Kisses of Death: A Nathan Heller Casebook - Softcover

Collins, Max Allan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1885941560 ISBN 13: 9781885941565

Publisher: Crippen & Landru Pub, 2001

Synopsis

NATHAN HELLER, PRIVATE EYE!!!

The private eye is as American as mom, apple pie — and gangsters and bootlegging. A child of the Roaring Twenties and the Depression Thirties, he is a genuine American hero with his poetic slang and his attempt to make things right as he goes down Mean Streets.

Max Allan Collins has recreated the great era of the P.I. in Nathan Heller. "I wanted to do the traditional P.I.," Collins writes in his introduction to Kisses of Death, "the tender tough guy in the trenchcoat and fedora with a bottle of wry in his bottom desk drawer. I didn't want to update him, and I didn't want to plop him down in contemporary times like a drunk who fell off a time machine." In novels and short stories, Collins has traced Heller's changes, and America's changes from the early thirties to the sixties, and in doing so has received a record nine Private Eye Writers of America "Shamus" nominations for his the series, winning twice. Each story investigates a genuine unsolved crime of the past.

Kisses of Death contains the previous unpublished title novella, in which Heller becomes associated with Marilyn Monroe and solves the famous Bodenheim murders. In other stories, he finds a solution to the death of actress Thelma Todd, becomes associated with Eliot Ness, and discovers who killed the midget that Bill Veeck had come to bat in a major league baseball game.

The book includes a new introduction and afterward by the author, and a Max Allan Collins checklist.

About this title

From Booklist:

Nathan Heller doesn't usually do bodyguard work anymore, but the CEO of Chicago's A-1 Detective Agency agrees to make an exception when the body in question belongs to Marilyn Monroe. She's in Chicago to promote the release of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and needs an escort to a potentially raucous press party. Marilyn survives the party, but the same can't be said for a womanizing lush who turns up murdered. As in all the Heller capers, author Collins dramatizes a real-life unsolved crime and posits a fictional (but believable) solution. Among the other real cases Heller "solves" in this collection of stories are the murder of actress Thelma Todd and the suspicious death of Eddie Gaedel (the only midget to play major-league baseball). Collins, winner of two Shamus Awards, makes the most of a winning formula. His mix of fiction and fact is rich in period detail, and Heller is a complex narrator who doesn't always follow the private-eye's code of honor. Fans of the novels will be thrilled to discover these stories. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Publishers Weekly:

Two-time Shamus winner Max Allan Collins (The Hindenberg Murders) blends fact and fantasy in the new title novella and six previously published short stories assembled in Kisses of Death: A Nathan Heller Casebook. In the novella, wry, slang-slinging PI Heller stumbles upon clues to the Bodenheim murders as he bodyguards a demure Marilyn Monroe.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Crippen & Landru Pub
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1885941560
• ISBN 13: 9781885941565
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 207