Bruce Von Stiers

Michael Collins is the author of the Dan Fortune detective stories. He has written a score of other stories as well. Some of them can be seen in a recent release from Five Star. The book is Spies And Thieves, Cops and Killers, Etc. All of the stories in the book had been written and previously released by Mr. Collins.

Some of the stories have definite time stamps on them. Others could have taken place thirty years ago or just the other day. A few of them were first printed in the Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, a pulp publication no longer in existence. A couple of them had been published in the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. One was even published in the Man From Uncle Magazine, a short lived publication of spies and intrigue stories.

The first story is Occupational Hazard. Mrs. Karl Jaspers gets up to make her husband some coffee after his long night’s work. She discovers his body. He has been stabbed to death. Who was the murderer? Was it Mrs. Jaspers or some unknown assailant? Investigator Lee Becket will try to get to the bottom of the murder. What he discovers will not be anything anyone should have been able to guess.

In Death, My Love we find an adulterer coming up with a scheme to rid himself of both his wife and his mistress. The plan is devious if it works. But the twists of fate sometimes make sure that justice is served.

Detective Sergeant Joseph Marx is the lead character in The Bizarre Case Expert. It seems that Marx has a knack for getting to the bottom of bizarre, and seemingly unsolvable, cases. A man and woman are attacked, him being wounded and her dead. Marx is given the case. He ends up finding that household items can indeed be deadly.

In Success of a Mission, agents for one nation try to steal a convoy route from a secured area of a rival nation. Careful planning and training all come to a screeching halt when things go wrong.

Silent Partner goes into what happens when a writer becomes desperate enough to ghost somebody else’s work. The consequences can be quite deadly. Man on the Run is about mobsters and the tricky situations that they can get themselves into.

When I read Freedom Fighter, I knew that it had to have been written long ago. In this era where all of the Eastern European nations are separate once again, you can tell this story was of ages past. There is to be a celebration in New York for the heroes of the Hungarian struggles. One man plans to be there to greet the heroes. Only he is not there to honor them. His motives are a testament to the struggles between the peoples of Eastern Europe.

In Harness Bull, Patrolman Emil Berger gets a little credit for something he didn’t do. Homecoming is a strange tale of a mother’s status as a soldier’s mom. Nobody Frames Big Sam provides a strange twist of fate for a vengeful gambler.

The Sleeper finds us looking at the story of a man who has been an inactive agent for a foreign power. He has been called out of his sleeper mode and to come home. He has an American family now and he will have to leave them behind. Once upon a time, this type of scenario was too real due to the Cold War. When the Eastern Bloc fell apart, things kind of went by the wayside and this type of story made irrelevant. With the events of September 11, this story reminds us that we are never too secure.

Others stories in this collection are The Savage, The Choice, Clay Pigeon, Hard Cop and Hot Night Homicide. They follow the themes that had been set by the previous stories.

The last story in the book is A Part of History. It deals with a man going to a village in Europe as a pilgrimage. It seems that he helped set up the assassination of a Nazi leader at that village. We find out what happened to the people of the village and the Freedom Fighters sent to assassinate the Nazi. We also find out that playing the political games were just as prevalent during World War II as they are now.

Spies And Thieves, Cops and Killers, Etc is an interesting collection of stories. You have cops and crooks, soldiers and spies all tied up into one volume by a top notch writer.

You can find out more about this book at the Five Star web site. The web site is www.galegroup.com/fivestar. It can also be ordered from Amazon.com.