A thoroughly satisfying, complex detective novel. ( )

I'm going to give this one 3.5 stars, and round up.

I had an exceptionally hard time getting into this one. I love the hard-boiled private eye genre, and Max Allan Collins is one of my favorite authors, so I'm not sure what happened here. The story seemed to take a really long time to set up, and I didn't feel connected to the main character much.

I did experience a major life event while trying to read this (my dad passed away); maybe that impacted me in more ways than I know. My reading pace has dropped dramatically over the month of June, as well.

Anyway, I am going to go back and reread this one at some point, and continue the series, too. ( )

This is not just the first in the Heller series, it is one of the best. Instead of having a hardboiled detective meet an Al Capone type hoodlum, have him meet the real Al Capone in proper historical setting. Meet Nate Heller, who may just be Collins' greatest creation. This is a superb novel with a breadth and depth to place it among the best of the twentieth century classics.

It is a story of drawing lines in a corrupt world, of honesty and trust, and betrayal. It is a coming of age story for a young police officer Nate Heller in the corrupt Chicago of the 1930's. He's no Boy Scout and no virgin, but Heller has some limits and some things he won't do, not even if Mayor Cernak (aka "Ten Percent Tony" because he presided over so many payoffs and underhanded dirty deals) says please.

Nate Heller is not only placed into history with such buddies as world class boxer Barney Ross, who grew up with Heller on Maxwell Street, and Eliot Ness, but he has dealings with a Frank Nitti and Al Capone. How can he pal around with both Nitti and Ness? Well, Heller is not a cardboard character. He is fleshed out here with quite a bit of depth, including his Jewish-Irish background, his family background, his romantic and dating life. The characterizations of the people Heller meets are absolutely terrific. When he meets Nitti, Heller explains that, once having seen him, you wouldn't forget him as he had a fighter's nose, was impeccably groomed, and and was smaller than Frank Nitti was supposed to be. Nitti ran the Chicago outfit when Capone did hard time.

It is a terrific, top notch book that you will want to read more than once to make sure you got everything because this book has everything you could want in a novel. ( )

True Detective by Max Allan Collins
I am not usually a reader of first person narrative novels, but Max Allan Collins was recommended to me and so I gave this, his first Nathan Heller novel, a try. I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised because the writing style was fast and pacy and drew me into the story straight away. The fact that characters involved in the story really existed made the storyline even better and more credible, and also drew me into doing some research about them.
Plenty of action, atmospheric descriptions, murders, mayhem and danger. All of these added to the realism of the storyline, one with which I became intrigued. I will certainly give him, that is both the author and Nate Heller, another go in the future.
4 stars.
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