After dealing with the murder of Chicago’s mayor Cermak and the assassination of public enemy number one John Dillinger, private eye Nathan Heller has different problems to tackle at the start of his third “memoir”. Waking up in St. E’s hospital, he finds himself covered in bandages, his skin tinted a worrying yellow and no idea how he came to be here.It was Guadalcanal. Having enlisted with his boxer friend Barney Ross, he ended up in the middle of the Pacific, fighting off the crazed Japanese army. In the end it’d be malaria and a serious case of amnesia that would send him off the Island and back Stateside.It’s this surprise opening that immediately lets us know this’ll be something else, for both Heller and the reader. During the first couple of chapters, there are no tommy-guns, no gangsters and no crooked police officers. Instead, we find ourselves in shell holes, burning palm trees all around, with Nathan fighting off wave after wave of ruthless banzai attacks in a jungle that truly feels like hell on earth.It’s a good opener. Though the previous Heller books were very satisfying reads (“True Detective” more so than it's follow-up “True Crime”), they both played against very similar backgrounds. With this story opening in the middle of the war torn Pacific, Max Allen Collins proves he can make his character of Nathan Heller work in a much larger world.Being eventually released from St. E’s, Heller returns to Chicago, where he gets dragged back into the mob-ruled underworld. The Outfit has extended its reached over the past years and Heller finds himself squeezed between corrupted Hollywood unions and fierce reporters determined to blow the whole thing wide open. Still battling the aftereffects of the war, Heller quickly has to get his detective head on straight again and wisecrack his way out of this ever expanding mess, leading to the inevitable downfall of the head of Chicago’s gangster world, Frank Nitti.There's an unforgiveable drag towards the end of the first half of 'The Million-Dollar Wound'. One can expect as much when Max Allen Collins seems so desperate to cover every aspect of a case from the first person view of Heller, that he's willing to sacrifice the streamlined plotting of a good detective-novel. God can be in the details, naturally, and Collins is known to research the real-life cases thoroughly well. But never in any of the previous Heller-books has his research been used so unnecessarily and displayed as obviously as in this one.But perhaps the drag isn't so much caused by the enormous amount of details, but rather due to the fact that each Heller book seems to become a bigger jumble than any of the previous ones. Rather than focusing on one cases, Collins/Heller takes on three, or four or five, and then tries to connect all of them through various conspiracy theories and mob-related connections. The fact that none of these cases come to a satisfying conclusion before the next one's opened up, makes the first half of 'The Million-Dollar Wound' all the more frustrating to read.Strangely enough it's the start of yet another case, that of gun moll Estelle Carey, at the opening of the second half of the book, which slides things back in its proper, comfortable place. With it, Heller returns to the noirish roots from which he came, only with the added bonus that he, as a character, has changed so much during the war. The struggle at Guadalcanal gives us a gloomier, moodier Heller, and compared to the cocky younger version he was in the previous novels, Nathan now seems to fit better into the world he's inhabiting.And yet, despite its surprising and successful opening and its engaging and satisfying conclusion, 'The Million-Dollar Wound' feels too murky, too complicated, too much.Well written, stylistically sound, but plot-wise too much of a unnecessarily incomprehensible mess.
This was a hard one for me to get into. For starters I have not read the second book, the one before this, and it has a totally different opening feel. Gone is the grittiness and neon sense of the Chicago created in True Detective. Instead you open with Heller at war, and spending a lot of time in the jungle. It's necessary to show how his views change as he opens the case but you spend a lot of time in the war and the chapters just weren't that engaging to me. When it returns to the classic noir genre it was excellent. The novel ends with everyone and everything changed, old crime bosses being fallible, and deaths coming to those close to Heller. Heller himself isn't as cynical or anti-heroic as in the past. War changes him and he starts to grow a conscience, one that cannot be swayed by money or women. It does weaken him a bit but it's necessary with the way the world is changing with war. A great book although, so far, one of my lesser favorites in the Heller series.
What do You think about The Million Dollar Wound (1986)?
After reading the first two Nathan Heller novels, I became a devotee. I appreciate how Collins blends fact and fiction in this series and, given my penchant for mob-crime stories, I have been fascinated by the subject matter. I find Collins' writing style comfortable and rarely find myself struggling with the narrative. He presents scenes in a logical sequence and weaves a story line that has continuity, intrigue, and gripping action. At the end of "Million Dollar Wound," Nate Heller is an aging former detective reflecting upon his professional life amid the various mob characters and government crime fighters who chased them -- most of whom are dead. IMHO, the Nathan Heller trilogy is outstanding and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys the criminal-detective genre.
—Ken Bour
As a fan of the author Max Allan Collins I have been enjoying the exploits of Nathan Heller and the way it incorporates historic moments and people. As i started this novel I wasn't enjoying the WW 2 exploits of Mr Heller. Mainly because it reminded me of the Norman Mailer novel the Naked and the Dead which wasn't a novel i enjoyed (I know its blasphemy to speak of such a well regarded novel but hey its my opinion) But once the setting came back to Chicago and the world of gangsters i was in heaven. As with the previous novels this book reminds me of old detective movies like The Big Sleep and the Maltese Falcon (The best detective movies are in black and white)
—Vincent Lombardo
Another great Nate Heller mystery. After Pearl Harbor Nate Heller and his buddy Barney Ross get drunk, lie about their ages and join the Marines. They end up on Guadalcanal. Suffering from malaria Heller is pinned down while on patrol. Ross is wounded as are several others. Heller suffers battle fatigue and is honorably discharged after he recovers. After he is discharged he has to reacquaint himself with a case that he had worked on years before.This one is a little more raw than the prior two. The novel has a lot of threads, Heller fighting on Guadalcanal. Heller investigating mob connections to unions in the late 30s. Heller dealing with both of those issues as he recovers from malaria he contracted on Guadalcanal. The threads interweave themselves throughout the book. Like all of the books it is well written, lots of fun, plenty of historical figures, and at least two conspiracy theories.
—David Williams
