Max Allan Collins

I found my way to this novel the long way around after watching old television episodes on Youtube of "What's My Line?" from the 1960s. The most stellar member of the panel was Dorothy Kilgallen, a journalist. Wikipedia describes the unusual circumstances of her death: a healthy woman who did not appear to be suffering from depression swallows an lethal mix of pills and booze after having expressed skepticism about the JFK assassination in print and interviewing Jack Ruby. Perhaps there's nothing suspicious in that, or perhaps there is. Next I went seeking any books about Miss Kilgallen or that might feature her, and came up with this fictional thriller. Dorothy appears here as "Flo Kilgore", which would normally suggest he's taken liberal freedoms with her character. Flo, however, began as an amalgamation of more than one historical personage in one of his prior Heller novels. In this one, she is all Dorothy.

Max Collins is a marvel at establishing his period and setting. The number of historical figures and places he's able to integrate is astonishing, given how smoothly it's done; you might well believe he's simply making everything up, but the high degree of detail gives away his secret. Nearly everyone and everywhere, right down to the hotels his character stays at, you can google or read Wikipedia entries for. Apparently the whole series is like this (this is book 15, so I've obviously missed a few). The degree of incorporated historicity is incredible, so overwhelming that it actually gets in the way of the story. The degree of detail to which Collins makes links and connections creates a vast, complicated web far stranger than what normal fiction would weave, too much to keep track of without taking notes. Sometimes there's a shift out of easy thriller fiction into what feels like a complicated, conspiracy-unravelling morass of non-fiction that is more difficult to follow.

The KGB are shut out of the picture Collins draws, but Lyndon Johnson is heavily implicated as are Cuban exiles, the CIA and the mob. Jack Ruby in this telling knew everybody and anybody, including Oswald. The number of folks on the periphery who knew significant bits and pieces of the whole but were silenced or kept just quiet enough without blowing the lid off is the least likely aspect, but still almost believable for how it might have been managed. Of course Detective Heller cannot bring the assassins to justice - what reader would believe that? - but there's a satisfying conclusion to his own side of the story.… (més)