Flying Blind
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Max Allan Collins |
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| Subtitle | A Novel of Amelia Earhart |
| Publisher | E P Dutton |
| Honors | |
| The year is 1970. Nathan Heller has retired from his distinguished career as a private investigator. But now a stranger has come knocking at his door. He wants Heller to travel to Saipan, the last place Amelia Earhart may have been seen alive. For Heller, it is an offer he can’t resist—the chance to find out what really happened to the woman he once loved… Now, decades later, Heller is determined to discover what really happened on that final, fateful flight. It is a journey that will take him to distant, deadly shores, into a world of international intrigue,… | |
The year is 1970. Nathan Heller has retired from his distinguished career as a private investigator. But now a stranger has come knocking at his door. He wants Heller to travel to Saipan, the last place Amelia Earhart may have been seen alive. For Heller, it is an offer he can’t resist—the chance to find out what really happened to the woman he once loved…
Now, decades later, Heller is determined to discover what really happened on that final, fateful flight. It is a journey that will take him to distant, deadly shores, into a world of international intrigue, espionage, betrayal, and finally, to a stunning secret buried at the bottom of the sea, locked away in the vaults of time.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
“Now it was the next morning and the gas was in the plane. The tall, slender woman I’d lusted after the night before was standing next to me on the tarmac, near her ship, buckling a tan helmet under her chin, flashing me that gap-toothed grin she hid from photographers….” The woman, of course, is Amelia Earhart, and the man describing her is Nate Heller, ex-Chicago cop and private detective to the rich and famous. One of the most original characters in the historical mystery area, Max Allan Collins’s Heller has jousted with Al Capone, helped out Clarence Darrow, and probed the killing of Huey Long—taking all his cases very personally. But a bad experience with a sadistic Charles Lindbergh has left him leery of flying, and it will take all of Earhart’s charm to get him into a plane from St. Louis to Albuquerque, and then to Los Angeles. It’s 1935, and Heller has been hired by Amelia’s husband (the conniving publisher G.P. Putnam) to both guard her body and search out possible lovers on a book tour. A warm relationship grows up between the flyer and the detective, and when Earhart disappears a few years later, an overage Heller enlists in the Marines to search for her on the island of Saipan. The story is framed by scenes of a retired Nate in 1970 being persuaded to revisit Saipan by a persistent Earhart researcher, and the conclusions that Collins offers about her fate are as convincing as they are moving and exciting. —Dick Adler
Barnes and Noble
Someday some real smart publisher is going to get even smarter and reissue all of Max Allan Collins’s Nate Heller novels. The publisher will put them in trade paperback, uniform editions with nicely painted illustrations depicting clearly the era in which the particular book is set, and will quote at least a few of the many great reviews lavished upon these books by people such as Donald E. Westlake and Lawrence Block—not to mention scores and scores of major reviewers.
Max Allan Collins is the best writer of American historical mysteries—bar none. Not only do his people come alive—especially Nathan Heller, who is a very complicated and sometimes contradictory man—but so does his history. There’s a scene in one of the early Hellers where Nate is in a speakeasy having a drink and just looking around the joint. I was struck, as I rarely am by historical novels, that this scene actually took place, a middle-aged man with one too many drinks in him taking stock of his life on a rainy Saturday afternoon, flappers, mobsters, crooked cops, and chorus girls all around him as he speculates on the middle-class life he’s never had—and somehowmisses.It’s a moment out of John O’Hara or Erskine Caldwell or William Kennedy, not a moment out of genre detective fiction. The Heller books are also fun. Collins is a superior stylist and a superior plotter. He combines the elegance and depth of the modern mystery masters with the relentless action of the classic storytellers of the ‘40s and ‘50s.
His new book, Flying Blind, is arguably his best. And certainly his most widely appealing, especially to women readers.
Flying Blind concerns Amelia Earhart, pilot, and what may have happened to her on her mysterious last flight. But just as important, it’s also about Amelia Earhart, woman, and what may have happened to her during her mysterious life.
In the late ‘30s, Earhart’s cynical, manipulative, and shamelessly dishonest husband hires Heller to do some security work for Amelia. Amelia and Heller end up having an affair. Two decades later, long after her presumed crash and subsequent death, Heller is hired to look into just what really happened to Amelia.
This is Collins’s most powerful Heller novel for a simple reason—Heller is older now and far less sure of things he has long believed in. He also realizes that his melancholy attachment to Amelia has never left him. He needs a quest, both for himself and for Amelia, and so he agrees to look into her disappearance.
As always, Collins has an ingenious solution to the mystery he’s trying to solve. He knows how to spoon-feed his readers the history elements—no long digressions, no scholarly pontification. His solution to the Earhart puzzle is not only novel, it’s also believable. Readers will be satisfied that they not only learned a lot about Amelia Earhart but that most of the speculation about her disappearance has been wildly off-base, even cynical and self-serving on the part of some fairly prominent citizens.
A smart producer could turn the Heller books into major TV movies. Heller has sought the truth, among others, of the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Huey Long assassination, and the creation of modern Las Vegas by Bugsy Siegel. Powerful, compelling stories for women and men alike.
For now, we have Flying Blind, one of the most enjoyable, riveting, and moving accounts of Amelia Earhart, American woman, American myth.
So, when can we expect the uniform trade-paperback editions of all the Heller novels? —Ed Gorman
