Sunday 10 March 2013

Max Allen Collins: Stakhanovite or Fordist, he's worth a read





Drew Ratter writes:

Max Allen Collins. I came across him because for a while he was a giveaway on Kindle. Gone far too dear now, regrettably.

He is fantastically prolific, and hopefully made a reasonable bag of cash from Road to Perdition, which was a pretty good gangster film, excellent Tom Hanks, weak Jude Law, and a brilliant late performance by Paul Newman. It was a graphic novel, by the way, which makes Collins more and more like a renaissance man(he did another version after the release of the movie, a tie in novel; indeed there's a whole series of 'Road to...' books) 

God knows how many tie-ins he's written. One other is American Gangster, which I have not read. It isn't a very comprehensible thing to do, really. Dr Who novelisations, anyone?
An excellent movie though, with real people, like Bumpy Johnson, and his successor in the heroin business, the brilliant Frank Lucas. His innovation was bringing in pure heroin in (or under, depending on which story you believe) coffins returning from Vietnam. Entrepreneurial or what?
The Nathan Heller novels are what I devoured one after the other in Inverness, with which there is no other connection. They're good, likewise built with real historical figures, from Ma Barker and Baby Face Nelson to Amelia Earhart, in Flying Blind, to the Kingfish, Huey Long, himself, in Blood and Thunder. You can see the point, strong characters and easy research. Speed!



Among Heller's close friends he numbers Frank Nitti, a notorious gangland figure, and among his lovers, the aforesaid Amelia Earhart and Sally Rand. The latter was most famous for her bubble dance.

Collins is one of the kind of American writing industries that produce  the kind of world beating TV we all love. Individual talent and Stakhanovism just can't produce this kind of mass and volume. We have to look for Fordism, and the kind of techniques which build a Liberty Ship in nine days.

With the amount of material by Collins on the market, there is bound to be chaff, as well as real wheat. Anybody wanting to have a go should stick with the Nathan Heller novels. That's enough commitment, I think. But, as I say, they're good! 

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