AHMM, January-February 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Finding an opening, Zeus sank his canines into Steve's neck and held on briefly, emitting guttural growls. Steve screamed in pain, causing the dog to let go. Blood streamed, a shiny, running mass on Steve's black T-shirt, bright red droplets spattering the white tile floor.

  Zeus's growls were so loud, Travis didn't hear the turn of a key in the front door or see that Jill Barth had entered the living room rolling a suitcase behind her.

  "What?” Jill came to a halt beside the leather sofa, clearly astounded to see Zeus pinning a man against the island counter, teeth snapping at his face. “Zeus! No!” She ran toward the dog.

  "Stay back,” Travis yelled at her. “He's dangerous."

  "Jonathan—Jonathan Sedar!” Head tilted, she eyed Travis, the torn envelopes, her expression utterly confused. “What's going on? Why's my dog attacking my realtor?"

  "Call him off!” The man pulled free of Zeus and lunged away, rounding the island counter, only to find himself trapped in a corner between the stovetop and sink. “Get him off!"

  The man stretched a hand out to his right, grabbing for the slotted, wooden block that held four chef's knives.

  Travis stepped up and simply lifted the block of knives off the counter. “Sedar, not satyr,” he said, eyes bright with understanding. He stood there with the knife block cradled in the crook of his left arm, mesmerized by Zeus's savagery. The dog had found a fresh hold on the man's neck.

  Of course, Travis thought. Realtors had easy access to house keys. When he sold a house to his victim, Jonathan Sedar simply kept a key. Getting the slave code of one or more pet-sitting outfits was a simple matter. On easy talking terms with his clients, he had no trouble learning about their vacation plans.

  "Zeus,” Jill yelled again. “Stop it. Stop!"

  The dog ignored her.

  "Why are you here, Jonathan?” she managed to spit out.

  Sedar couldn't answer as he was now on his knees, smearing blood like fingerpaints across the glossy white tiles. Coiling himself into a ball, he wrapped both hands around the back of his neck, bomb-scare fashion, to ward off the dog's snapping teeth.

  "He came to murder you,” Travis said.

  "That's absurd. Why? Because I wouldn't go out with him?” She glared at Travis as if he should know the answer.

  "He's a serial murderer. He killed another woman I sat for, Marilyn Finley. And then another, last year."

  "But ... Jonathan's a million-dollar agent."

  "It's the kid,” the man managed to rasp from his crouched position on the floor. “I was suspicious. I came to protect you. Call your dog off."

  Travis stood in front of Jill, his mouth open. The guy was a murderer, but how could he prove it? This Steve—now Jonathan—was slick. Like those other times, he probably hadn't left any evidence behind, none that couldn't be explained away by saying it all belonged to Travis. He'd say the gun was Travis's, and those gloves, and the knife. Travis had opened the mail, not him. Oh Lordy, he knew what would come next: the police, skinny Mr. Quick, more questions, newspaper stories, his life ruined forever.

  Feeling numb, he stared at Jill Barth with wide-open eyes as she glanced back and forth, from him to Jonathan Sedar. The man still cowered on the floor, hemmed in by Zeus's stabbing feet and intimidating growls, his sheer size.

  "I'm bleeding. Help me,” Sedar groaned. “I tell you, this kid's a killer."

  Jill's eyes narrowed. She pulled a cell phone out of the pocket of her tan travel jacket.

  "It's the kid, huh, Jonathan?” Her voice was shaky but determined. “The kid's the bad guy?” She thumbed in the magic numbers. “Then why is Zeus attacking you and not the kid? Keep up the good work, boy. Good dog."

  Relief flooded Travis's body. She'd put it together. “He's a great dog,” Travis said. “The best."

  When the police invaded minutes later, Travis learned that he needn't have worried about being believed. Jonathan Sedar had been a much more competent real estate agent than serial murderer.

  A pair of handcuffs, among other unsettling objects found in an upstairs bedroom, might easily have been palmed off as Travis's. But one item put the lie to Sedar's version of events. Flipped open on a bedside chair, resting on top of the handcuffs, was a folder containing the papers for his newest listing in a posh Winston-Salem neighborhood. Might as well get some last-minute work done while waiting for his latest victim to enter his trap. Why not?

  "I thought Great Danes were called gentle giants,” Detective Quick said to Jill and Travis hours later, after two cops escorted Sedar out of the house, his neck heavily wrapped with gauze and tape, hands cuffed behind his back.

  "That's what he must have thought,” Jill answered. “And they are. But Great Danes will defend those they love to the death. Jonathan didn't have a clue about that, or about the bond that's sprung up between Zeus and Travis."

  The detective shrugged. “He didn't count on Travis coming back to make sure the dog was okay either. Good work, son. Just understand, it's my job to be suspicious."

  Mr. Quick left them standing by the swimming pool. The pump kicked on; water cascaded down the sandstone waterfall.

  "What a homecoming.” Jill slumped into one of the lounge chairs and motioned to Travis to take the chair opposite hers. She was pale, eyes unfocused. “It's clear to me, by the way, you saved my life."

  "And Zeus saved mine.” In more ways than one, he wanted to add.

  "Look—the Night-blooming Cereus,” she said. “I think tonight's the night. Would you like to come back and see? Please do. Ask someone else too. I'd rather not be alone tonight."

  After ten, Travis brought his sister along for the viewing. The three of them sat around the pool, Zeus hunkered at Travis's feet.

  "How does one celebrate not getting murdered?” Jill raised a glass of champagne to Travis and Libby as they lifted theirs. “Throw a Night-blooming Cereus party. Why not? Let's just hope the flowers don't forget to show up."

  "That is nice,” Libby said, “not getting murdered. I'll toast that."

  Libby, Travis thought, was already just the slightest bit tipsy.

  Nearing midnight, the mysterious flowers did bloom. Fleshy white, with many layers of pointed petals, they dangled from the leathery leaves on thick, round, curving stems that resembled swans’ necks. The air was heavy with a potent scent Travis would never forget. For the second time that day he'd arrived in the right place at the right time.

  The flowers were eerie, even scary in a way he couldn't define—like reality, as he'd come to know it. They either took you by surprise or you missed the blooming altogether, Jill had once said. Only now did he fully grasp how close he'd come to missing out on his own life, not so much at the hands of Jonathan Sedar as his own.

  Zeus rested his chin on Travis's foot. Travis tipped his glass to honor the Great Dane. He was ready now, eager to step out of the tight corner he'd painted himself into, and meet his future.

  Copyright (c) 2007 Elaine Menge

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Department: REEL CRIME by Steve Hockensmith

  Max Allan Collins is an in-demand author whose books have been snatched up by literally millions of readers around the globe. So why would he feel like his most successful novels are “the Rodney Dangerfield of popular literature"?

  It all goes back to another label, one Entertainment Weekly once applied to him: “the novelization king."

  Air Force One, I Spy, U.S. Marshals, Maverick, Saving Private Ryan—Collins handled the script-to-novel transformations for all of them, and many more besides. (His latest adaptation is of the Denzel Washington crime saga American Gangster.) And the Novelization King is also the Tie-In Czar, penning original novels based on CSI, CSI: Miami, Bones, and other hit shows. (His novel Criminal Minds: Jump Cut comes out this month.)

  * * * *

  Max Allan Collins. Photo by Bamford Studio

  * * * *

  If these adaptations and spin-offs sometimes overshadow his well-regarded non-tie
-in work, Collins isn't complaining ... much. After all, as Novelization King, he regularly pops up on the bestseller charts. Go looking for respect for that success, though, and you'll find the kingdom's coffers bare.

  "The screenwriters who script the TV episodes are envied and honored,” Collins says, “but [tie-in writers] are viewed as a sort of joke ... often by writers who sell nowhere near as many copies of their novels."

  Tired of getting the Dangerfield treatment, Collins and fellow tie-in scribe/TV writer Lee Goldberg (Monk, Diagnosis: Murder) founded their own Friars Club, of sorts: the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers (IAMTW). Though the membership comes largely from the science fiction, fantasy, and horror realms (thanks to franchises like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the mystery genre's represented as well. AHMM contributor Jeremiah Healy is a member, as is Donald Bain, Jessica Fletcher's “collaborator” on dozens of Murder, She Wrote novels.

  * * * *

  Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe face off in American Gangster. (c) Universal Studios

  * * * *

  Collins (IAMTW's president) describes the organization as a conduit for sharing “marketing tips and war stories.” And he's got more than a few of each himself. Despite the bias against tie-in writers, for instance, he argues against using a pseudonym for licensed projects.

  "I know I'll have a wide audience and hope they'll enjoy the tie-in novel so much that they'll go looking for my original material,” he says.

  As for war stories, he's got those in spades. One of his favorites: how he wrote the novelization of the 1993 Clint Eastwood thriller In the Line of Fire in two weeks.

  "I bunkered in and had a lot of help on research from my wife [writer Barbara Collins] and made deadline and then collapsed for about a month,” he recalls.

  And novelizations don't just have to be done quickly. They need to be done early as well—months before the movie hits theaters.

  "I rarely see anything from the finished film when I'm writing these, strictly the screenplays,” says Collins (who couldn't just pop over to the studio to see a rough cut even if Security would let him through the gates—he lives in Muscatine, Iowa).

  Unlike with novelizations, IAMTW members usually have plenty of material to work with when doing a tie-in novel, including episodes on DVD, scripts, and a series “bible” (a writers’ guide to the characters and setting). What they don't have, however, is freedom. Though tie-in authors are expected to come up with dynamic, novel-length stories, the heroes have to remain completely static.

  "You can't do anything major with the characters, which is frustrating,” Collins admits. “Nobody from the regular cast can fall in love or get badly injured and have an epiphany or any of the things characters in most novels do."

  And everything that does happen has to be approved by the TV network and the show's producers. So instead of the usual novelist's lot—trying to please an editor in New York—a tie-in writer has a handful of people on both coasts to keep happy.

  * * * *

  Criminal Minds (c) CBS Broadcasting

  * * * *

  Obviously, Collins has been remarkably successful at that. Perhaps too successful, in one case: He lost his gig as the go-to guy for CSI tie-ins when the books were still selling like bloody hotcakes.

  "I was told it was time for a ‘new voice,’ and we parted ways on the novels,” Collins says. “After selling millions of books for them, I'm not sure why the CSI folks took me off the novels, though I suspect it may be because I was becoming too strongly identified as ‘the’ CSI writer, and they of course want CSI to be the star, which it is."

  Despite his disappointment, Collins isn't bitter. He may be Novelization King and Tie-in Czar, but he knows all too well who has the real power over a licensed project.

  "You're playing in their sandbox,” Collins says of the studios and networks he deals with. “You don't have the usual rights you have as the writer of something you've wholly created."

  Collins found that out the hard way while working on a project he was uniquely qualified for. The 2002 gangster drama Road to Perdition was based on a graphic novel Collins wrote, so it was only natural that Collins pen the novelization. Unfortunately, what started off seeming like a dream job eventually became the most frustrating tie-in assignment Collins ever landed.

  "Often I'm given a good amount of freedom to flesh out characters and backstory and to expand and add dialogue—film scripts being a naturally compressed form,” Collins says. “With Perdition, I delivered a 100,000-word novel that I was very proud of. But the studio made me cut it to 40,000 words, leaving out anything that wasn't in the screenplay—even though I had created the story. Can you imagine? I couldn't write dialogue for my own characters."

  That's not the case anymore. Not only has Collins written another novel and more comic books about his Perdition characters, he'll be in the driver's seat when they return to the screen: He plans to direct the sequel, Road to Purgatory, himself. If all goes according to plan, the film will go into production in Iowa in the not-too-distant future.

  Collins, you see, isn't just the Novelization King and the Tie-In Czar. He's also the Midwest's busiest—well, maybe, only—movie mogul. He's made several low-budget crime flicks in and around Muscatine, including the 1995 serial killer thriller Mommy and its 1997 sequel, Mommy's Day. His most recent effort, a performance film documenting his play Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life, was released on home video in September.

  So for those of you keeping score at home, here's the tally: Collins's American Gangster novelization, Criminal Minds tie-in, and straight-to-video Eliot Ness movie have all been released in the past three months. Collins also has a new novel, Deadly Beloved, coming out from neo-noir specialists Hard Case Crime by the end of the year, while another book from the imprint—Mickey Spillane's Dead Street (released last month)—was completed by Collins after “the Mick” passed away. And let's not forget Collins's standalone mystery, A Killing in Comics, which hit stores in May. Oh, and he's published two books this year under pseudonyms. Black Hats, a whodunit starring an aging Wyatt Earp, was put out under the name Patrick Culhane, while Antiques Maul (released in August) was the latest entry in the long-running “Barbara Allan” mystery series Collins cowrites with his wife.

  Which all leads to one logical question: How the heck does he do it?!?

  Collins gets research help from an assistant, Matt Clemens, who occasionally pitches in with plot ideas, as well. But for the most part, it's simply a matter of sitting down and getting the job done.

  "I'm a full-time writer, or I should say ‘storyteller,’ and just work every day, or try to,” Collins says. “I do get behind and sometimes things pile up."

  Yet the tie-in assignments never stop piling up, too, and that's just the way a workaholic like Collins likes it. His reign as Novelization King might not win him a lot of respect, but he's got plenty of other projects for that. (He's been nominated for the Edgar Award four times and has won the Shamus Award twice.) In the meantime, the tie-ins keep bringing him new readers and racking up big sales.

  As a wise man once said, it's good to be the king.

  Copyright (c) 2007 Steve Hockensmith

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: PANIC ON PORTAGE PATH by Dick Stodghill

  The ransom note was delivered to the mansion on Portage Path on the postman's Monday morning round, the first of two on his schedule for the day. The crudely printed address did not contain a name, just the house number, street, and “city.” After opening it along with the rest of the mail that had accumulated during their month at Bar Harbor, the residents, Quentin and Roberta Makepiece, were perplexed. The text consisted of letters cut from a magazine and newspaper. The message was concise: “If you pay $50,000 yor sun will be returned safely."

  The Makepieces were in their seventies and their children, two daughters, were grown, married, and living far from Akron. Both had sons who were in their teens. A
fter a hasty but concerned conference, Roberta Makepiece phoned their eldest daughter in Baltimore and then the other in California, forgetting the three hour difference in time. The latter, awakened from a sound sleep, grumpily agreed to check, then returned to the phone to say the two boys were safely in the bedroom they shared. The report from Baltimore had also been reassuring.

  "Do you think it's someone's idea of a joke?” Mrs. Makepiece asked her husband.

  "Not hardly. I think we had better notify the police."

  Having arrived home late Sunday evening, the Makepieces were unaware of the excitement in the affluent neighborhood the previous Friday. On Saturday it had changed to panic, and by Sunday, to despair. Unknowing and unprepared, the response to Quentin's phone call left the elderly couple bewildered and more than a little frightened. Four Akron detectives were at their door within minutes, and close behind were two FBI agents. All doubt was removed that the letter might have been a poor joke.

  I was making my rounds at Central Police Station when the call came in. After phoning Times-Press city editor Ben Goldsmith to say I was on my way to the west side and someone else would have to finish my routine checking of police reports, I hurried to where I had parked my 1934 Hupmobile. It was a fine car, an olive green sedan with black fenders and just a little more than fifty-five thousand miles on the odometer. It received rough treatment, though, in my haste to get to Portage Path, where I had spent much of the past three days. Sweat had soaked through my shirt by the time I arrived, and I was hoping that the remainder of August of 1938 would be cooler and less humid than the past week or two.

  It had begun with a mass search of the neighborhood for the two-year-old son of a rubber company executive, Frederick Stauffer, and his wife, Joanne. The blond youngster called Bobby had been playing on the front lawn of a sprawling redbrick home directly across from the unoccupied residence of the Makepieces'. His nanny, a large woman in her forties named Prudence Longfellow, said she had a sudden and urgent need to use the bathroom and felt it would be perfectly safe to leave her charge alone for a few minutes. When she returned he was gone.