Max Collins: The War of the Worlds Murder

Suddenly 1975 seems like a long time ago.

Not as long ago as 1938-when the bulk of this story takes place (and long before I was born)-but nonetheless distant, right out on the edges of my memory.

I graduated with an MFA from the Writers Workshop in Iowa City in 1972, right after selling my first mystery novel, and promptly took a job teaching Freshman English at the small-town community college where I’d been attending a few years before. I was just a kid, really, though I’d been married since 1968.

By ’75 I’d already sold half a dozen mystery novels. But only two of them had been published when I decided to attend my first Bouchercon, which was in Chicago, a city my wife Barb and I both felt comfortable in.

My childhood sweetheart and I had honeymooned for a week in Chicago, going to movies, dining in wonderful restaurants, checking out the sights, as well as the usual things newlyweds do…plus some they don’t, specifically risking my bride’s life during those turbulent times by having her help me chase down old used paperbacks I needed for my mystery collection, in some of the roughest parts of town. Toward the end of that week, Robert Kennedy was assassinated-we were RFK supporters and anti-Vietnam War-and the event…in the context of celebrating our marriage…brought home just how fragile happiness can be. On the other hand, we’re still together.

On this return visit to Chicago, Barb did not attend the convention: she shopped at Marshall Field’s and along Michigan Avenue, though in those days it was mostly window-shopping. I, for the first time, mingled with mystery fans and my fellow writers, awkwardly straddling the two factions. That it was the weekend before Hallowe’en seemed appropriate for such benignly criminal doings, and Chicago was its chilly windy city self, the Palmer House hotel in the El’s shadow (the Wabash-side entrance, anyway); I felt almost like a grown-up.

My generation of mystery writers was perhaps the first to emerge largely from “fandom”-we had not only read the fiction of our writer-heroes, we had written and published “fanzines” celebrating that fiction and those creators, much like the world of comics, where I was also a fan (but not yet a writer).

Had I not already attended two or three comic book conventions, I would have been much more intimidated at Bouchercon Six, with its bustling dealers’ room that seemed so large (though by today’s convention standards was minuscule) and its panel discussions bracketed by informal conversations (in hallways and bars and dealers’-room aisles) between strangers with mutual interests. Many of us were what is now called geeks and even then were known as nerds-lonely oddballs pleased to encounter their own kind.

Patterned after similar events that had grown up in science fiction, the Bouchercon-named after celebrated New York Times critic/mystery author Anthony Boucher-is the World Mystery Convention. Fans, authors, editors, literary agents, publicists and of course booksellers attend these fan-run gatherings, and as I write this in the early twenty-first century, the events-held in cities from London to New York, from Toronto to San Francisco-are attended by thousands, unlike the hundred or so who came to Chicago in 1975.

I was a barely published author-two paperback-original novels, Bait Money and Blood Money , had seen print-and certainly not a “name” fan, that is, a fan who’d published a fanzine. I’d contributed a few articles to such self-published publications, mostly defending and celebrating my favorite mystery writer, Mickey Spillane; but mine was definitely not a name that would resonate with the average attendee of Bouchercon Six.

I prowled the dealers’ room, wearing a name badge of course, and before long, a small miracle happened. A dark-haired, mustached kid stood grinning at me, his eyes large behind horn-rim glasses; he wore a light-blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and chinos, and seemed to be only mildly insane.

“You’re Max Collins !” he said.

I frowned. “That’s right…”

I checked the name badge of this guy: Robert J. Randisi . His home was identified as “Brooklyn,” a legendary city known only vaguely to Iowans such as myself.

“I can’t believe it!” this Randisi creature blurted.

Did I owe him money? I sometimes bought comic books and old paperbacks through the mail. Maybe he was a dealer I’d shorted on the purchase of Jim Thompson or Richard Stark paperbacks. He seemed harmless enough, if overenthusiastic-of medium size, solidly put together, but not a threat.

“ You wrote the Nolan books!” he said, pointing a pleasantly accusing finger.

Nolan was the thief anti-hero of my two published novels.

“Right,” I said, waiting for a shoe to drop.

“Those are great ! I love those books!”

My eyes tightened. “Really?”

He reared back and laughed, once. “Why? Don’t you believe me?”

“Well…it’s just that I never met anybody before who’s read my books…at least, that I wasn’t related to.”

“Well, I’m a fan. Big fan.”

This was a first for me; and a moment I’ll never forget.

“Muscatine, Iowa,” he said, reading my name badge further. “Is that ‘Port City’?”

Port City was the fictionalized version of my hometown that I used in the books.

“Sort of,” I admitted.

“Where is it?”

“On the Mississippi-between Iowa City and the Quad Cities.”

“Like in your books!”

“Like in my books.”

We shook hands and fell in alongside each other, walking and talking.

“What do you think of this place?” Randisi gestured around a dealers’ room rife with rare books and vintage paperbacks.

“It’s heaven,” I said. “Also, hell…. I can’t afford any of this stuff.”

“I know the feeling…. Y’know, there are some big writers here. The Guest of Honor wrote the book that Steve McQueen movie came from-with the car chase? But the really cool thing is…Walter Gibson is here.”

“Really? The guy who created the Shadow?”

“ ‘Maxwell Grant’ himself-pretty spry for an old boy, too.”

“How old is he?”

“Late seventies, I think. Still writing. Still doing magic tricks. He knew Houdini and Blackstone and all those guys, y’know.”

Robert J. Randisi and I continued to walk and talk, and so began a friendship that endures to this day. In ensuing years, Bob would found the Private Eye Writers of America, and become a bestselling writer of Western fiction, as well as authoring many fine mystery and suspense novels.

That evening, we wound up having dinner together-meeting up with Barb-at the now-defunct George Diamond’s Steak House, where the fillets were the size of a football and the salads were half a head of crisp cold lettuce slathered in three dressings that mixed so well I’m salivating now. My lovely blonde wife lived up to Bob’s high expectations of the standards of a “successful” hard-boiled mystery writer.

And I was impressed to learn he’d sold a story to Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine ; I’d never been able to crack the short story market (ironically, the first short story I would publish was sold to Bob, editing a PWA anthology, about ten years later).