Slice of P.I.: “True Detective”

(Above) True Detective (1986), with the artist’s hidden signature.

If you did not remember that July 24 is National and International Private Investigator Day, have no worries. I wouldn’t have a clue about it either, had not the blog Guns, Gams & Gumshoes—launched in 2009 by Colorado detectives Shaun Kaufman and Colleen Collins, but not updated since last summer—alerted me to this annual event way back in 2018. With the passage of each successive year, I try to remember to celebrate. More often than not, though, I forget.

But not this time. That’s because private eyes have been much on my mind lately, particularly one such character: Nathan Heller.

I was contacted in March by a writer who said he’d been laboring “for several years” on a “fully authorized” literary biography of award-winning Iowa crime novelist Max Allan Collins, creator of the aforesaid Mr. Heller. He went on to explain that he had read and been impressed by my long-ago interview with Collins in January Magazine, and wanted to know if I’d be interested in penning a foreword to his book.

Anyone who has kept up with my work in January or The Rap Sheet knows what a fan I am of Collins’ fiction, not just his Heller stories, but also his tales starring killer-for-hire Quarry, his Road to Perdition graphic novel and its prose sequels (another of which, Road to Hell, is in the works), his more than a dozen novels continuing the not-infrequently violent escapades of Mickey Spillane’s Gotham gumshoe, Mike Hammer, and of course, his sequel to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, released earlier this year. So I agonized for a full few hours before deciding my answer to the offer had to be “yes.”

In the end, I delivered a 2,850-word essay that talked about Collins’ creative influences, his position in the pantheon of modern crime writers, and the three protagonists he will be principally remembered for dispatching onto the mean streets of fiction. In addition, I recounted my discovery of his first Heller yarn, True Detective. This would have been in the mid-1980s, when I was working for a magazine in downtown Portland, Oregon. Looking for something new to read, I wandered one lunchtime into a nearby branch of J.K. Gill, a locally owned office supply store that did a rather brisk trade in books as well. Quickly, the 1986 Tor Books paperback version of True Detective (seen above) caught my eye, and as I recall in my foreword, “I couldn’t plunk down my hard-earned folding money fast enough to acquire a copy!”

The cover of that edition boasted three components to entice a young man of my bibliophilic inclinations: a Depression-era automobile adorned with gleaming silver grille, a wide wave of fender … and bullet damage to both the driver’s-side headlamp and front windshield. It wasn’t until I set about writing my foreword that I gave much thought to who was behind that art. The novel’s copyright page didn’t supply that information. Neither did that same page in True Crime, Tor’s release of Collins’ second Heller tale, which was published only months after True Detective and looked to carry a painting by the very same artist. However, the copyright page inside Tor’s 1987 edition of The Million-Dollar Wound, the third Heller outing, did credit its cover illustration to one Joe DeVito. Only then did I spot the name “DeVito” atop the grille of that shot-up car fronting True Detective. It seems the artist’s signature had been hiding in plain sight all along!

Artist, sculptor, and storyteller Joe DeVito.

Not much effort was required to locate a Web page for DeVito, which told me that he was born in New York City, grew up in New Jersey, “and graduated with honors from Parsons School of Design. … He is the founder of DeVito ArtWorks, LLC, an artist-driven trans-media studio dedicated to creating and developing imaginative properties across publishing, film, gaming, and fine art. Among its flagship creations are King Kong of Skull Island, War Eagles, and The Primordials.” It went on to mention that “Over the decades, DeVito has painted and sculpted many of pop culture’s most legendary figures—Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Tarzan, The Shadow, Doc Savage, and even MAD magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman. His art has graced hundreds of book and magazine covers, collectible posters, trading cards, and concept designs for film and television.” Learn more here.

In response to an e-mail inquiry, DeVito said he has “many fond memories” of painting the covers for Max Allan Collins’ earliest three Heller books. “I began illustrating professionally 45 years ago, in 1981,” he said, “so from that perspective it was relatively early” that he undertook this assignment. What was his design process? “I believe I was given a synopsis when illustrating all three books and chose the scenes I wanted to illustrate. That said, I always ran various rough sketches by my [art director], Joe Curcio (an all-time favorite AD), before deciding on a final direction. I would then do a small color sketch to work out value/color/edges, etc. (much easier to make changes on a small sketch). Only then would I start the actual painting. I would normally draw up several thumbnail sketches to choose from, then Joe and I would discuss which one we thought worked best …”

(Left to right) DeVito’s fronts for True Crime (1986) and The Million-Dollar Wound (1987). Notice that unlike True Detective, each of these paintings contains a human. As the artist explains, “In Million-Dollar Wound I used myself in a WW II military uniform, and in True Crime I painted the reflection of a woman in the fender. The images of the figures were added later from separate photo shoots.”

Naturally, I was curious to know whether DeVito had done more with this trio of paperback titles than simply give them covers. Had he actually read the stories, and if so, what were his impressions? “I have always read both fiction and non-fiction in genres across the board,” he related. “That said, I am partial to historically accurate books and Max Allan Collins’ novels were what I would call ‘faction’ novels (fiction based in fact). I remember reading True Detective and enjoyed it, but can’t remember all the details after all these years.”

Most of what Joe DeVito told me didn’t make it into my foreword, despite its length. But a couple of things did. You will find those in the finished book, which may appear in print as soon as the end of this year. I’ll report more on that as time passes.

In the meantime, I don’t want to end Killer Covers’ celebration of fictional P.I.s with this single post. So over the next seven days or more, I shall roll out additional fronts from this subgenre. Stay tuned.

Celebrating Quarry’s Half-Century Career

Crime novelist Max Allan Collins has unveiled the cover of Quarry’s Reunion, his 18th book starring the killer-for-hire known only as Quarry. The book is due out in late 2026, with artwork by Paul Mann, whose talents we have celebrated before on this page.

This is being promoted as the 50th-anniversary Quarry novel, the first installment in that series being The Broker (later retitled Quarry), which was published in 1976. Collins explains in his blog that he “wrestled with the plot [of Quarry’s Reunion], which is an unusual one for Quarry as it’s a more traditional murder mystery than a crime novel, and has lots of moving parts, more Christie than Spillane. Right now I don’t know how my editor and agent will react to a change of pace like this; but I can really only write the novel that wants to be written. This one, appropriately given the 50th anniversary aspect, delves into Quarry’s past in a way I never have before.

“The story that presented itself to me was almost something out of Grace Metalious. If that reference doesn’t mean anything to you, or even if it does, I’ll just say she was the underrated author of Peyton Place, one of the best-selling (and most scandalous) novels of the ’50s and early ’60s. I had to develop a whole cast, even generations thereof, the residents of a town in Ohio about the same size of my own smallish Muscatine, Iowa. I literally (not figuratively) wrote half a dozen breakdowns of the characters and their relationships, both familial and romantic, detailing a trust fund that would be the engine of the mystery, i.e., who would/could benefit financially from the death of a character or two.”

Complicating matters further were Collins’ ongoing health concerns. He says he’d completed several chapters only of Reunion before he was sent into care “for an ablation procedure to deal with my a-fib [abnormal heart rhythm]. This turned into a nightmarish month of emergency room visits, ambulance rides, and three hospital stays, the middle one of which found me hallucinating about where I was and whether or not I was investigating a murder.”

All of this certainly makes us look forward to a finished copy of Quarry’s Reunion, with its Natalie Wood cover lookalike. But we’d also be interested in a novel about a writer hallucinating that he’s investigating a murder. Have you got time to pen that one too, Max?

The Black Bird Is Back!

I had known for a long while that Iowa crime novelist Max Allan Collins wanted to pen a sequel to Dashiell Hammett’s genre-defining 1930 private-eye novel, The Maltese Falcon, so when the official announcement of his effort came last September, I was hardly surprised. However, the subsequent rush to print of Return of the Maltese Falcon, due out from Hard Case Crime in January 2026, seems remarkable.

As Collins writes today in his blog, “My editor at Hard Case Crime, Charles Ardai, is something of a wonder. Normally when you turn a manuscript in, it takes an editor months or at least weeks to get you the line-edited manuscript to go over. Charles gets back to you the next day, or if he takes two or three days, he apologizes for the delay. Then he has the book typeset in another day (he does this himself) and provides galley proofs, and to say this is unusual is an understatement.

“It’s very cool to have the process go this quickly. Writers like the feeling when a book has ‘gone to bed.’”

No less cool is the fact that we now have a front for Return!



Both this novel’s cover painting and design (including title type hearkening back to Falcon’s original edition) are credited to Irvin Rodriguez, “an artist working in painting, drawing, digital media and illustration based in Los Angeles.” You can see more of Rodriguez’s work on his Instagram page.

Meanwhile, Collins has posted his afterword to Return of the Maltese Falcon in CrimeReads, which tells how he was first introduced to Hammett’s best-known yarn and what he asked of himself in order to echo that long-dead author’s writing style. An introductory note to the excerpt cites some resources Collins used in order to re-create the Depression-era San Francisco of Sam Spade’s heyday. (Don Herron’s The Dashiell Hammett Tour receives due applause.) Why post this afterword rather than some portion of the actual story? “Where normally an advance look at the first chapter might have been used as a promotional teaser,” he explains in his blog, “something had to substitute, because the public-domain nature of the original novel won’t kick in until my sequel is published next year. So advance promo couldn’t use any of my novel itself—we’d be in violation of the original copyright.”

I’m normally skeptical of another writer being hired to augment a prominent but deceased author’s oeuvre; Collins himself acknowledges that “following in the footsteps of a genius writer as precise as Dashiell Hammett is a sort of suicide note.” However, the creator of series gumshoe Nathan Heller has already done a fine job over these last 16 years of doubling the number of novels starring Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (a run that ended recently with Baby, It’s Murder). I am confident Return of the Maltese Falcon will do Hammett proud, too.

* * *

Max Collins’ CrimeReads post today reminds me that a “somewhat different version of [The Maltese Falcon]’s initial pulp serialization” was included in Otto Penzler’s The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (2010). I never did get around to reading that variant. Perhaps now is the time to take it down off the shelf.

Capturing Van Cleef’s Lookalike

Hard Case Crime’s new reissues of Max Allan Collins’ novels starring a professional thief known only as Nolan received some love recently from TheBad.net, a soon-to-be-10-year-old blog devoted to the life and works of actor Lee Van Cleef. It seems artist Mark Eastbrook’s cover images of Nolan look strikingly like the film and TV star.

That alikeness isn’t accidental, as Collins explained in his blog late last year. “The Van Cleef resemblance (which was part of the [early 1980s] Pinnacle covers, to a degree, and very much an element of the Perfect Crime reprints) is mentioned prominently in the novels. I met him once, interviewed him, and he treated me with amusement and at one point got briefly irritated with me. It was unsettling but memorable, being Jon to his Nolan. No guns were involved.”

The Lesser Look: “Quarry in the Middle”

Part of a month-long celebration of Ron Lesser’s artistic legacy.



Quarry in the Middle, by Max Allan Collins (Hard Case Crime, 2009). This is the eighth entry in Collins’ series featuring a randy, peripatetic hit man known only as Quarry.

McGinnis at 90: “The Consummata”

Part of a day-long celebration of artist Robert McGinnis’ birthday.



The Consummata, by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins
(Hard Case Crime, 2011).

One Final Treat from Orbik

After a very busy holiday season, I’m finding it somewhat difficult to get back into the usual swing of editorial commitments. Surely, by next week or so, this stumbling along will be at an end, and Killer Covers can return to its regularly scheduled postings. Meanwhile, let me at least present what I understand is the last book-cover illustration Glen Orbik created before he passed away in May 2015.



Quarry in the Black is the 12th installment in Max Allan Collins’ long-running series about a single-monikered killer-for-hire, Quarry, following last year’s Quarry’s Choice. Due for release in October from Hard Case Crime, this novel boasts some particularly timely elements. Here’s the plot brief from Hard Case’s Web site:

WHERE DOES A HIT MAN DRAW THE LINE?

With a controversial presidential election just weeks away, Quarry is hired to carry out a rare political assignment: kill the Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd, a passionate Civil Rights crusader and campaigner for the underdog candidate. But when a hate group out of Ferguson, Missouri, turns out to be gunning for the same target, Quarry starts to wonder just who it is he’s working for.

Given how fond I was of Quarry’s Choice (it wound up on my top-10 list of crime novels for Kirkus Reviews), I’m looking forward to seeing what moral and criminal complications Collins can throw at his protagonist next. At the same time, I’m sorry this book will mark the end of Orbik’s splendid contributions to the genre.

A Convenient Bevy of Beauties

Yours truly, J. Kingston Pierce, with sometime co-authors Barbara and Max Allan Collins at Bouchercon in Raleigh.

(Editor’s note: One of the genuine delights of my attending this month’s Bouchercon convention in Raleigh, North Carolina, was seeing author Max Allan Collins and his wife, Barbara. I first interviewed Max, a resident of Muscatine, Iowa, way back in 1999, but have since had many more opportunities to quiz him about his fiction. And whenever we both find ourselves at Bouchercon, he and I manage to catch up a bit on what’s new in our respective lives. When I saw him in Raleigh, I also asked Max if he could write a short article for Killer Covers about how he had managed to secure Robert McGinnis-painted fronts--shown below--for all five of the Quarry novels Hard Case Crime plans to reissue between now and March of 2016. His not-so-short explanation follows.)

Like many baby-boomer males around my age, I looked in awe at the wonderfully lurid paperback covers riding the spinner racks at newsstands, bookshops, and drug stores. As an aspiring writer since age 13, I dreamed of one day having beautiful cover paintings like those of Robert McGinnis, James Avati, Barye Phillips, and Robert Maguire adorn my novels.

Alas (I’ll spare you the “alack”), by the time my first paperbacks began appearing in the early ’70s, those glorious paintings were replaced by cheaper (and cheap-looking) photography. This approach doomed Bait Money, Blood Money, The Broker, The Broker’s Wife, The Dealer, and The Slasher to covers that labeled the product within as mediocre. Later, when Pinnacle reprinted Bait and Blood and published more of my Nolan novels, they used men’s adventure-style paintings, which were much better if not quite what I’d dreamed of. And in the mid-’80s, when The Broker became Quarry (and the other three Quarry novels became Quarry’s List, Quarry’s Deal, and Quarry’s Cut) at Foul Play Press, the publisher utilized cool but very modern, almost abstract covers. Still better than cheap photography.

Cut to decades later, when editor-writer Charles Ardai began publishing the Hard Case Crime line, with covers that evoked the grand old style. Unfortunately, when Charles published a reprint of Bait and Blood under the joint title Two for the Money, the cover was one of the weakest in the Hard Case lineup (and it still is). Charles, who was publishing some of his own novels with Hard Case, had meanwhile enlisted the legendary Robert McGinnis for his covers.

So when Charles called me in 2006 (or it may have been 2005) and asked if I might write a new Quarry novel for him--the previous one (Primary Target, aka Quarry’s Vote) having appeared in the mid-’80s--I said I’d write the book on one condition.

That Robert McGinnis did the cover painting.

Charles, bless him, made that happen. Since then there have been another half-dozen Quarry novels, the most current of which (Quarry’s Choice) also sports a McGinnis cover, as does my Spillane collaboration, The Consummata. There’s also been a feature film, and now a Quarry TV series is poised to begin airing in early 2016.

To tie-in with the TV show, Charles thought that Hard Case Crime republishing the first five Quarry novels--at the time only available as print-on-demand titles (and e-book)--might be a good idea. I thought it was a great idea. I’d never had a chance to review the text of the novels (I’d never seen galley proofs of the first four) and create definitive editions.

The only problem was that the books would have to be published quickly, to take full advantage of the Cinemax series. And of course Hard Case Crime is famous for its magnificently pulpy covers, which don’t happen overnight. In addition, there were no promo photos from the TV show available yet--it was still filming.

So I suggested we approach Robert McGinnis and see if he had any appropriate paintings (i.e., of beautiful girls) in his inventory. After many decades of work, he surely had a few put away.

Charles approached the great man, and indeed he did have several such paintings in inventory.

Five.

I studied the paintings and arranged them to match up to the novels (mostly the hair color of the beauties dictated that).

Which is how I managed to gain five more McGinnis covers in one fell swoop. And no other writer of my generation can boast as many--counting the as-yet-unwritten Quarry on Target, that will make nine.

I only wish I could whisper in that 13-year-old’s ear, as he spun the paperback rack at Cohn’s Newsland in Muscatine, that his wishes were going to come true.





(Top photo © 2015 by Ali Karim)

READ MORE: “The Early Quarry Novels of Max Allan Collins,”
by Tom Callahan (Graphic Novel Reporter).

Tragic Beauties

Wow, publisher Thomas & Mercer has certainly done well by Max Allan Collins, releasing many of his older novels in handsome new paperback editions. It’s especially nice to see Collins’ six “disaster mysteries” back in print.

I’ve read all half-dozen of those works, and can certainly endorse your doing likewise. That’s especially true in the cases of The Titanic Murders (1999), which casts Jacques Futrelle--an early 20th-century mystery novelist who actually perished on the Titanic in 1912--in the role of amateur sleuth; and The Lusitania Murders (2002), which finds journalist-author Willard Huntington Wright (aka S.S. Van Dine) investigating, in 1915, the presence of German spies aboard the soon-to-be-torpedoed British ocean liner Lusitania.

Scream and Scream Again

It’s still only September 2012, but I am already looking forward to a couple of Hard Case Crime releases for 2013--in large measure because of their exceptional cover illustrations.

Seduction of the Innocent, the third entry in Max Allan Collins’ series of Jack Starr historical thrillers, is set to reach bookstores next February, with artwork by the prolific Glen Orbik. Orbik is responsible as well for the painting that fronts Stephen King’s forthcoming Joyland, displayed above. However, Hard Case editor Charles Ardai tells me that artist “Robert McGinnis is also doing one [for Joyland], which will be revealed--along with how we will use two covers--in due course.” King’s novel should be out in June 2013.

These will both be beautiful additions to my bookshelves!

READ MORE: “Cover for Stephen King’s Joyland,” by Jeremy Lynch (Crimespree Magazine).

Did You Hear About Morgan?

Author Max Allan Collins first mentioned The Consummata to me during an interview I conducted with him for The Rap Sheet last May. It’s the long-awaited sequel to Mickey Spillane’s 1967 thriller, The Delta Factor, featuring a professional thief known only as Morgan the Raider. The Consummata was one in a small stack of uncompleted manuscripts that Spillane left behind--and specifically in Collins’ care--when he died in the summer of 2006. Since that time, Collins has been slowly but surely finishing those Spillane yarns and arranging for their publication. He wrote in his blog earlier this month that wrapping up The Consummata was more difficult than some of those previous projects:

I’m very pleased with it, but it was a tricky one. Mickey had completed 108 double-spaced pages, but this time I had no plot or character notes. Even the evocative title itself (which had been announced by Signet Books many years ago) went unexplained. It required really getting inside the manuscript, and Mickey’s head, to figure out where he was headed ... and I think I pulled it off.

This book isn’t due out from reborn publisher Hard Case Crime until September 2011, but Collins has already posted the cover (shown above). You may recognize the illustration as coming from famous paperback artist Robert McGinnis--the second time he has created the front for one of Collins’ numerous novels. (McGinnis’ previous one was for The Last Quarry, 2006.) And if you think you’ve seen another cover from McGinnis’ brush that bears a striking resemblance to this one ... well, pat yourself on the back, because you’re right. The 1972 Signet paperback edition of The Bombshell, by Carter Brown (shown on the right) focuses on a very similarly posed woman, only in that one, the lady dangled a flower in her left hand, rather than a pistol.

Click on either cover for an enlargement.