The War of the Worlds Murder Read online

  Praise for

  The London Blitz Murders

  “The author makes history come alive...The details of life, the dialogue, and the realities of living in London during wartime are meticulously set out for the reader. The nightly blackouts...make the perfect setting for criminal activities. The mystery [is] well crafted and quite interesting...A new Collins novel is a treat for lovers of history and mystery alike.”

  —Romance Readers Connection

  The Lusitania Murders

  “Entertaining...full of colorful characters...a stirring conclusion.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Collins ably weaves a well-paced, closed-environment mystery reminiscent of Agatha Christie...[He] succeeds in...re-imagining the Lusitania’s final voyage.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  The Titanic Murders

  “Collins makes it sound as though it really happened.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Collins does a fine job of insinuating a mystery into a world-famous disaster...[he] manage[s] to raise plenty of goose bumps before the ship goes down for the count.”

  —Mystery News

  The Hindenburg Murders

  “Max Allan Collins has become one of the masters of the twentieth-century historical mystery and The Hindenburg Murders will only augment his growing reputation.”

  —BookBrowser

  The Pearl Harbor Murders

  “[Collins’s] descriptions are so vivid and colorful that it’s like watching a movie...[and he] gives the reader a front row seat.”

  —Cozies, Capers & Crimes

  ...and for Max Allan Collins

  “No one can twist you through a maze with the intensity and suspense of Max Allan Collins.”

  —Clive Cussler

  “Max Allan Collins blends fact and fiction like no other writer.”

  —Andrew Vachss, author of Flood

  “A terrific writer!”

  —Mickey Spillane

  “Collins displays a compelling talent for flowing narrative and concise, believable dialogue.”

  —Library Journal

  “No one fictionalizes real-life mysteries better.”

  —Armchair Detective

  “An uncanny ability to blend fact and fiction.”

  —South Bend Tribune

  “When it comes to exploring the rich possibilities of history in a way that holds and entertains the reader, nobody does it better than Max Allan Collins.”

  —John Lutz, author of Single White Female

  “Collins’s blending of fact and fancy is masterful—there’s no better word for it. And his ability to sustain suspense, even when the outcome is known, is the mark of an exceptional storyteller.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Probably no one except E.L. Doctorow in Ragtime has so successfully blended real characters and events with fictional ones. The versatile Collins is an excellent storyteller.”

  —The Tennessean

  “The master of true-crime fiction.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2005 Max Allan Collins

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612185156

  ISBN-10: 1612185150

  For Leonard Maltin—my brother in twentieth-century pop culture

  Though this is a work of fiction, an underpinning of history supports the events depicted in these pages. Still, the reader is cautioned to keep in mind what Orson Welles said in his 1973 film F for Fake: “Any story is almost some kind of lie.” In any case, the author intends no disrespect for the real people who were caught up in the so-called “Panic Broadcast” of 1938.

  You don’t play murder in soft words.

  —Orson Welles, press conference after “The War of the Worlds” broadcast

  It is my intention to introduce legislation against such Hallowe’en bogeymen.

  —Iowa State Senator Clyde Herring

  Everything seemed unimportant in the face of death.

  —A radio listener, the day after the broadcast

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE: A HALLOWE’EN SHADOW PLAY

  THURSDAY: OCTOBER 27, 1938

  CHAPTER ONE: RADIO DAZE

  FRIDAY: OCTOBER 28, 1938

  CHAPTER TWO: BROADWAY MALADY OF 1938

  SATURDAY: OCTOBER 29, 1938

  CHAPTER THREE: COTTON CLUBBED

  SUNDAY: OCTOBER 30, 1938

  CHAPTER FOUR: SHANGHAIED LADY

  CHAPTER FIVE: NOW YOU SEE IT

  CHAPTER SIX: WAR OF THE WELLES

  CHAPTER SEVEN: JOURNEY INTO FEAR

  CHAPTER EIGHT: PUNKIN PATCH

  CHAPTER NINE: TIMES AT MIDNIGHT

  CHAPTER TEN: THE TRIAL

  A TIP OF THE SHADOW’S SLOUCH HAT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  A HALLOWE’EN SHADOW PLAY

  SUDDENLY 1975 SEEMS LIKE A long time ago.

  Not as long ago as 1938—when the bulk of this story takes place (and long before I was born)—but nonetheless distant, right out on the edges of my memory.

  I graduated with an MFA from the Writers Workshop in Iowa City in 1972, right after selling my first mystery novel, and promptly took a job teaching Freshman English at the small-town community college where I’d been attending a few years before. I was just a kid, really, though I’d been married since 1968.

  By ’75 I’d already sold half a dozen mystery novels. But only two of them had been published when I decided to attend my first Bouchercon, which was in Chicago, a city my wife Barb and I both felt comfortable in.

  My childhood sweetheart and I had honeymooned for a week in Chicago, going to movies, dining in wonderful restaurants, checking out the sights, as well as the usual things newlyweds do...plus some they don’t, specifically risking my bride’s life during those turbulent times by having her help me chase down old used paperbacks I needed for my mystery collection, in some of the roughest parts of town. Toward the end of that week, Robert Kennedy was assassinated—we were RFK supporters and anti-Vietnam War—and the event...in the context of celebrating our marriage...brought home just how fragile happiness can be. On the other hand, we’re still together.

  On this return visit to Chicago, Barb did not attend the convention: she shopped at Marshall Field’s and along Michigan Avenue, though in those days it was mostly window-shopping. I, for the first time, mingled with mystery fans and my fellow writers, awkwardly straddling the two factions. That it was the weekend before Hallowe’en seemed appropriate for such benignly criminal doings, and Chicago was its chilly windy city self, the Palmer House hotel in the El’s shadow (the Wabash-side entrance, anyway); I felt almost like a grown-up.

  My generation of mystery writers was perhaps the first to emerge largely from “fandom”—we had not only read the fiction of our writer-heroes, we had written and published “fanzines” celebrating that fiction and those creators, much like the world of comics, where I was also a fan (but not yet a writer).

  Had I not already attended two or three comic book conventions, I would have been much more intimidated at Bouchercon Six, with its bustling dealers’ room that seemed so large (though by today’s convention standar
ds was minuscule) and its panel discussions bracketed by informal conversations (in hallways and bars and dealers’-room aisles) between strangers with mutual interests. Many of us were what is now called geeks and even then were known as nerds—lonely oddballs pleased to encounter their own kind.

  Patterned after similar events that had grown up in science fiction, the Bouchercon—named after celebrated New York Times critic/mystery author Anthony Boucher—is the World Mystery Convention. Fans, authors, editors, literary agents, publicists and of course booksellers attend these fan-run gatherings, and as I write this in the early twenty-first century, the events—held in cities from London to New York, from Toronto to San Francisco—are attended by thousands, unlike the hundred or so who came to Chicago in 1975.

  I was a barely published author—two paperback-original novels, Bait Money and Blood Money, had seen print—and certainly not a “name” fan, that is, a fan who’d published a fanzine. I’d contributed a few articles to such self-published publications, mostly defending and celebrating my favorite mystery writer, Mickey Spillane; but mine was definitely not a name that would resonate with the average attendee of Bouchercon Six.

  I prowled the dealers’ room, wearing a name badge of course, and before long, a small miracle happened. A dark-haired, mustached kid stood grinning at me, his eyes large behind horn-rim glasses; he wore a light-blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and chinos, and seemed to be only mildly insane.

  “You’re Max Collins!” he said.

  I frowned. “That’s right...”

  I checked the name badge of this guy: Robert J. Randisi. His home was identified as “Brooklyn,” a legendary city known only vaguely to Iowans such as myself.

  “I can’t believe it!” this Randisi creature blurted.

  Did I owe him money? I sometimes bought comic books and old paperbacks through the mail. Maybe he was a dealer I’d shorted on the purchase of Jim Thompson or Richard Stark paperbacks. He seemed harmless enough, if overenthusiastic—of medium size, solidly put together, but not a threat.

  “You wrote the Nolan books!” he said, pointing a pleasantly accusing finger.

  Nolan was the thief anti-hero of my two published novels.

  “Right,” I said, waiting for a shoe to drop.

  “Those are great! I love those books!”

  My eyes tightened. “Really?”

  He reared back and laughed, once. “Why? Don’t you believe me?”

  “Well...it’s just that I never met anybody before who’s read my books...at least, that I wasn’t related to.”

  “Well, I’m a fan. Big fan.”

  This was a first for me; and a moment I’ll never forget.

  “Muscatine, Iowa,” he said, reading my name badge further. “Is that ‘Port City’?”

  Port City was the fictionalized version of my hometown that I used in the books.

  “Sort of,” I admitted.

  “Where is it?”

  “On the Mississippi—between Iowa City and the Quad Cities.”

  “Like in your books!”

  “Like in my books.”

  We shook hands and fell in alongside each other, walking and talking.

  “What do you think of this place?” Randisi gestured around a dealers’ room rife with rare books and vintage paperbacks.

  “It’s heaven,” I said. “Also, hell.... I can’t afford any of this stuff.”

  “I know the feeling.... Y’know, there are some big writers here. The Guest of Honor wrote the book that Steve McQueen movie came from—with the car chase? But the really cool thing is...Walter Gibson is here.”

  “Really? The guy who created the Shadow?”

  “ ‘Maxwell Grant’ himself—pretty spry for an old boy, too.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Late seventies, I think. Still writing. Still doing magic tricks. He knew Houdini and Blackstone and all those guys, y’know.”

  Robert J. Randisi and I continued to walk and talk, and so began a friendship that endures to this day. In ensuing years, Bob would found the Private Eye Writers of America, and become a bestselling writer of Western fiction, as well as authoring many fine mystery and suspense novels.

  That evening, we wound up having dinner together—meeting up with Barb—at the now-defunct George Diamond’s Steak House, where the fillets were the size of a football and the salads were half a head of crisp cold lettuce slathered in three dressings that mixed so well I’m salivating now. My lovely blonde wife lived up to Bob’s high expectations of the standards of a “successful” hard-boiled mystery writer.

  And I was impressed to learn he’d sold a story to Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine; I’d never been able to crack the short story market (ironically, the first short story I would publish was sold to Bob, editing a PWA anthology, about ten years later).

  After dinner, Barb headed to our room at the Palmer House to “play with” the things she’d bought, while Bob and I retired to a corner of the hotel bar. We talked for several hours about our respective dreams—many of them now realized—and he paid me the huge compliment of asking me to describe, in some detail, the three Nolan novels that were as yet unpublished, and at the time languishing in a publisher’s inventory, fated not to see print till the early ’80s.

  Bob, it turned out, was a civilian employee of the Brooklyn P.D., taking what are now 911 calls, and I was further complimented that a guy who worked in a world where he encountered real crime and criminals could be impressed by my imaginary ones. I told him I thought his writing future was bright—he was damn near a cop, and that was useful in lots of ways, from background info to PR possibilities.

  A handsome, sharply dressed young black guy swung by the table—Percy Spurlock Parker, a mystery writer who was also just starting out—and informed us about a cocktail party in a hotel suite, where the con’s Guest of Honor...who I’ll call Lawrence R. Trout...was holding court.

  I was not particularly a fan of the Guest of Honor. Under his real name, he remains held in high esteem by a lot of writers and fans, particularly those in the New York area who have long been active with the Mystery Writers of America; a major mystery award in his honor is given by the MWA. Among his crowd, Trout must have been a nice enough guy, and no writer has a long career without talent and ability. But at the time I found his work dull and unremarkable. (Truth be told, I still do.)

  Still, he was a pro, and I’d met precious few of those—a real-life successful mystery writer. He’d even had a Steve McQueen movie made out of one of his novels—what would that be like, I wondered, having a major movie star bring one of your characters to life! So I eagerly followed Bob and Percy onto an elevator and up to a small suite, where lots of mystery writers and fans were crowded in.

  Cigarette and cigar smoke hung thick, but it wasn’t really a noir-ish atmosphere (particularly since nobody was using the noir term yet in these circles); it reminded me of the bars my rock band played in (I’d turned down a booking to attend the con) and, while not a smoker myself, I was used to such a smokehouse stench. A few women were among this group, but it was predominantly male. In future years, that ratio would reverse, but the mood (and for that matter reality) of that suite on that evening was strictly Boys’ Club.

  Booze was flowing fairly freely, its blow softened by chips and pretzels. I’m no teetotaler, but I’ve never particularly been a drinker either, so I stayed with Coca-Cola. I engaged in several conversations with people who no doubt would become my friends in future years, though I frankly don’t recall any of them specifically, with the notable exception of Chris Steinbrunner.

  Chris was one of the sweetest, kindest, most articulate and knowledgeable men in the world of mystery. Heavyset, his clothes (suit and tie) an unmade bed, his comb-over dark hair disheveled, his eyes constantly on the move behind heavy-rimmed glasses, moonfaced Chris was as focused mentally as his appearance was a blur.

  “I know you,” Chris said, taking in my name tag, gesturing with mixed drink in ha
nd. “You’re the Mickey Spillane defender!”

  “Guilty as charged,” I said with a grin.

  One of the oddest things about my career, for that matter about my life, is that I have become the premiere defender of one of the world’s best-selling writers. Heavily exposed to the wave of private-eye TV shows in the late ’50s and early ’60s, as a junior high kid I inhaled private-eye novels, starting with twenty-five- and thirty-five-cent paperbacks featuring the wild likes of Richard S. Prather’s Shell Scott and G.G. Fickling’s Honey West, then discovering Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, and loving all three, particularly Spillane, whose fever-dream sex-and-violence writing style set my adolescent brain on fire.

  Imagine my surprise, growing older, when I learned that many mystery writers and even some snooty fans considered the incredibly popular Spillane to be beneath contempt—they adored Hammett and Chandler (as did I), but Spillane was a boorish, right-wing lout. I happened to be a boorish, left-wing lout, but I took offense nonetheless, and my contributions to fanzines were spirited defenses of Spillane, with scholarship about his comic-book work and his “lost” stories that had appeared in pulpy men’s adventure magazines.

  At another Bouchercon, in Milwaukee in 1981, I would be the con’s contact man with Spillane, the Guest of Honor, and the creator of Mike Hammer and I would become great friends. He is my son Nathan’s godfather, has been my collaborator on numerous projects, and the subject of an Edgar-nominated critical biography I cowrote with fellow Spillane buff Jim Traylor, as well as a documentary film I made a few years ago, which was screened to much acclaim in Italy, England and (for the Mystery Writers of America) in New York.