Макс Коллинз: Shoot the Moon (and more)

Shoot the Moon (my alternate title was Wynning Streak ), was written in the first phase of my career. When I wrote the novel, I had already sold Bait Money, No Cure for Death, Quarry, Blood Money , and The Baby Blue Rip-off .

Between contracts, I decided to try something different. I was very much in the sway of Donald E. Westlake at the time, and my first novel ( Bait Money , and its sequels as well) might be fairly termed “Richard Stark” pastiches. Before I knew that Westlake and Stark were the same writer, they were my two favorite contemporary crime fiction writers — indeed, they were the last two crime fiction writers to influence me in any major way. Their works sat on the same shelf, with a bookend separating them. When I learned Westlake was Stark, I simply removed the bookend. (Don loved that story.)

On its most basic level, Shoot the Moon was an attempt to do the kind of comic crime caper Don was known for, under his own name. He was mentoring me at the time, and I now wonder if he was irritated that I had chosen to imitate him yet again, in another fashion. When he read Shoot the Moon , he was not enthusiastic, and suggested I had gone overboard with the discursive approach. The version in this collection reflects a cutting and revision based on Don’s generous notes (the original doesn’t seem to exist).

Incidentally, the book was written in 1974 at the tail-end (sorry) of the streaking fad. The direct inspiration was a streaking incident at my cousin’s wedding.

Strange as it may seem, I’d pretty much forgotten about the novel until I was sent some materials from the files of my former agent, Knox Burger, upon his passing in 2010. Knox represented me till around 1982, when he had a lackluster response to my novel True Detective , and I — frankly — fired him. Since that time I’ve been with agent Dominick Abel, who believed in that novel, which went on to win the Private Eye Writers of America “Shamus” for Best Hardcover Novel of 1983.

True Detective wasn’t the first book of mine that Knox rejected — Shoot the Moon was. I didn’t even know agents could reject a client’s manuscript, but there it was. That was when I sent the book to Don Westlake, who gave me his typically helpful notes. The revision went to Burger (and I have a hunch Don called Knox and rattled his cage for me), who finally consented to handle the thing.

As I indicated, the manuscript of “the thing” was returned to me, with a few other odds and ends, in 2010. It did not appear to have been sent out anywhere, and I never received a report from Knox on any history of rejections (much less acceptance). But my career had heated up about then, with more Nolans, Mallorys and Quarrys to write, and Shoot the Moon became a low priority that was soon to become a faded memory.

Reading it now, many decades later, I’m not ashamed of it. It’s clearly my work and rather fun. What’s most surprising to me is that I see myself doing James M. Cain in it more than Donald E. Westlake. Cain was a huge influence on my first-person style and, despite the lack of cuckolded husbands getting bumped off in the book, the approach is very much his.

As sort of bonus features, this volume collects two short stories of mine, from the early years of my career.

The two stories were written in a writing class at Muscatine (Iowa) Community College, though I’m not sure exactly when — some time in the 1966-’68 period. Neither story was submitted anywhere, as there really wasn’t much of a market then for hardboiled fiction. I had started sending novels out in the mail as early as the ninth grade, and wasn’t shy about collecting rejection slips. But these stories just didn’t seem to have a logical home. They were part of my self-schooling in the craft of hardboiled crime fiction-writing, and they were discussed in class, and went into a drawer.

They emerged in the mid-’80s when mystery writer Wayne Dundee began Hardboiled , a prozine that was still in existence the last time I looked, albeit not under Wayne’s stewardship. Wayne, a fellow Midwesterner, was (and is) a friend whose work I admired. He wondered if I would write something for his new magazine. Not surprisingly, I didn’t have time, due to various deadlines, but said I’d be willing to show him two early stories of mine that might be publishable. He published them both, with “Public Servant” appearing in Hardboiled ’s first issue (Lawrence Block later re-published it in Opening Shots , 2000). Eventually Wayne also serialized the first Nolan novel, Mourn the Living , before its various book publications (it will be gathered with Spree as Mad Money by Hard Case Crime in a year or so), written in 1968 around the same time as the two short stories here.

“Public Servant” is quite shamelessly a Jim Thompson pastiche. What is perhaps most interesting about it is that I was imitating Thompson when he was largely unknown in the mystery field. Anthony Boucher had praised him, and R.V. Cassill’s famous essay celebrating The Killer Inside Me in Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties would appear in 1968, though I’m fairly sure I wrote “Public Servant” in ’66 or ’67.

I read Thompson in high school. I have a vivid memory of reading Pop. 1280 (1964) in study hall. That book is very much the inspiration for my story, but I repaid Thompson putting together (with Ed Gorman) the first monograph on him, Jim Thompson: The Killers Inside Him (Fedora Press, 1983), which brought “This World and Then The Fireworks” into print for the first time.

“The Love Rack” is a longer story, generously described as a novella. It was an attempt to combine what I’d learned from two of my favorite writers — Mickey Spillane and James M. Cain — into one tale. The title, as any Cain buff already knows, is a reference to the Vincent Lawrence definition of a certain kind of sex-driven story situation that was his gift to Cain. That it’s heavily Spillane-influenced is amusing, considering what Mickey once told me about why he didn’t care for Cain: “I don’t like stories written in jail cells.”

I present these stories to you because the young writer I once was very desperately wanted to see his work published, and read, and I owe him that much. I hope more casual readers will find these tales lightly entertaining, and my more dedicated fans will view them as interesting, even instructive road signs on the path I would be taking.

Max Allan Collins

Of course it’s crazy on the face of it that I would run naked across the lobby of the Holiday Inn in DeKalb, Illinois, in the middle of June, after streaking had hit its peak and gone the way of swallowing goldfish and cramming into phone booths.

Crazier still when you consider that I am a short-haired, painfully straight young man, who at the time was taking summer school at Northern Illinois University to get a diploma to go with the empty folder I’d been handed at graduation a few weeks before, and had no intention of taking off my clothes in public (or robbing a bank, either) or anything else except getting that damn degree so I could maybe work at a bank or Holiday Inn. I’m no rebel. I’m no criminal. My father is a Methodist minister, for Christ sake!

It started one night, in mid-June, around eleven. I was sitting beside my friend Wheaty in a booth in Sambo’s, the chain pancake house across from the DeKalb Holiday Inn. Both of us were, each in his own way, trying to reason with Peter “The Shaker” Saltz, a massive guy who was All-Conference tackle and to whom we owed a total of $78 in poker losses, $48 of it mine, $30 of it Wheaty’s.