ICU, LLC enters into a production agreement with author Max Alan Collins

Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, Max Allan Collins.

Imagination Connoisseurs Unlimited, LLC (ICU) has entered into a production agreement with best-selling author Max Allan Collins (ROAD TO PERDITION) to develop his Nathan Heller series of detective/crime novels for various media.

Nathan Heller is a “true detective”

Nathan Heller, Collins’s cop-turned-private eye, is the central character in a nineteen (soon to be twenty) series of detective novels – the author’s longest-running and probably most acclaimed “franchise.”

Nathan Heller is a Chicago private investigator who gets involved in famous crimes of the 1930s through the 1960s. Packed with important figures from that time, the novels include celebrities, political figures, and legendary criminals, with Heller a “private eye” witness to history.

Characters appearing in Heller novels include Orson Welles, Frank Nitti, Eliot Ness, Sally Rand, FDR, Al Capone, Walter Winchell, and George Raft (among many others).

“I do exhaustive research into the events, people, and circumstances surrounding a famous unsolved mystery of the Twentieth Century,” Collins explains, “and when I finally feel I’m ready to write the definitive non-fiction book on the subject, I write a private eye novel instead.”

The first novel in this historical fiction series, True Detective, won the 1984 Shamus for Best Novel from the Private Eye Writers of America. Collins won his second Best Novel Shamus for the 1993 Heller novel, Stolen Away, “solving” the Lindbergh kidnapping. The series itself has been nominated by the PWA Awards more often any other.

The series includes the following novels:

• True Detective (November 1983)
• True Crime (December 1984)
• The Million-Dollar Wound (February 1986)
• Neon Mirage (February 1988)
• Stolen Away (May 1991)
• Dying in the Post-War World (October 1991) – Novella
• Carnal Hours (April 1994)
• Blood and Thunder (August 1995)
• Damned in Paradise (October 1996)
• Flying Blind (August 1998)
• Majic Man (September 1999)
• Angel in Black (March 2001)
• Kisses of Death: A Nathan Heller Casebook – Short story collection
• Chicago Confidential (June 2002)
• Bye Bye, Baby (August 2011)
• Chicago Lightning: The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories (October 2011)
• Triple Play: A Nathan Heller Casebook (April 2012; novellas) 
• Target Lancer (November 2012)
• Ask Not (2013)
• Better Dead (2016)
• Do No Harm (2020)
• The Big Bundle (January 2023)
• Too Many Bullets (October 2023)

About Max Allan Collins

Collins has written novels, screenplays, comic books, comic strips, trading cards, short stories, movie novelizations, and historical fiction.

He is probably best known for writing the graphic novel Road to Perdition (later developed into a film in 2002. With frequent collaborator Terry Beatty, Collins co-created the long-running private eye comic book Ms. Tree, its lead character the first of the wave of female PIs in the 1980s

Collins first broke into the mainstream when he took over writing the Dick Tracy comic strip from its creator, Chester Gould, in 1977, doing so into 1993. Collins also scripted a year-long run on the Batman comic book in the mid-1980s.

While working with DC, Collins and Beatty developed Wild Dog as a self-titled limited series, the character later appearing in Action Comics Weekly. In 2016, Wild Dog became a recurring character in the Arrow television series, portrayed by actor Rick Gonzalez.

Collins wrote two prose sequels to Road to Perdition – Road to Purgatory and Road to Paradise – as well as several graphic novel prequels and sequels.  Collins also created Quarry, the first recurring hitman “hero” (17 books to date, plus a 2016 HBO/Cinemax TV series).  He and his wife Barb (as “Barbara Allan”) write the award-winning Antiques “Trash ‘n’ Treasures” comic cozy mysteries (Antiques Foe).

As a singer/keyboard player/songwriter, Collins has been inducted twice into the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame with his bands the Daybreakers (2008) and Crusin’ (2018).  He has recorded with both groups as well as with Seduction of the Innocent, featuring actors Bill Mumy and Miguel Ferrer.

As a filmmaker and screenwriter, Collins has written and directed six features (notably Mommy with Patty McCormack) and two documentaries (Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane).  He has written two other produced feature films, a Quarry TV episode, and four video games for the CSI TV franchise.

Collins received a B.A. at the University of Iowa and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  He has received lifetime achievement awards from the Mystery Writers of America (Grand Master) and the Private Eye Writers of America (the Eye).

Collins was a fan of the mystery writer Mickey Spillane from childhood and later became close friends with him. The two collaborated on a comic book series in the 1990s called Mike Danger. Upon Spillane’s death in 2006, Collins was entrusted to finish Spillane’s uncompleted works, including Dead Street, The Consummata and – beginning with The Goliath Bone in 2008 – an ongoing series of Mike Hammer novels.

To date, Collins has completed fourteen Spillane Hammer novels, the most recent being Dig Two Graves, published by Titan in 2022.  With James L. Traylor, Collins wrote the literary biography Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction (2022), a Mystery Writers of America “Edgar” nominee. In August of 2023, Collins was named an executive producer of a Mike Hammer movie currently in pre-production at SkyDance.

Collins and his wife Barbara are life residents of Muscatine, Iowa, where their son Nathan – a translator of Japanese into English with a long list of books and manga to his credit – also resides, with his wife and two children.

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