[Detective] Miller stood planted there like one of the lions in front of the Art Institute, only meaner-looking. Also, the lions were bronzed and he was tarnished copper.

I discovered, after I had bought True Detective, the first of Max Allan Collins’s Nate Heller novels, that it was one I’d already read, some time back. Nevertheless I didn’t regret the purchase. I’d forgotten what an extremely fine book this is—one of those few novels that lift the hard-boiled mystery to a new level.

All the Heller books are good. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s impossible to keep a series from becoming formulaic after a while. With the Heller books, you have a series where the same private eye somehow manages to be on the scene for almost every important murder in America between 1930 and 1970. Each one is plausible individually, but they stretch credibility in the aggregate.

But this first novel deserves a place all its own. Collins’s own contemplation of the hard-boiled genre led him to want to write a book that stretched the limits and broke the rules, not with malice but for a reason. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe was an honorable man, trying to keep clean in a dirty world. Collins’s detective, Nate Heller, is a soiled man, trying to find a way to preserve some degree of integrity. He’s a tragic character, and True Detective is a genuine tragedy, with a plot that functions like the mechanism of a guillotine.

When this book starts, Nathan Heller is a detective on the pickpocket squad of the Chicago Police Department. One day two detectives summon him—against his will—to follow them on a raid. It turns out to be an attempt to assassinate gangster Frank Nitti. Nitti survives—barely–but Nate ends up killing a man. In disgust, he quits the force and sets up as a private eye.

True Detective actually centers on the murder of Chicago mayor Anton Cermak (Heller’s inside account doesn’t match the one in the history books), but it also involves the Chicago World’s Fair. I was particularly impressed by the climax, which was as heart-stopping as any I’ve ever read, and the payoff was a heartbreaker.

So if you’re a fan of hard-boiled, I recommend True Detective highly.

Cautions for language, violence, and adult content.