No Cure for Death Please See MY Photo of Cover -- it May Differ

Mallory investigates a mysterious case in his own small Iowa town after a suspicious automobile accident claims the life of a young woman he met in a bus station

A Q&A with Max Allan Collins

Question: Where did Mallory begin? We understand that the first novel published, The Baby Blue Rip-Off, was actually the second Mallory novel.

Max Allan Collins: That’s right. No Cure for the Death was written first, at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. I probably began it around 1969, when I was studying with Richard Yates, the great mainstream novelist. I wrote three novels as my MFA thesis, Bait Money, No Cure for the Death, and Quarry, all sharing the same small Midwestern setting, Port City, but otherwise unrelated. The idea was to demonstrate that a mystery or crime novel could be written with a non-urban setting. Private eye-type stories were usually set in New York or Los Angeles, and I wanted to use a setting where I’d actually lived. Port City was Muscatine, Iowa, the small town where I still live.

Q: But Mallory isn’t a private eye.

MAC: Not technically, but the novels use the Raymond Chandler-style first- person technique, and the general investigative approach of a private eye novel, though these stories are probably more “medium-boiled” than “hardboiled.” Mallory is a mystery writer, which is the excuse for him getting involved in mysteries, but he was not intended to be a series character. Neither was the pro thief Nolan in Bait Money or my hitman Quarry. The three books in my MFA thesis were all designed to be standalones.

Q: Why series then?

MAC: Bait Money and No Cure for the Death both sold in late 1972 to Curtis Books, where the editor asked for sequels to both. Later, Quarry sold to Berkley Books, and that editor asked for a series, too. I was glad to comply in all three cases, but it caused me trouble. Nolan originally died at the end of Bait Money, Quarry was awaiting seemingly inevitable assassination, and Mallory, well...he was just a mystery writer. I’d have given him a better excuse to solve mysteries if I’d known he was going on to four more books!

Q: No Cure for the Death, why was the first book published second?

MAC: Curtis Books bought two Mallory novels, but the company was swallowed up by a bigger publisher, Popular Library, who consigned my novels to the purgatory known as inventory. For years, Popular Library’s editor assured me the books would be published, but before that ever happened, the rights reverted to me. No Cure for the Death had been very much of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, with a strong Vietnam theme – some have called Mallory a hippie private eye. By the early ‘80s, the book seemed dated. The second novel, The Baby Blue Rip-Off, hadn’t dated at all. So it came up into the first slot. When No Cure for the Death was published next, I added an author’s note to label it a prequel.

Q: What were the circumstances of Mallory finally finding his way into print?

MAC: In the early ‘80s, I wrote an eco-thriller called Midnight Haul that I submitted to Walker Books. An editor there loved it and told me she was buying it, but then the top editor at Walker, Ruth Cavin, a very famous editor, called me to say that she liked Midnight Haul, but that it was too dark, and too much of a thriller, for the Walker line. If I ever did a mystery, though, she wanted to see it. As it happens, I had just gotten the rights back to the two Mallory novels, bundled The Baby Blue Rip-Off off to Ruth, who bought it in lightning speed. Shortly thereafter, Midnight Haul sold to Foul Play Press. The eco-thriller really is similar to the Mallorys, and if I had it to over, I’d probably rewrite Midnight Haul into a Mallory novel.

Q: The smalltown setting does seem to be part of Mallory’s appeal, though you take him out of Port City in both Kill Your Darlings and Nice Weekend for a Murder.

MAC: That indicates the autobiographical nature of the books. Kill Your Darlings is set in Chicago at a Bouchercon, the big mystery fan convetion, and Nice Weekend for a Murder is set at Mohonk Mountain House, in upstate New York, where real mystery writers used to stage fake mysteries for guests...maybe they still do. Anyway, my late friend and mentor Don Westlake was good enough to invite me there to participate, which became the basis for Nice Weekend for a Murder. Those two books seem to resonate very well with mystery fans, but my favorite of the Mallory novels by some distance is A Shroud for Aquarius, which is extremely autobiographical, as it deals with the death of a high-school friend of mine, my best friend actually, who was an apparent suicide ten years or so after graduation.

Q: Have we seen the last of Mallory?

MAC: Let’s see what new readers think, now that Thomas & Mercer are bringing the books back into print. With Quarry, I’ve gone back and written new novels set in the ‘70s and ‘80s. If I did Mallory again, though, I would bring up him into the present day, at my own present age. He’s me, for better or worse.