Wed 10 Feb 2016
Reviewed by Barry Gardner: MICHAEL COLLINS – Crime, Punishment, and Resurrection.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[2] Comments
MICHAEL COLLINS – Crime, Punishment, and Resurrection. PI Dan Fortune short stories. Donald I. Fine, hardcover, 1992. No paperback edition. Introduction by Sue Grafton.
I’m not a big reader of short stories. It isn’t that I dislike them, it’s just that I like novels much more, and my time is sadly finite.
I do like Michael Collins and Dan Fortune very much, and so couldn’t resist this. Two of the stories including the novella that closes the book are new, the rest (seven of them) reprinted from various magazines.
The stories ranged in my estimation from barely adequate — “The Woman Who Ruined John Ireland” — to excellent — “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and the novella, “Resurrection.” The latter is very nearly worth the price of the book. It is a grim and powerful story of a cult and its leader, written with all of Collins’ considerable skill.
I am not sure, no, not sure at all, that there is a consistently better writer in the hardboiled field today than Michael Collins. Highly recommended.
February 10th, 2016 at 11:16 pm
I would have to agree with Barry that at the time no one was as consistently good as Dennis Lynds writing as Michael Collins about Dan Fortune.
February 11th, 2016 at 12:26 am
I’ve read all the Dan Fortune novels, I think, but for some reason, not this collection of short stories.
When I read the novels the first time, I wasn’t as impressed as Barry, or you, David, but thinking back on them now, they have a sticking power to them that other books from the same era don’t have — I remember bits and pieces of the Fortune books, and others I read back in the 1970s I don’t remember at all.
Not until I read my old reviews of them, that is. Then sometimes they come back.
But: Act Of Fear, The Brass Rainbow, Night Of The Toads, Walk A Black Wind, Shadow Of A Tiger, and The Silent Scream … those I remember now.
Don’t tell anybody, though. I had to go back out and check out the titles, only to be sure I didn’t leave out any of these first few in the series.