Review by C.J. Bunce

If you were going to stage a heist at a shopping mall, how would you do it?  Would you steal from all the stores in the mall in the same heist?  Back in 1987, when malls were still in their prime, Max Allan Collins made an attempt in the pages of Spree, his longest novel in the Nolan series.  His anti-hero Nolan is the Michael Corleone of grime fiction–they keep trying to pull the retired thief back in just as he’s ready to settle down (Collins pulls him back in each of his 9 novels).  Collins knows how to reflect the ugliest people in the ugliest of underworlds, and he does it by creating criminals in Missouri that would make New York mobsters look like wimps. 

Spree sees a reprint this year thanks to Hard Case Crime in a 2-for-1 edition called Mad Money.  It’s bundled with Mourn the Living, another Nolan novel, and the last of a series of reprints that provide some of the best value around for pulp crime readers and fans of Collins’ unique voice.  I thought the hillbilly Comfort family of Missouri was vile in the last Nolan novel I reviewed here at borg: Hard Cash, the fifth Nolan novel.  I had no idea.

As you see in the cover of Mad Money and the other novels in the series with art by Mark Eastbrook, Nolan is Collins’ Lee Van Cleef lookalike, a bad guy who thinks he’s a good guy in a world of creeps and criminals even worse.  With Spree, Collins again pushed the boundaries of pulp crime.  It’s full of the writer’s brand of rough sex, racist characters, and violence we’ve seen in his Quarry series and earlier Nolan stories, but this time that includes threats of incest and underage sex, the kind of cringey content that paints the darkness into the story’s villains.  It’s also the kind of shock and awe that would later make Quentin Tarantino win movie awards.  It all goes full circle, because Nolan was inspired by Donald E. Westlake’s Parker novels, which inspired every other pulp crime writer, including Tarantino.  Spree takes Collins into horror territory, something that may give readers a Silence of the Lambs vibe.

I’m still reading and enjoying Nolan novels, with five more to look forward to, but I think Collins’ effort to stretch out the wordcount of this book is reflected in page after page of padding.  Collins is a master of brevity in his books, and he spent more time in this book with descriptions that neither enhance the mood and setting nor further its plot.  At a few points his leads Nolan and frequent sidekick Jon even make mistakes that the characters I thought I knew from Bait Money, Hard Cash, and Skim Deep were too smart to do.  Maybe I was wrong about them?

Here’s the set-up for Spree: Nolan’s nemesis, hick Comfort family patriarch Cole discovers where Nolan has landed: owning a restaurant/nightclub named Nolan’s attached to a typical 1980s mall in Davenport, Iowa.  Nolan previously killed some Comfort family members in a past exploit, and Comfort decides it’s time for payback.  He stakes out Nolan and his mall and, along with his son and daughter, kidnaps Nolan’s girlfriend Sherry.  Cole tells Nolan he must help him rob all the mall stores or he’ll kill her.

Collins provides the minimal details to show how the heist might be possible, but not quite enough to make it believable.  The players are numerous: a few guys who worked jobs with Nolan before, plus a set of shoot-first triplets who can fence the loot later.  Sherry, the great, tough, equal to Nolan, is relegated here to the victim role, and the 1980s shine through with Sherry as the only woman lead of the story.  The only other woman is Cole’s “slutty-looking” daughter, who Cole hits on because she looks like her mom.  Yikes.  In no doubt Jon’s worst moment of the series, he has sex with the teen (who worships Jon from his days as small-time rock band member), which is bad choice #1, then instead of holding her to swap for Sherry he just lets her go (bad choice #2).  Nolan has his worst moment by not grinding the story to a halt and holding the girl for a swap, maybe slapping Jon a few times.  The story also just stops, and we don’t get to see the aftermath, which is a disappointment after all the build.

Nolan, Jon, Sherry, and the reader know there is no way Sherry is going to get out of this alive.  That’s the story Collins tells, but not quite where it lands–Collins doesn’t stick the landing as satisfying as in his other works (whether in his Nolan, Quarry, Heller, or Mike Hammer novels).  Nitpicking aside, appropriate bad guys get theirs, just not directly proportionate to their level of vileness, and that’s a shame.  But the bookending Collins incorporates is clever and almost delivers some satisfaction.

Jon returns as a slightly older young version of Nolan–who also has all those interests of a young Max Allan Collins–a guy who wants to create comic books for a living.  He’s lost his apartment, which drives him back to Nolan for help, where he meets Sherry.  He’s at a down point in his life with Nolan, but that doesn’t explain his extra dose of bad judgment this round.

Is there a worse pulp crime family than Collins’ Comforts?  I don’t think so.  Spree is not a typical Collins quick read, and that epic mall heist only gets to what you could imagine as the montage sequence in the movie adaptation.  If the film rights were exercised today, the cast would need to be better developed and the execution a bigger part of the story.  Here the idea is so good, but the delivery not so much.

It may not be Collins’ best, but it’s still fun, and it will keep you engaged.  Order Mad Money, including Spree and Mourn the Living, here at Amazon, and check out the other double-trouble sets, Two for the Money, Tough Tender, and Double Down, and the final novel in the series, Skim Deep (reviewed here).  I reviewed Hard Cash here and Bait Money here.  Keep coming back to borg where we’ll double back to the second novels in these 2-for-1 editions from Hard Case Crime later.