True Detective

my sanity was by teaching a course on mystery fiction. It was in my capacity as a college instructor, then, that I re-read my favorite mystery novel, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, for the umpteenth time.

Perhaps it was that academic mode of thought that made me glance at the indicia page, note the copyright, and muse, 'Nineteen twenty-nine… that's the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. That means Sam Spade and Al Capone were contemporaries.'

In the comics field (where I also occasionally toil), this moment might be marked by a lightbulb going on in a balloon over my head. It was that kind of idea- the stray thought that lights up the world and changes everything, or at least a career.

For a long time I had been looking for a way to write private eye novels in the classic mode. I grew up on Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane and dozens of their imitators, but my first published novels did not include the private detective narrator those writers made famous. Instead, at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop, I wrote a trio of novels about three different protagonists: a thief, a hitman and a mystery writer; but in each case, the novels had roots in the P.I. form as much as the crime novel.

My lightbulb moment probably took place around 1974, not long before Chinatown came along, doing something of the same kind of P.I.-in-history thing I had in mind. And a couple of mystery writers, good ones (Andrew Bergman and Stuart Kaminsky), did their own period private-eye novels right around the same time.

Robert Towne's great screenplay for Chinatown loosely dealt with historical events, but his characters were fictional. Both Bergman and Kaminsky placed their P.I.s amid real people- chiefly, movie stars and various other Hollywood celebrities- but not in the context of actual events or specific crimes.

My concern, back at the end of the '60s and start of the '70s, was that the private eye character had become anachronistic- I did not (and still do not) care for the Marlowe type of noble-urban-knight detective earned over bodily into modern times (those times starting around 1963), a guy in fedora and trenchcoat with a bottle of whiskey in his bottom desk drawer, who apparently stumbled into a time machine.

Such novels seemed to me forced, cliched, ungainly pastiches of a form that was fixed in the amber of a bygone day. That was why my lightbulb epiphany was so crucial to me: I had come up with a way to write the private eye today… by setting the stories yesterday.

The first incarnation of the Nathan Heller character (the protagonist of the book you're about to read) was in a comic strip called 'Heaven and Heller.' An editor at Field Enterprises, around 1975, asked me to take a stab at creating a new story strip. That editor- Rick Marschall- was bucking the conventional wisdom, still held today, that story strips were no longer marketable.

The Heller samples (two batches were done- one by Ray Gotto, creator of the baseball strip 'Ozark

Dee'; another by Fernando DaSilva, the last assistant to Alex Raymond, creator of 'Flash Gordon') had to do with a seance being held in Chicago by Harry Houdini's widow: the true-crime aspect of the Heller novels was there, in embryonic form.

'Heaven and Heller' was sold to Field Enterprises. But my visionary editor lost his job. and the contract was cancelled. 'Heaven and Heller' went into the drawer. A few years later. Rick Marschall recommended me to the Tribune Company as the writer of 'Dick Tracy,' a job I held fifteen years (starting in 1977)… By the way- thanks, Rick!

In the meantime, Chinatown happened, and a good but short-lived period private eye TV series called City of Angels (co-created by Stephen Cannell and Roy Huggins) appeared, as did those aforementioned novels by Bergman and Kaminsky. The private eye in period setting was becoming a distinct if underutilized sub-genre of mystery fiction.

But it still seemed to me that nobody had fully plumbed the potential of the P.I. in period. In fact, that was the problem: they were doing the private eye in period, but not in history'. It occurred to me that Heller shouldn't just bump into real people, but that he should be involved in real events… that he should crack a real unsolved case. I was not thinking in terms of a series of novels, just one book, though I did contemplate the possibility of sequels (one of the reasons I made Heller a younger man in True Detective than most protagonists of private eye novels).

From the first inklings of Heller, I began gathering research materials, and the case that attracted me most- that seemed like a classic under-explored Chicago subject- was the attempted assassination of FDR that wound up taking the life of Mayor Anton Cermak. My fascination for that case had been sparked by a TV show I saw as a kid…

One of the pop-culture touchstones that served to interest me in true crime and real detectives (or. should I say. real crime and true detectives) was the Robert Stack-starring television series. The Untouchables, based on a slightly fictionalized memoir by Eliot Ness (who was one of the real federal agents Chester Gould patterned his Dick Tracy upon).

The Untouchables had done a two-part episode about the attempt on Chicago Mayor Cermak's life, and it was typically inaccurate- the series, while wonderful, played fast and loose with the facts even as it pretended, courtesy of real newspaperman Walter WincheH's voiceover, to be a docu-drama. Only the original two-part TV movie, 'The Scarface Gang' (which aired on Desilu Playhouse and was a kind of accidental pilot film), hewed at all close to the facts of any of the cases the show explored.

Years later, digging into the research, I discovered a much better story in real life, having to do with Cermak's own attempt on the life of Frank Nitti. To say more would be to spoil the story you're about to read: but I will say that the facts of the Cermak case- and the mainstream historical accounts aren't much more accurate than the Robert Stack series- opened my eyes about the realities of Chicago crime and politics.

* * *

This book could not have been written without the research assistance of George Hagenauer. I don't use the word 'assistant,' anymore, because that doesn't do George justice- he has been my great friend and collaborator on these novels, not only helping with the research, but with the interpretation of that research. The plots have always been formed out of endless phone conversations in which George and I turn over all the facts like stones, looking for the wriggling, squirmy things underneath.

George now lives near Madison. Wisconsin, but he was born and raised in Chicago, and lived there throughout the writing of the first eight or nine Heller books. He- and another valued friend and Chicago historian, Mike Gold- helped me shape the character and the world of Nate Heller. Let me give an example.

When I first approached George, whom I knew through our mutual interest in collecting original comic art (we met at a comic book convention in Chicago), he was happy to help with the Chicago end of the research. Among