Max Allan Collins is a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master and creator of the gangster classic Road to Perdition. A. Brad Schwartz is a doctoral student at Princeton University and the author of Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News. They've joined forces to write the definitive account of America's great crime epic: Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago (Morrow, August 14).On your nightstand now:
Collins: Noir City Annual 2017 from the Film Noir Foundation. It collects the best from a year's worth of their online magazine.
Schwartz: I've decided this will be the summer I finally tackle Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote by Cervantes, though I'm probably tilting at windmills.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Collins: Dick Tracy Versus the Brow by Chester Gould, collecting a story from the wartime '40s, the great comic strip in its prime. Other favorites, if I might be allowed, were The Saint and the Sizzling Saboteur by Leslie Charteris, The Hound of the Baskervilles by Doyle and Tarzan and the City of Gold by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Schwartz: As children often do, I strongly identified with Mary Shelley's misunderstood monster--like me, an only child, so I have to say Frankenstein, which is still in my top five. Only later would I come to appreciate how Shelley both created a myth and established an entire genre, all before she turned 21.
Your top five authors:
Collins: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Agatha Christie, Rex Stout--I could go on, of course.
Schwartz: I have to echo my co-author on Hammett and Chandler--two of the all-time great mystery writers, and among the finest American novelists. I'll add three of the writers whose work influenced me the most: Edgar Allan Poe (I memorized "The Raven" in high school and will recite it at the slightest provocation), Alan Moore (for Watchmen, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in that order) and another guy with "Allan" in his name (I'll let you guess who).
Book you've faked reading:
Collins: None. Except my algebra textbook.
Schwartz: The first week of seventh grade, I carried around John Steinbeck's East of Eden to impress all my teachers. I still haven't read it.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Collins: Frankly, if it's not out of line to say, my own--usually the latest Nate Heller novel (Better Dead, for example). I've also been a defender and booster of Spillane, who became a friend and who, right before his passing, asked me to complete the unfinished novels in his files. Which I've been doing for over 10 years now.
Schwartz: Eliot Ness has been criticized for decades for the supposedly self-aggrandizing memoir, The Untouchables, that he co-wrote with Oscar Fraley. But after spending years researching his life, I'm amazed at how much that book got right.
Book you've bought for the cover:Collins: Well, considering I own the painting of the edition by the great paperback artist James Avati, One Lonely Night by Mickey Spillane. I would say Re-Enter Fu-Manchu, when I was in the fourth grade, but they had me at Fu-Manchu. The cover of that one, when I took it to school, got my parents called in to inform them of their wayward son.
Schwartz: Any number of editions of the Shadow novels by Walter B. Gibson (writing under the pseudonym Maxwell Grant). The phenomenally vivid pulp art covers by such artists as George Rozen and Jim Steranko are often better than the stories within.
Book you hid from your parents:
Collins: None. My mom was open-minded and my dad oblivious. They didn't even take Re-Enter Fu-Manchu away from me.
Schwartz: Dr. No and You Only Live Twice, both by Ian Fleming. I got ratted out each time (once by the school librarian!) but my folks let me finish reading them anyway.
Book that changed your life:
Collins: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Hammett invented and perfected the private eye form with that one novel (and then abandoned it).
Schwartz: I could say the same, but I'll also mention Max's novelization of the 1990 Dick Tracy film. Listening to that on audiobook when I was about five years old opened me up to his entire body of work--and led, all these years later, to us becoming partners in crime(-writing).
Favorite line from a book:
Collins: "They threw me off the hay truck around noon." The first line of The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain, who would have been on that list of favorite writers above if the number had been six not five. Cain wrote tragic melodrama about ordinary people in love while caught up in crime.
Schwartz: "Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible." --T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence's life shows the perils of trying to act one's dream, but that will never stop us daydreamers from trying.
Five books you'll never part with:
Collins: Signed by each author: The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett; Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler; The Mirror Crack'd, Agatha Christie; I, the Jury, Mickey Spillane; Casino Royale, Ian Fleming. Number six is a signed The Bad Seed by William March, months before his passing.
Schwartz: Just five? A battered hardcover of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Complete Sherlock Holmes that my father read as a kid and passed on to me (having no idea what he was starting); a handbook on playwriting given to me by my fifth-grade teacher, one of the first people to believe in my writing abilities; a British paperback of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, which I bought while living in a villa outside Florence, Italy; a first edition of Road to Perdition that Max signed for me; and a copy of Barbara Bush's First Teachers that my mom got Hillary Clinton to autograph back in 1992.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Collins: The Southpaw by Mark Harris. Possibly the best first-person voice since Twain and Huckleberry Finn.
Schwartz: I doubt the perfectly executed plot, with the mind-blowing final twists, of And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie will ever be topped, though The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express are close runners-up.
What made you want to be a writer:
Collins: Encountering the various authors mentioned above. I dreamed of joining their ranks. Most young Dick Tracy fans wanted to be a detective when they grew up. I wanted to be his creator, Chester Gould (a dream that came true, when I became the second writer on the strip, when Gould retired in 1977).
Schwartz: As a little kid, I loved hearing stories and kept asking my parents to tell me some. Eventually, my mom ran out of material and suggested I come up with my own. I've never stopped.