Two for the Money

by Max Allan Collins

  Now I’d already shelved (temporarily, as it turned out) my desire to write private eye novels in the Mike Hammer/Shell Scott mode. Already private eyes were seeming quaint to me, rooted in another era, and I didn’t feel like writing about cops. I was a long-haired hippie (according to my father, anyway) and was disillusioned by cops clubbing kids in Chicago at the Democratic convention, among other outrages of the day. So the anti-establishment notion of Stark’s Parker appealed.

  I played catch-up, reading other writers of “crook books,” in particular W.R. Burnett and Horace McCoy (whose Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye remains one of my half dozen favorite novels). And soon I set about to write my own Stark-like novel, with the notion of hitting the contemporary scene as hard as I could—no crime writers were dealing with my long-haired hippie generation. The result was a novel called Mourn the Living, which ended up being serialized long after the fact in Hardboiled magazine and in recent years has been collected into hardcover form by Five Star. The Nolan character was called Cord in that book (I changed it to Nolan many years later, since the character really was the same, down to the backstory).

  The book did not find a publisher, though it was good enough to get me into the Writers Workshop (undergrad) at Iowa City, where I began to work with my mentor, the fine mainstream novelist and short story writer, Richard Yates. Dick Yates had a lot to do with pushing me across the line from imitator into creator, and helped me understand the needs of character over plot, though he was highly complimentary about several minor characters in Mourn the Living. He paid me the best compliment of my career: “You’re a real writer.” (This, he believed, in spite of my genre leanings.)

  I had taken a tentative step toward writing about the midwest in Mourn, and took a greater leap with Bait Money, which was initially called First and Last Time. I set the story in my own home area—Muscatine, Iowa (Port City) and the Quad Cities (home of John Looney, Road to Perdition’s real-life gangster). Essentially, my wife Barb helped me rob the bank where she worked; I in fact used the bank’s own security plan as a guide (it’s quoted at the front of the book). The book is called Bait Money because I loved the sound of this real banking term my bride shared with me.

  The Nolan-esque character in Mourn had been presented as in his thirties and a sort of Robin Hood who hit only the mob. I aged him almost to 50 and threw out the Robin Hood notion; the concept was to take a Parker-like character who has reached the ancient age of 48 and wants badly to retire, and of course needs one last heist to do so. My thinking was, if anybody lived like Steve McQueen did in the movies, in real life, he’d be dead by 50. (McQueen later pretty much proved my point.)

  The second notion was to partner this “old” man with a young kid who represented my generation, those longhaired hippies previously mentioned—to put the traditional hardboiled hero in contact with youth of the late ’60s/early ’70s. I believe I was one of the first writers in the genre to do this. Further, the heist in the novel would be Nolan’s last and Jon’s first (and last). I figured Jon was a basically honest kid, not cut out for this life, who got caught up in crime naively and because of his heister uncle, Planner.

  Because of this first-and-last theme, and since I knew the book was at least partially a Richard Stark rip-off, I killed Nolan at the end. My then-agent Knox Burger—who Dick Yates had found for me—did not like the ending. Rather prophetically, he said, “Robin does not leave Batman to die.”

  I was stubborn, because . . . because I’m stubborn. I felt this was a novel about the death of the American tough guy . . . which seemed to require the American tough guy dying.

  And so the book was sent out with that bleak ending. It was rejected perhaps ten times over the course of a year or two. Then an editor did me an unintentional favor: a cup of coffee was spilled on the manuscript. In those ancient, typewritten days, this meant preparing a new manuscript— retyping the sucker; couldn’t even submit carbons in those days. And Burger said, “Why don’t you take this opportunity to put on a better ending?”

  So I unkilled Nolan, writing an extra couple of paragraphs, and Burger sold the book next try. And immediately the editor asked for a sequel.

  Now I was nervous. One Parker pastiche was an homage; a series really did seem a rip-off. . . .

  By this time I was corresponding with Don Westlake, who had read Bait Money in manuscript and said nice things about it to Burger, which may be why Knox kept trying with it after so many rejections. And I asked Don what he thought—did he mind if I kept writing Nolan novels?

  He did not. He was extremely gracious, saying that the Jon aspect of the books humanized Nolan in a manner that made these books wholly different animals (never mind that I even mimicked his point of view method and time-shifting chapters) (we were both way ahead of Quentin Tarantino, but behind Kubrick).

  And with Don’s blessing, I went forward. There were seven Nolans . . . eight, counting Mourn the Living . . . and that was where my career began, thanks to Dick Yates and Don Westlake and Knox Burger. They were the collective Nolan to my Jon, and I’ll always be grateful to them.

  But I’ve stayed with my life of crime.

  MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  Muscatine, Iowa AKA Port City

  November 2003

  HARD CASE CRIME Presents

  The QUARRY Novels

  by MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  The Last Quarry

  Retired killer Quarry gets talked into taking one last contract—but why would anyone want a beautiful librarian dead...?

  The First Quarry

  The ruthless hit man’s first assignment: kill a philandering professor who has run afoul of some very dangerous men.

  Quarry In the Middle

  When two rival casino owners covet the same territory, guess who gets caught in the crossfire...

  Quarry’s Ex

  While protecting a movie director who has been marked for murder, Quarry discovers the man is married to Quarry’s ex-wife—the woman who drove Quarry to a life of crime.

  Available now at your favorite bookstore. For more information, visit

  www.HardCaseCrime.com