[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 138: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 150: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 151: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 152: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 153: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 154: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 155: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 156: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 157: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 158: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 159: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 160: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/book.php on line 161: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4130: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3009) [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4130: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3009) [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4130: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3009) [phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/includes/functions.php on line 4130: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [ROOT]/includes/functions.php:3009) The Internet Book Database of Fiction - Detailed view for the Book: Dying in the Post-War World
This grandly titled but drab clutter of crime fiction--an original novella and five previously published short stories--represents some of the last work of the late Collins (scripter since 1977 of the Dick Tracy comic strip, who often based his fiction on true crimes). Collins's friend Ed Gorman contributes an adulatory foreword in which he reveals that Collins ''didn't think he was very good at short stories.'' Collins was right. His tales are pulpish and his hero, hard-boiled Chicago private eye Nate Heller, is unimpressive, given to blinding flashes of insight, to playing God with the evidence, to taking bribes to supplement an income which in the Depression ran $10 a day plus expenses. The best story here isn't the overwrought title tale, (based on the Susan Degnan kidnap-murder) but ''Marble Mildred,'' in which a frenzied harridan pursues and batters her seemingly exemplary husband, eventually gunning him down. Nate unlocks the secret that has festered for 14 years in this marriage. Nate also appears in the novel Stolen Away , a revisionist approach to the Lindbergh kidnapping, published last spring.