Book - BookDetective

Name: Kisses of Death

Author: Max Allan Collins
Year: 2001
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Genres/categories:
Mystery, Crime

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ISBNs:
9781885941565
1885941560

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 rough guy in the trenchcoat and fedora with a bottle of rye 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 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Kisses of Death contains the previous unpublished title novella, in which Heller becomes Marilyn Monroe's bodyguard and solves the famous Bodenheim murders.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 sent to bat in a major league baseball game.

This book contains a new introduction and afterword by the author, and a Max Allan Collins checklist.

This book is part of the "Nathan Heller" series. Here are some other books from this series: