Tue 2 Mar 2021
A 1001 Midnights PI Mystery Review: MAX ALLAN COLLINS – Kill Your Darlings.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[4] Comments
by Art Scott
MAX ALLAN COLLINS – Kill Your Darlings. PI Gat Garson. Walker, hardcover, 1984. Tor, paperback, 1988. Thomas & Mercer, softcover, 2012.
Max Allan Collins is not merely a writer of mystery novels (and of the Dick Tracy comic strip); he is also a mystery scholar, collector, and fan. This book, third in a series featuring his detective alter ego, Mallory (like Collins, a mystery collector, fan, and writer from a small town in Iowa), is an “inside” story about mystery fans and fandom. It takes place at the Bouchercon, the annual convention for mystery fans and writers. (By a remarkable coincidence, Collins sets the story al the same Chicago hotel where the 1984 convention was actually held.)
The murder victim is Roscoe Kane, a veteran paperback mystery writer, His once-popular detective, Gat Garson, is out of fashion, and Kane is on the skids. He’s at the con to receive an award from the Private Eye Writers Association, but drowns in the bathtub – an apparent accident – before the presentation. Mallory, Kane’s friend and fan, isn’t satisfied by the medical examiner’s hasty verdict and noses around, suspecting that Kane’s death might be linked to the upcoming publication of a “lost” Hammett Continental Op story.
In an introduction, Collins makes the disclaimer that his fictional Bouchercon attendees, writers and fans, are mostly composites of real characters. However, initiates will have little trouble identifying many of them, including a self-absorbed guest of honor named Keats – the creator of a sensitive-macho private-eye character. Other inside jokes and fan tributes are scattered throughout; e.g., Collins’s borrowing of a gaudy metaphor from Spillane’s Vengeance Is Mine in the climactic shooting scene.
This fast-moving and inventive novel is the newest addition to the very small subgenre of fandom mystery novels. Two others are Bill Pronzini’s Hoodwink (murder at a pulp collector’s convention) and Edward D. Roch’s Shattered Raven (murder at the MWA Awards Banquet).
Mallory is also featured in The Baby Blue Rip-Off (1983), No Cure for Death (1984), and A Shroud for Aquarius (1985).
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
Bibliographic Update: Add to the books in the Mallory series: Nice Weekend for a Murder (1986).
March 2nd, 2021 at 5:26 pm
Always up for Max Collins books.
Brett Halliday and Isacc Asimov both wrote convention mysteries, and surely the grandfather of the genre was Anthony Boucher.
Half the fun is trying to see who’s ox is getting lightly gored.
March 2nd, 2021 at 6:35 pm
I’ve read others in the Mallory series, but I don’t know how I’ve missed this one. I’m sure Max had a lot of fun writing them, semi-autobiographically, in a wishful sense?
March 2nd, 2021 at 8:21 pm
And in a related story …
In 2005, Max Allan Collins put out The War Of The Worlds Murder, which was the final novel (so far, anyway) of his “disaster” series.
As with the others, TWOTWM posits a mystery happening during Orson Welles’s 1938 Mercury Theatre radiocast, which is run to ground by Shadow creator Walter B. Gibson.
How this ties in here:
MAC gives us a framing story that takes place at the 1975 Bouchercon, the first one that he and Barb were able to attend in person – and in this account, MAC names all the names!
Well, all but one: Max describes a confrontation he had with “Lawrence R. Trout” (three guesses who this refers to), over the merits of Mickey Spillane, pulp mystery, comics, and other such stuff.
According to MAC, this dustup actually did occur at the ’75 Bouchercon; here, he uses it as a pretext for meeting up with Gibson, who spends most of the book telling about WOTW, Welles, John Houseman, the Mercury Theater, and of course, The Murder.
Fun read – and if you haven’t read it yet, it makes a great twin bill with Kill Your Darlings …
By the bye, tomorrow, March the Third, is Max Allan Collins’s 73rd birthday.
Why not drop by his blog, and wish him and Barb all the best?
March 2nd, 2021 at 8:38 pm
Here’s the link: http://maxallancollins.com/blog/
Where he says:
“And if you really are, seriously, looking for a way to say Happy Birthday to me, buy one of the recent books: Come Spy With Me, Skim Deep, Masquerade for Murder, Antiques Fire Sale, Reincarnal, Shoot the Moon, Ms. Tree Vol. 2: Skeleton in the Closet, Murderlized, or maybe one of the great audiobooks that Skyboat Media is putting out (they’re doing all of the Nolans!). And the Wolfpack trade paperbacks are very handsome books indeed.
“Here’s an idea: post a positive review for Max for his birthday. ”
PS. Robert L. Fish ?