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Flying
Blind
by
Max
Allan Collins
Published
by Dutton Books
352 pages,
1998
Buy it
online
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Winging It
Reviewed
by J. Kingston Pierce
"I have a feeling that there is just one
more good flight left in my system and I hope this trip
is it. " -- Amelia Earhart, shortly before she
vanished over the South Pacific
Confession time: I suffer from severe
envy of Max
Allan Collins. This is a
condition of long standing, and from which I can't imagine
recovering until I am able someday, somehow to engineer a
best-selling fiction-writing career of my own. You see,
Collins does pretty much exactly what I would most like to
do in this world. He creates period mysteries around real
characters and incidents. And he's damn good at it.
Flying Blind, in which Collins' Chicago private
eye Nathan Heller "solves" the disappearance of renowned
American aviatrix Amelia Earhart, is his ninth novel-length
attempt to make sense of some of the most sensational crimes
of the 20th century. This series began back in 1983 with the
publication of True Detective, a
Prohibition-era yarn that found Heller quitting the Chicago
police force and taking on his first client as an
independent investigator: gangster chieftain Al Capone, who
hires him to prevent the 1933 murder of Chicago Mayor Anton
Cermack.
In the years since, Heller has delved into the 1934 FBI
shooting of bank robber John Dillinger (True
Crime); failed to protect Las Vegas mobster Benjamin
"Bugsy" Siegel from being gunned down in 1947 (Neon
Mirage); figured out the real story behind the 1932
Lindbergh baby kidnapping (Stolen Away) and the
1935 assassination of Louisiana governor-turned-US senator
Huey Long (Blood and Thunder); and teamed with
legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow to reveal the truth behind
the revenge murder of a Hawaiian "native" accused in 1931 of
raping a sexy socialite (Damned in
Paradise).
Balancing fact and fiction like this is a trickier
business than it seems. Because after spending weeks or
months researching something like the Lindbergh case, a
writer may naturally feel the urge to demonstrate his or her
scholarship through lengthy digressions that only detract
from the flow and purpose of a novel. Collins manages to
resist that compulsion, instead delivering the historical
facts behind Heller's inquiries in slow drips, as
needed.
Nonetheless, his stories crackle with the authenticity of
studied period detail, whether Collins is describing an
illegal Chicago "speakeasy," tossing Heller into
tête-à-têtes with G-man J. Edgar Hoover
or notorious fan dancer Sally Rand, or re-creating Bugsy
Siegel's murder ("Glass crashed as gunfire rocked the room,
shook Ben like a rag doll, his right eye flying, nose
crushed, and I hit the deck..."). Contributing to the
verisimilitude are assorted other personages out of
America's past -- from hit man Frank Nitti and celebrity
columnist Walter Winchell to Olympic swimmer (and future
actor) Buster Crabbe and Untouchables lawman
Eliot Ness -- who make cameo appearances or have recurring
roles in the Heller series. The only other author who rivals
Collins at weaving a fictional gumshoe into the troubled
lives of 20th-century American luminaries is Stuart
Kaminsky, but his Toby Peters series (A Fatal Glass of
Beer, Dancing in the Dark ) is more
deliberately humorous than Collins' work.
The mystery of Amelia Earhart is certainly no laughing
matter to our hero in Flying Blind. The story
actually begins in 1970, after Nate Heller has semi-retired
to Florida, where he exhausts his days betting at horse
tracks and ogling bikinied young women. He hasn't thought
much about Earhart for years, until a deep-pocketed Texan
shows up on his doorstep hoping he'll participate in a new
search for the missing pilot. Heller wants to tell him no;
but hell, he wants to know, too, whether there was more to
Earhart's story than he ever understood.
Flashback to 1935. Amelia Earhart -- "Lady Lindy," as the
press called her, fashioning her as the distaff counterpart
to Charles Lindbergh -- is near the peak of her fame. She's
set flying records, shares a close friendship with Franklin
and Eleanor Roosevelt, is a published author, and has even
developed a new line of sports and spectator attire for
women. At the same time, she's apparently the recipient of
threatening letters. Her husband/manager -- a shameless
promoter and book publishing heir named George Palmer Putnam
-- wants Heller to protect her during a coming cross-country
lecture tour. He also wants the detective to keep his eyes
open for the possibility that Earhart is cheating on her
marriage vows. Seduced by the money offered and having long
ago shed any righteous repugnance toward the dirty laundry
airing of divorce work, Heller takes the job.
It's a decision that he comes to regret. For as the pair
cruise slowly over the byways of the United States, Heller
learns to like this tall, slender and earnest flyer, with
her honey-blonde hair and playful demeanor. "To the world,
she was Amelia Earhart," Heller remarks at one point, "but
to me, and only me, she was Amy."
Through Collins' fiction Earhart becomes fully-dimensional,
as she rarely has been in factual texts, somebody ruled by
her passion for planes (despite relatively mediocre skills
as a pilot) and determined to open up new career prospects
for women in the 20th century. Extrapolating from
contemporary descriptions of her mannish attire and hints of
her promiscuity, the author goes further in completing her
character, depicting Earhart as bisexual -- an orientation
that, while initially surprising to Heller, doesn't stop him
from becoming the "other man" in Amelia's life, the very
person Putnam had hired him to expose. This is a significant
evolution for Heller, who in previous "memoirs" has enjoyed
numerous sexual encounters with women, but sometimes
demonstrated a sort of Mike Hammerish disregard toward them
as continuing sources of affection.
There's no doubt of Heller's devotion to Amelia Earhart
when, about two thirds of the way through Flying
Blind, she supposedly crashes into the Pacific and
dies during her 1937 'round-the-world flight. Although
initially resistant to contrary suggestions that she and her
navigator, Fred Noonan, might have survived, Heller decides
to poke further into the matter, eventually concluding that
Earhart and Noonan have actually been captured as spies by
the Japanese (who in the 1930s were building up their war
armaments and Pacific island bases). Yet before he can do
much more, Heller is set upon by government agents and
convinced -- at least for a while -- to stop searching for
his beloved Amy, to allow her release to be undertaken by
diplomats rather than a lone detective.
"I was a good American, after all; and anyway, I had no
desire to be the government's next disappearing act," Heller
says by way of explaining his acquiescence, then adds:
But as the days and months passed, I would
open the paper each morning, looking for the headline
announcing her return. Amy's good pal President Roosevelt
wouldn't let her rot in some Japanese jail, would he? An
arrangement would be made; some exchange; something that
would allow both countries to achieve their goals and the
honorable Japanese tradition of saving face.
But the headline never came. Amelia Earhart had
vanished from the pages of the papers as completely as
she had somewhere over the Pacific. She had flown out of
the news and into the pages of history, where she lay
prematurely buried.
I shan't give away the ending, except to say that Heller
was right: there was more to Earhart's story than he ever
understood. At least, according to this novel, which draws
heavily on postulations made over the last half century by
both conspiracy theorists and some more level-headed
historians. Amongst those, Collins has sifted in a few
plausible complications of his own -- none of which may ever
be confirmed by official reports or eyewitnesses, but which
remain superb grist for intellectual debate.
Scrupulously plotted and gracefully written, with a
judiciously restrained edge of violence, Flying
Blind and the Heller series, in general, could be
seen as a sort of microcosm of the American detective story.
Like Dashiell Hammett, John Dickson Carr, James M. Cain, and
the other "pulp" magazine writers who created this genre,
Collins' stories find their footing in the 1930s and '40s,
an age of financial depression, mob violence, and political
corruption. Yet Nate Heller is clearly a man tempered by the
sensibilities and self-reflection of our own era, someone
simultaneously more prone toward compassion than say, Sam
Spade, but less constricted by any personal moral code than
Philip Marlowe or (in a more extreme sense) Spenser. Someone
who, after a lifetime of action and one-night stands, might
still credibly find himself dreaming in his 64th year about
a tomboyish flyer who'd once captured his heart as easily as
she did headlines. | September 3, 1998
J. KINGSTON PIERCE
is the crime fiction editor of January
Magazine.
To learn more about the early life, celebrity, and last
flight of Amelia Earhart, go to http://www.ionet.net/~jellenc/ae_intro.html
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