Early Crimes

For fans of the popular author of Road to Perdition, here is an opportunity to see a young writer developing his themes and techniques. Two short stories from the late 1960s reveal the strong influences of Jim Thompson and James M. Cain on Max Allan Collins's hard-boiled career. And a previously unpublished caper novel, Shoot the Moon, confirms Collins's debt to his crime novel mentor Donald Westlake. "I present these stories," says Collins in his Introduction, "because the young writer I once w...