Chicago Lightning

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Back in 1981, when I began work on my first Nathan Heller novel, True Detective, the historical mystery was no hot trend I was latching onto. I was just looking for a way to write my favorite kind of mystery—the private eye story—in a manner that didn’t seem anachronistic.

A lot of smart people—my then-agent, Knox Burger; my mentor, Donald E. Westlake—begged me to rewrite the novel in the third-person, and to make Nate Heller a cop or a reporter or anything but a private eye. That genre was dead, or at least an embarrassing niche, and I had hold of a great Chicago yarn that could be the breakthrough of my career…if I would just abandon my embarrassing insistence on writing it as a private eye story.

I remember Don saying, “Do you really think anybody wants to read a first-person private eye novel that’s as long as Moby Dick?”

It was sobering.

I eventually broke with Burger, who was willing to “show the book around” but was painfully unenthusiastic. Once editor of the legendary Gold Medal line of paperbacks, Knox had always made for me a downbeat advocate. When my Writers Workshop instructor, Richard Yates, first approached Burger about looking at my stuff, Burger did so, only to say: “I’m afraid young Collins is a blacksmith in an automotive world.” He wasn’t wrong, but finally he wasn’t right for me.

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