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    Better Dead
    Better Dead
    Better Dead
    Audiobook10 hours

    Better Dead

    Written by Max Allan Collins

    Narrated by Dan John Miller

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    It's the early 1950's. Ju McCarthy is campaigning to rid America of the Red Menace. Nate Heller is doing legwork for the senator, though the Chicago detective is disheartened by McCarthy's witch-hunting tactics. He's made friends with a young staffer, Bobby Kennedy, while trading barbs with a potential enemy, the attorney Roy Cohn, who rubs Heller the wrong way. Not the least of which for successfully prosecuting the so-called Atomic Bomb spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. When famous mystery writer Dashiell Hammett comes to Heller representing a group of showbiz and literary leftists who are engaged in a last minute attempt to save the Rosenbergs, Heller decides to take on the case. Heller will have to play both sides to do this, and when McCarthy also tasks Heller to find out what the CIA has on him, Heller reluctantly agrees. His main lead is an army scientist working for the C.I.A. who admits to Heller that he's been having misgivings about the work he's doing and elliptically referring to the Cold War making World War II look like a tea party. And then the scientist gus missing.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 3, 2016
    ISBN9781501919442
    Better Dead
    Author

    Max Allan Collins

    <p>Max Allan Collins is a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master. He is the author of the Shamus Award-winning Nathan Heller thrillers and the graphic novel <em>Road to Perdition</em>, basis of the Academy Award-winning film starring Tom Hanks. His innovative Quarry novels led to a 2016 Cinemax series. He has completed a dozen posthumous Mickey Spillane mysteries, and wrote the syndicated <em>Dick Tracy</em> series for more than fifteen years. His one-man show, <em>Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life</em>, was an Edgar Award finalist. He lives in Iowa.</p>

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    Reviews for Better Dead

    4.5/5

    9 ratings1 review

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      To read Collins' Nathan Heller series is to step back into Twentieth Century American history and actually live through events along with all the colorful characters. Heller is, of course, a fictional character - a sort of Sam Spade Chicago-based detective who finds himself linked to all kinds of historical figures including Frank Nitti (True Detective), Bugsy Siegel (Neon Mirage), The Lindbergh Baby (Stolen Away), Marilyn Monroe (Bye Bye Baby), JFK (Ask Not), and now Senator
      McCarthy (Better Dead).

      This novel (which is really two interconnected novellas) drops Heller into the height of the McCarthy era, the Red scare, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the Atom secrets, the Kefauver Commission, Roy Cohn, a young Robert Kennedy, and the CIA and its experiments with LSD.
      Along the way, Heller pals around with Dashiell Hammett and does more than just pal around with sexy Bettie Page.

      What's really irresistible about this series is how the characters from history are humanized with all their foibles. These are chapters of history not as well known today and many of the details about the hearings and the Rosenberg prosecutions are absolutely factual even if Heller's presence isn't. There is quite a lot to learn here, particularly when you look up the names and events and see how much of it really happened.

      The book shines best when Heller goes into action, rescuing kidnapped damsels and pounding hoods and other tough guys.

      Overall, the book depicts excesses of an era and the careers that were built on those excesses and those which were destroyed by them. But it doesn't loose sight of the fact that there were real Soviet spies and that there were real threats to freedom.

      Heller may be a private eye but that is really just the vehicle for telling the story, not the central point of it. Thus, it's denser than most hardboiled PI fiction and it's not really about solving the case so much as traveling through the events.