A Scholarly Analysis of Michael Collin's Work
by Richard C. Carpenter, Ph.D.

Michael Collins is the best-known persona of Dennis Lynds, who has written under a number of different pseudonyms. It is in the Collins series that Lynds writes tales distinguished by a strong personal flavor and originality. In these, the typical hard-boiled characteristics are enriched, developed in complex and subtle fashion, primarily because of Dan Fortune, the one-armed, compassionate, and philosophical private investigator who is both the narrator and the principal character.

Lynds’s novels are densely plotted, with an intricate pattern of events and characters, as many as 20 of the latter, all playing active roles. A minor problem, at least for mysteries — the disappearance of a relative, an apparent mugging, a man struggling for a renewal of his lease — becomes the initial thread that leads to a vast, entangled web of hatred, obsessions, assaults and multiple murders. The minor problem spreads out to involve a host of characters until both the detective and the reader are wandering in a maze of interconnected lives and motivations. Eventually the mystery itself is solved, the murderer or murders revealed, although the resolution is ambiguous and incomplete.

We discover that the events are in reality a web, as in the classic mystery story, where just about every character and event, no matter how seemingly insignificant, has had its place. Our interest may become focused on the murder and mayhem, especially that directed toward Dan Fortune, but Collins keeps his pattern firmly in hand. Following his plots requires close attention to detail and a rather retentive memory; but they reward the effort, for they are precisely crafted, credibly motivated, and ingenious.

Collins does not create these plots primarily as puzzles to be solved but as analogues to the complex interconnections of contemporary American society. Greed, ambition, corruption, and their opposites, idealism, loyalty, integrity are to be found in every level of our culture. They link the corporate boardroom with the seedy bar, the mansion with the barrio shack. The richly diverse areas of New York and Southern California — Collins’s favorite locales — provide him with a great variety of types: wealthy ranchers, developers, executive vice presidents, small businessmen, hippies, hookers, gamblers, hit men, Hispanics, strong-arm cops, and venal politicians.

His lens is both wide-angle and microscopic: we see not only a cross-section of American life but peer deeply into the motivations and attitudes of many people representative of modern culture. Collins is, however, more a philosopher of culture than a sociologist. He does not merely present and observe; he invests his portraits and his situation with values, or more frequently, disvalues. Wherever he looks he sees deceit, ruthless ambition, and self-aggrandizement, the straight way made crooked, the American dream belly-up in the sun, and violence and murder the result.

The picture is bleak but not totally pessimistic. There are people in Collins’s novels who have their values straight, Dan Fortune most particularly. He is unequivocally opposed to everything sleazy and corrupt, to the lies and deceit, even to the violence with which he is inevitably involved. The intricate plotting and social analysis depend for their unique effect on this searcher for the truth.

The reader, often the reviewer, who does not see that Dan is essentially different from other private eyes misses an important point. For, although he is a drop out from conventional society in a beret and duffel coat, a man without family and only fleeting sexual relationships, much like hard-boiled detectives in general, unlike the rest he is far more a thinker, a philosophical contemplator of human frailty drawn into whirlpools of crime because that is his job, the life that has been laid out for him. He is neither out for himself nor for vengeance; he is more often a victim rather than an aggressor; he is tough enough but not hard; he is often afraid but has that two-o’clock courage that makes him go on.

His being one-armed is no gimmick, a diversion like Columbo’s raincoat designed to mislead the wicked into underestimating him, although it often has that effect because he is far smarter and cleverer than most of them realize, until too late. He lost the arm as a juvenile delinquent trying to hijack a Dutch freighter, but he fobs off the inevitable questions with talk about tanks or crocodiles. His greatest fear is for his remaining arm, and villains often play on this. But he continues his investigations regardless.

Fortune is incredibly persistent. Hounded, threatened, beaten, shot, baffled at every turn he never surrenders. He is told in story after story that the case is solved, that there is no case, that he had better lay off, but none of this deters him. In Blue Death, for example, probably the best of the early Collins novels, he works his way from the death of a parking-lot owner to the offices of a giant corporation that leases the lot, to the scientists who work for IMR, from New York to California and back to New Jersey, on and on. Although at different times he is drugged, kidnapped, stonewalled, even shot at, he bores into the affairs of Franklin Weaver, the powerful and glamorous executive vice president, until he finally has the answer not only to the death of Jake Carter in his parking lot, but also to two other deaths for which Weaver was responsible.

On the way to solving the case he engages in a running debate with Weaver over the basic values in a corporate society. Weaver’s ethics are those of hte complete corporate man: what is good for the company is good. To which Dan makes the only just reply: because something is, doesn’t make it right. Behind the intricate plot is this theme: that evil grows as naturally as weeds out of such warped values and distorted visions.

This kind of situation typifies Collins’s novels up to the early 1980s, but recently he has explored different themes, characters, and methods of narrative development.

In The Slasher, for instance, he expands the arena of crime, which begins with the deaths of a young hooker/model and a liaison man for the modeling agency, spreads out into questions about the involvement of the CIA and FBI, and comes t the eventual revelation of the killer’s motive to protect his mother’s cover, since she was a former Nazi death-camp mistress who has been given U.S. citizenship in exchange for her knowledge of Communist plans and agents. What appears at first merely a sordid murder reaches back in time and up the ladder of society to demonstrate how evil proliferates through time and social space.

In Freak, Collins explores a different kind of proliferation: how one person’s psychic state can result in widespread violence and death. J.J. is the most alienated figure in Collins’s novels, perhaps one of the most alienated in modern fiction. Castrated when mauled by a bear in his youth, J.J. is a moral monster, the most chilling murderer in the novels, a man whose only satisfaction in life is listening to Mahler and Sibelius, not for enjoyment, but because their dark strains echo his own inner darkness. Collins has nothing more macabre than the scene at the end where J.J., mortally wounded, holds Dan at gunpoint, making him operate J.J.’s portable stereo for his own grotesque requiem.

Minnesota Strip and Red Rosa also make moderate excursions into new perspectives. The plots are of the familiar type, following the thread of a seemingly run-of-the-mill murder and a disappearance as each develops into a complicated pattern of corruption and deceit, but they also show shifts in point of view and explore two different kinds of alienation.

Red Rosa herself is the archetypal radical who has finally become a bag lady, killed almost accidentally. She represents one way in which a separation from bourgeois American society can proceed, while Roy Carter, the central figure of Minnesota Strip, is psychically alienated because of his loss in the belief in any values and his commitment to eradicating evil as he sees it. He eventually becomes a terrorist.

In Castrato, Collins again probes into the life of a man in the grip of an illusion, or delusion, but in addition he employs several different fictional strategies to add varying perspectives to the story. The principal character — principal in the metaphoric sense so important in this novel — is Frank Owen, prey to the powerful myth of America, particularly of the West, as a land of freedom and individuality, the land of the cowboy. He feels he has been robbed of his heritage, castrated, primarily by women, who seek only security and stability. His way out is through alcohol and snorting coke, a way that, through various convolutions brings death and destruction around him.

The plot is not especially original, a scam fueled by greed, but the story is told with interpolations new for Collins and for the hard-boiled genre in particular: shifts in point of view; flashbacks to earlier events that give depth to the present; brief biographies that flesh out the psychology of Frank Owen, his brother Billy, and Elizabeth Martin, Owen’s opposite in ideology, a believer in getting what you can, never mind the freedom; bits of history of the West, particularly an account of the real Alamo rather than the legend; and even the erotic dreams of Dianne Owen, Frank’s wife. All of which make Castrato a “breakout novel,” as one commentator has expressed it.

Chasing Eights, the most recent Collins, goes even further. We see characters nearly as bizarre as J.J. in two extremely violent and foul-mouthed hit men, and in the Genius, poker-player extraordinary and a revolutionary who had plans to assassinate the President with homemade ground-to-air missiles, along with a number of other strange personalities. The shifts in point of view are lengthier, while biographies and historical sketches relate symbolically to the principal themes of greed and “making it.” The style is more varied, more often breathless and jagged, using italic passages to change tone.

The basic plot is another scam by a speculator/developer, but many people are involved, notably Jack Price, the central character whom Dan has been hired to find. The ending is unusually violent, Dan here, as in Castrato, breaking from his usual role and shooting the two hit men with the gun he fondly calls his “old cannon,” and which he has practically never used, certainly not in this way, in previous novels.

Win some, lose some. For these varied ways of telling the story, this emphasis on the metaphoric and symbolic, as in the stud-poker game that runs all through Chasing Eights, the gambling Nirvana-experience that is the key to much American life nowadays, do shift the focus from Dan Fortune, with all that gained for Collins. Dan is always in the scene, pursuing the truth, knitting the events together, doing his job.

But with his new strategies, Collins has moved into another dimension of the mystery/detective story. These last novels are not only more complex, even more violent, they are harsher, more pessimistic. Powerful and memorable, they indicate that Collins has embarked on a new course after some 60 books. Truly he is a writer to be reckoned with.