Two for the Money

This selection from the Hard Case Crime series is a bundling of two books by Max Allan Collins, perhaps best known for his graphic novel Road to Perdition. He wrote them around 1970, and they concern a professional thief called Nolan who, in the grand tradition of professional thieves, is looking to pull off one big last score so he can retire and sever ties with the mob.

In the afterword, which Collins wrote in 2003 upon publication of this edition, he cites his influences, and therein lies a problem. This book was a bit of a slog to get through, because it seemed wholly unoriginal. Collins mentions the Donald Westlake creation Parker, but he also seems indebted to Mickey Spillane. This was clearly the work of a writer wet behind the ears.

Nolan is one of those characters that's larger than life, so much so that he seems ridiculous. When we meet him he's laid up by a gunshot wound. He's 48, and has been on the run from the mob for sixteen years. An old friend offers him a chance to settle his scores with the Mafia if he will pull off one last job. He has no choice, but has to work with a group of amateurs to pull a bank heist in of all places Iowa City, Iowa (the book is mostly set there and in the Quad Cities, which is kind of a nice change of pace). Of course the robbery doesn't go as planned.

That's the first book, originally called Bait Money. The second, called Blood Money, concerns Nolan settling all accounts with the mobster who has constantly bedeviled him. This book was a little better, more gritty and had less stylistic flourishes (among them are a tendency for Collins to rehash scenes from different perspectives, which is common in cinema these days but laborious in print).

Perhaps true to a homage to Spillane, the books are also casually sexist and racist. Would a guy really tell a girl that if she gets a darker tan she'd have to ride on the back of the bus? Women are treated either as disposable sex objects, or as uptight do-gooding liberals who would look better if they only tried. I'll give Collins the benefit of the doubt that he was only parroting pulp crime conventions, but geez they go down hard in 2008.

What bothered me most about these books is their lack of authenticity. I didn't believe any of this could happen. It was clear that Collins didn't know much about the Mafia or bank robberies when he wrote this--it unspools like a kid writing a thriller in his notebook after school. I've read one of Collins' Heller books--Majic Man, and that was much better, so I'll have to chalk this dud up to a lack of experience.