologies.

Reading "The Titanic Murders" made me do a little research, and it seems that Jacques Futrelle actually was on the Titanic, and he was one of the fifteen hundred or so lives lost on that night to remember.  It is also reported that about a half-dozen brand new Thinking Machine stories went down with the ship as well.  He was traveling with his wife who did survive that night.  Of all the famous people who died from that sinking, I had never heard that Futrelle was among them.  I also went to the Kindle store to see if any of Futrelle's works were available in digital format, and it  turns out that that indeed they are.  I was able to download a complete collection of Thinking Machine stories for $1.99.

I read a few of the stories, including the famous "Problem of Cell 13", and you can see the parallels between these and the Sherlock Holmes stories (a newspaper reporter named Hutchinson Hatch serves as Van Dusen's Watson).  Van Dusen can also be seen as the precursor to any number of fictional detectives, from Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot to Jefferey Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme.  Admittedly, Futrelle's writing style seems a bit dated, but I am not sure that he deserves to be so completely forgotten today.

As for the Max Collins novel, all the characters are real people who were on the Titanic.  You know who they were - Isadore Strauss, Benjamin Guggenheim, John Jacob Astor, Molly Brown, Captain Smith, Bruce Ismay - and, he does fashion a mystery story about two murders that maybe, possibly, could have been committed on that infamous voyage.  I thought that this would be a piece of fluff, but when you read the Epilogue and the acknowledgements that Collins writes, it is kind of an impressive piece of writing.

Like a lot of mystery stories, "The Titanic Murders" is not great literature, but it is entertaining and fun to read, and what more can you ask, especially when sitting around a swimming pool?  It can be all yours for $4.99 if you have a Kindle, or free if you visit the library.  I am sure that I might now be prompted to check out a couple Collins' other Disaster Series novels as well.