Seduction of the Innocent

Seduction of the Innocent

By Max Allan Collins

Cover art by Glen Orbik

Hard Case Crime, February 2013

ISBN: 9780857687487

This is the third of Max Allan Collins’ novels set in ’50s New York and featuring Jack Starr, troubleshooter for a comic strip syndicate and a PI by any other name.

Here Starr is called upon to solve the murder of a do-gooder, a psychiatrist concerned with the pernicious effect of comics on impressionable young minds.  It’s a superior mystery characterized by Collins’ vivid storytelling and trademark punchy prose; and if you know something (or a lot) about comics, you’ll enjoy it all the more.

When given an opportunity to interview Max Allan Collins, I naturally asked him about the background to the novel and his own relationship with comics:

I enjoyed spotting the comics references in your latest Jack Starr novel, Seduction of the Innocent, the references to various artists & creators, and the description of a notorious panel by Jack Cole on page 88.  What attracted you about setting a novel in this milieu, the golden age of comics?

Max Allan Collins: I’ve been a comics fan since childhood, and around age six, I became aware of Dr. Frederic Wertham and his attacks on comics.  I saw EC disappear and that dreaded “Comics Code Authority” stamp start appearing on the covers of comic books, which meant to me that they would be watered-down.  I read SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT – Wertham’s “non-fiction” book, not my novel – over and over again, using it as a guide for comic books to look for.

Really, when comics fandom started turning into something, in the ‘70s, everybody knew of Wertham, and hated him, or what he stood for.  When Bill Mumy, Miguel Ferrer and Steve Leialoha first put our band together in the ‘80s, to play at comic cons, we immediately took the name Seduction of the Innocent.  We knew it would resonate with everybody who was into comics.  Miguel’s idea, by the way.

Having written comics as well as novels, could I ask for your thoughts on comics as a medium.  What possibilities does the medium offer the writer?

MAC: I’m not writing comics as often as I used to – for a long time, it was part of my daily writing life.  Now, when I return to it, I realize how difficult it is.  The medium is really very complex, for a writer – lots of decisions.  There’s an obvious need to think visually, there’s a need to write concisely yet vividly, there’s a need to think the story through in little slices, little pieces of time.

Though comics writing is very different from screenwriting and novel-writing, it does help a writer on both those fronts – particularly visual thinking.

Are you still a comics fan?  Have you followed Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s 100 Bullets series and what did you make of it as a work of hard-boiled fiction?

MAC: I sampled it, thought it was first-rate, but I don’t really follow comics much anymore.  I don’t read many mystery novels, either.  I really don’t want to be influenced.  I’m too natural a mimic, frankly.  The only storytelling area I still follow, as a fan, is film.  Though I’m a filmmaker of sorts, I realize there is still a lot for me to learn.  That’s not to indicate that I can’t learn anything about writing comics or novels at this point, but I do have both of those pretty well down, and any learning I do will be self-taught, as a I refine, and explore within, what I already know.

Were these (EC, etc.) your comics as a kid?  Or if you came to comics later (the most important question of them all): did you read Marvel or DC?

MAC: Comic books were my life from around age four through college.  For many years, I wanted to be a cartoonist, and was the kid who passed around his homemade comics at school for everybody to read.  But I got interested in private eyes during the craze on TV in the late fifties and early sixties, PETER GUNN, 77 SUNSET STRIP, PERRY MASON.  I got hooked on the novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, and I retained my comics interest, but my ambition to be a cartoonist was replaced with wanting to be a mystery writer.  It’s somewhat ironic that the first major gig of my career was a comic strip, DICK TRACY – which I’d been obsessed with as a kid.

I read all the so-called Silver Age comics – SHOWCASE with the Flash.  I subscribed to CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN – I must have been in first or second grade.  I bought every issue of SPIDERMAN and FANTASTIC FOUR and all the other Marvels off the stands, from day one – including AMAZING FANTASY 15.  I lost interest, somewhat, when Ditko left SPIDERMAN.  EC I knew from childhood – it was taken away from me shortly after I discovered it…by the Wertham witch hunt.  In college and the decade thereafter, I collected EC Comics as best I could – they were outrageously expensive, even then.  In answer to your implied question, I was neither a DC nor a Marvel guy.  I was a comic book guy.  When Kirby was drawing CHALLENGERS, I was DC.  When Kirby was drawing all that stuff at Marvel, I was Marvel.  Hell, I even bought those monster comics he did – VIM VAM VOOM, that kind of nonsense.  I loved it.  And I bought SUPERMAN and BATMAN all through those years – Wayne Boring, Dick Sprang.  Great stuff.

Would you say there’s evidence of homophobia in Wertham’s original Seduction of the Innocent?

MAC: There’s a smoking phallic gun.  He not only sees homosexuality in Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson – and lesbianism in Wonder Woman – he considers homosexuality a sickness and perversion.  That’s not unusual for the time frame, but what he reads into those innocent comic books (well, maybe not Wonder Woman – there’s bondage in there, obviously, and Marston was a freak) reveals a deeply homophobic individual.

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This article was posted as part of the Seduction of the Innocent Blog Tour, celebrating the release of Max Allan Collins’ new Hard Case Crime novel.  More details about the blog tour are here, and the publisher’s description of the book can be read here.

For the opportunity to win a copy of the book, simply tweet “I would like a copy of Seduction of the Innocent @TitanBooks #MaxAllanCollins”.

Little Book of Vintage Terror

Little Book of Vintage Terror

By Tim Pilcher

ILEX, 2012

ISBN: 9781781570029

In this compact book, easily slipped into an inside pocket, there are myriad comic book images from the 1950s, rude and rough-hewn depictions of the wonders of the world and the wayward wickedness it holds.

There are images of carnivorous flowers, giant insects, baying banshees, mad scientists, sinister skeletons, screaming maidens, ghosts and ghouls, vampires and zombies… and much else.  Not any angels, mind.  Marcus Gheerhaerts the Elder’s great etching, Allegory of Iconoclasm, meets its comic art equivalent in the frontispiece of the book.

Although cover images predominate (the titles themselves being suitably suggestive: Out of the Night, Weird Terror, Forbidden Worlds, The Hand of Fate, Haunted…) there are some complete stories as well, together with a selection of stand-alone panels.  They are kitsch verging on creepy.  He looks in the bathroom mirror, this one fellow, intending simply to shave, and sees a skull staring back.

The moral panic concerning comics as it played itself out in America is well known, due in large part to David Hajdu’s excellent book The Ten Cent Plague; and Max Allan Collins’ current novel, The Seduction of the Innocent, takes this foofarah as its background.  By contrast, the similar moral campaign in Britain has not been widely covered, even though it culminated in the Children and Young Persons’ (Harmful Publications) Act of 1955, an Act that’s apparently still in force today.  Therefore Tim Pilcher, a renowned historian when it comes to these matters, devotes some salubrious space to this campaign in his introduction.

But who could ever have believed that these bold, gaudy pictures, accompanying as they do such twisted, mendacious stories and fantasies, could ever do permanent harm to impressionable young minds?  On the contrary they have a certain cute (now kitsch) charm and add spice to life!

The publisher’s description of the book can be read here.  A description of the Little Book of Vintage … series can be read here.

The Consummata

The Consummata

By Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Cover art by Robert McGinnis

Hard Case Crime, October 2011

ISBN: 9780857682888

When a novel is attributed to two authors, a word of explanation is perhaps necessary.

So from what I understand, the division of labour goes something like this: Mickey Spillane wrote a first draft or an incomplete version of The Consummata sometime in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s.  He never got around to completing it; but Max Allan Collins has done so now.

Set in the late ‘60s, it is probably best described as a cold war thriller, the plot centreing on research into an atomic weapons detector.  A lot of it concerns a group of anti-Castro Cuban fighters and although the cold war paranoia is only mid-range, it belongs to the same world as Libra and The Cold Six Thousand.  There is a lot of incident and action, a fair amount of smart-alecky wisecracking, and a kinky undercurrent too.  For ‘The Consummata’ of the title is a world famous dominatrix, while the guy Morgan (Spillane’s hero, who made his first appearance in The Delta Factor in 1967) is tracking is particularly keen on strong women.

Morgan, our hero here, is cynical and has a kind of pretend street knowingness, a tabloid view of the world.  As with Fleming’s Bond’s so-called sophistication, you don’t quite buy it.

What I like about Mickey Spillane as a writer though (and putting Max Allan Collins’ contribution to one side for a moment) is how he hooks you in and keeps you coming back.  Here each chapter is a house with its front door ajar and its rear door jutting onto the edge of a cliff.  Best sentence is awarded to this effort: ‘I looked like ten miles of bad road.’

The Consummata is a twisty, precarious ride and – wouldn’t you know it – the face behind the dominatrix’s mask is a familiar one.

The publisher’s description of the book can be read here.

Quarry’s Ex by Max Allan Collins

Quarry’s Ex

By Max Allan Collins

Cover art by Gregory Manchess 

Hard Case Crime, September 2011

ISBN: 9780857682864

How best to describe Quarry, the series character of a number of novels by Max Allan Collins, this one the latest?

Well, once he was a hitman but now, at the beginning of the 1980s – and in a poacher turned gamekeeper kind of way – he has morphed into a very proactive protection officer.  Not only does he safeguard the target of a hit – here, a film director specialising in straight-to-video movies who also happens to be married to his ex-wife.  No, he also aims to take out the guy who is aiming to take out the guy he’s protecting.  (That last sentence does make perfect sense; read it through again if you don’t believe me.)  As an added service, and for a further fee, Quarry will even go after the guy who ordered the hit – and that’s when the fun really begins.

And another thing, the source of further fun: the novel is written in the first person, from Quarry’s point of view, and our hero has a rather jaundiced, though some would say well-founded, view of the world and the human animal that inhabits it; and he makes a lot of jokes, some would say smirks, at humanity’s expense.

It is an amusing, fast-paced novel and if your notion of perfect pulp fiction involves guys with deadly weapons gunning for each other, you’re sure to enjoy it.  The suspense is maintained right up to the final pages and there are some unusual twists and surprising reveals along the way – involving sexuality, for one thing.  What you have in essence is a satisfying whodunit, albeit an unusual one.  Here the mystery to be solved is: ‘Who ordered the hit?’

Oh, and Quarry eventually manages to put certain matters in his troubled past to bed, and that in more ways than one (nod, nod; wink, wink).  A good one.

The publisher’s description of the book can be read here.