A Wing And A Prayer

Max Allan Collins' Nolan series is definitely badass, thanks to the author's lean writing style and his honorable hero, who may be a thief, but he isn't a bad guy. A cross between Donald Westlake's Parker and Lee Van Cleef's Colonel Mortimer, Nolan is a former Mafia burglar working his way back up through the ranks after a couple of decades in the Mob's doghouse. A cynical, tough, independent bastard, Nolan the loner took up with a wiry comic book nerd named Jon in BAIT MONEY, the first book. By #3, FLY PAPER, Nolan and Jon have evolved into a rough father/son relationship—I guess knocking over banks is a good way to bring people together.

Nolan, now running a Mob hotel in the Quad Cities, comes to Jon's rescue when Breen, an old acquaintance, gets shot up and stumbles to Jon's antique shop, which was formerly owned by his late uncle Planner, a legend among thieves. Breen was the victim of a doublecross by crazy redneck Sam Comfort and his stoner son Billy, with whom he had been knocking over parking meters for several weeks. To keep Jon out of a jam with the psychotic Comforts, Nolan works up a plan to rob the hillbillies of their $200,000 fortune.

In the meantime, Collins crosscuts to an unassuming young man named Ken, who plans to hijack an airliner from Chicago to St. Louis and parachute out of it D.B. Cooper-style with the ransom. What feels like a subplot mushrooms into FLY PAPER's big climax, as Nolan and Jon coincidentally find themselves with a suitcase of stolen cash on the same airplane.

FLY PAPER, like other early Nolan novels, was barely released, if at all, in the early 1970s and went mainly unnoticed until Pinnacle printed it in 1981. The late success of the Nolan series led the prolific Collins to continue the adventures of the irascible antihero, which, unlike most other men's adventure series, are still in print.

His Name’s Nolan

And Nolan is badass. Intended by his creator, Max Allan Collins, as a derivative of Donald Westlake's Parker (who was personified on film by Lee Marvin in the great POINT BLANK and by Mel Gibson in PAYBACK), Nolan (no first name) is a hard-bitten 50-year-old professional thief trying to get back on his feet after an enemy in the Mafia discovers the false name he's been using. Charlie, the Chicago Mafioso still holding a grudge after Nolan killed his brother fifteen years earlier, promises not to squeal on Nolan to the FBI for a fee of $100,000. The catch is that it has to be new money, not cash from Nolan's bank accounts, and he has one month to deliver. So, it's one last heist for Nolan. Since none of his former associates will work with him, now that he's on Charlie's shit list, he recruits a trio of idealistic twentysomethings, including a fresh-faced comic book collector named Jon, to pull an Iowa City bank job.

Nolan is a great character, intended by Collins as a mixture of "Parker and the Lee Van Cleef character in FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE." Collins, who has since become a prolific and quite famous author of novels, adaptations, comic books and screenplays, was just 19 when he began the Nolan series with MOURN THE LIVING, which went unpublished. BAIT MONEY was first published—barely—in 1973, but it wasn't until Pinnacle bought Collins' Nolan manuscripts and put them out in paperback in 1981 that the book made any kind of splash. According to Collins, Pinnacle was looking for a property to replace Don Pendleton's Executioner, which had been sold to Harlequin.

MOURN THE LIVING finally came out in book form in 1999, and is the eighth in the Nolan series. I look forward to reading the rest of them, if they're as tightly delineated as BAIT MONEY, which crackles with believable dialogue, a clever plot (with an interesting twist near the end concerning Charlie) and the relationship between the loner Nolan and the comic book-loving Jon, obviously a Collins surrogate, even though BAIT MONEY doesn't read like a Mary Sue story.