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Two For The Money

von Max Allan Collins

Reihen: Frank Nolan (Omnibus 1 and 2)

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282793,431 (3.76)6
A brand-new edition of the first two classic Nolan novels, Bait Money (1973) and Blood Money (1973), now with a beautiful new cover painting. AFTER 16 YEARS ON THE RUN, WOULD NOLAN BURY THE HATCHET WITH THE MOB... OR WOULD THEY BURY HIM FIRST? They don't come tougher than Nolan - but even a hardened professional thief can't fight off the entire Chicago mafia. So when an old friend offers to broker a truce, Nolan accepts the terms. All he has to do is pull off one last heist - and trust the Mob not to double cross him. Fortunately, Nolan has a couple of things going for him: an uncanny knack for survival and an unmatched hunger for revenge...… (mehr)
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Right from the beginning, this feels like a watered down version of a Richard Stark’s ‘Parker’ novel. Blatantly so.

There are two ‘novels’ in this book, hence the title! Book One is “Bait Money” and finds Parker robbing a bank with three rookies, to settle a debt with the Outfit. I mean Nolan, with the Family. Nearly the same thing.

Book Two is titled “Blood Money”, set a year after the first one. Someone steals the money from Nolan that he stole in the first book.

Interesting, in the afterword, the author basically cops to the 'Parker' thing, calling it an homage and that it was approved by Westlake himself. I'll probably have to give him a pass, if 'Stark' himself did. ( )
  Stahl-Ricco | Jan 24, 2022 |
Two for the Money consists of two stories that are two parts to the same story. The first, Bait Money, was Collins' first book. The second, Blood Money, was written as a sequel, but some years later. They are perfectly paired together here by Hard Case Crime. Collins explains in an afterward that Westlake's Parker character was the inspiration for his character Nolan and that, before creating a whole series based on the Nolan character, he discussed the enterprise with Westlake, obtaining approval.

Bait Money was his first published novel, but it is hard to imagine that was Collins' first published novel. It is that good. It is what readers like to call a page-turner. It's a good solid story set in the Midwest, in Iowa to be precise. Nolan, who originally was a nightclub manager for a mob-controlled enterprise, had a disagreement with a mobster, who ordered Nolan to kill a friend. Nolan ended up killing the mobster and fleeing with the Mob's money. The call comes and an intermediary offers to negotiate a truce so that Nolan can get his hands on money he had socked away. The price, however, is steep. Nolan must pay off his nemesis, Charlie, and can't use any of his socked-away assets. He has to earn his keep. Unfortunately, none of the usual suspects are willing to work with Nolan until he makes permanent peace with the mob. He's just too hot to deal with now. So, instead, the Planner sets Nolan up with a virgin crew, a bunch of college kids who collect comic books and long-haired stoned out hippies. This is who he is going to use to help him rob the largest bank in town!

The bulk of the tale is about how the daring daylight robbery is pulled off with only one professional in on the job and Nolan's eventual confrontation with his nemesis, Charlie.It's a great story, well written, finely paced. Its good old fashioned crime fiction set in the early seventies in the Midwest. Collins combines fast action with doses of humor of levity and does it well.

Blood Money is the sequel. A year has gone by and things have changed and boy have they changed. Nolan is now operating a motel for the mob and his nemesis is nowhere to be found. Another daring robbery takes place and Nolan's future with the mob, once-assured, is no longer safe. Bodies are falling. People are being snatched. Witnesses are being wiped out before Nolan can talk to them.
This book is a little different than Bait Money. It is more of a live action, mob action tale of intrigue and lacks some of the levity found in the first book. However, a lot of the same characters are here and the story flows nicely from the ending of the first book. ( )
  DaveWilde | Sep 22, 2017 |
Two for the money is, of course, a pun, and the book contains two novellas, sort of. No spoilers. You will just have to read this book to understand why I can’t tell you about Book Two or provide much of the plot.

Excellent Nolan the thief story. Nolan is getting old, or at least to an age that he thinks is old (he’s forty-nine but [spoiler coming: turns fifty in Book Two.) He’s also an Iowan, or at least Iowa has become his locale of preference given his problems with Chicago.

Iowa City depressed Nolan. It wasn’t the Midwestern atmosphere that bothered him, or even Iowa itself—he liked being left alone, which was basically what people did to each other in Midwestern states, as opposed to East Coast rudeness, West Coast weirdness and Southern pseudo-hospitality. Iowa City was a college town, and that depressed Nolan. Or more specifically, college-town girls depressed him. Maybe it was this new awareness of what he was beginning to view as the onrush of senility. Or just an awkwardness that came from being around people he couldn’t relate to. But these young girls, damn it, all looking so fuckable and at the same time untouchable, in their jeans and flimsy tee-shirts. . . . He guessed it was ego; he didn’t like looking at a desirable woman without at least the remote possibility of getting in. Not that he’d ever been much for playing the stud, that wasn’t it; sex was a gut need to be filled when time and circumstance allowed. But with young girls like these, daughters and possibly granddaughters of the one or two generations of women he’d had intercourse with, he had no basis for rapport, no way, man, none at all to relate with such creatures. Conversation was enough of a pain for Nolan without having to struggle for whatever wave-length these children were on this week. So Nolan is alone.

He has returned to the Chicago area where he is recognized and shot by a member of the “Family” with which Nolan has a long-standing grudge. He had killed the brother of “Charlie,” one of the Family bosses who has sworn revenge and who has had a contract out on Nolan for fifteen years. Nolan, tired of hiding, running, and thieving, seeks a reconciliation with Charlie so he can have access to all the money he has squirreled away from assorted heists over the years under an alias that Charlie now controls. Charlie agrees, but with a condition: he must pay $100,000 for the privilege.

“You heard me, Nolan. Go out and get it for me. Earn it. Steal it. Counterfeit it if you can do a good enough job. But you got to be able to show me where you got it. I want to pick up the newspaper and see such-and-such jewelry store got hit, or so-and-so rich bastard was robbed. Don’t even think about using any of the Earl Webb money to pay me off.” “Why the hell not?” “Because I don’t want you to. Because it would be too goddamn fucking easy.”

So Nolan is stuck planning a bank heist with some amateurs. The heist goes well but things begin to go very wrong. He has the money to pay off Charlie, but is he just being set up?

Collins has the ageism and worry for the future dead on. It’s uncanny how this book has the feel a Richard Stark Parker novel. High praise, indeed. Kudos to the publisher who resurrected these these early novels as ebooks.

There’s a very interesting historical afterword that’s worth reading [spoiler alert] in which Collins discusses the origin of his pen name Michael Allan Collins, his real name. He had originally written under the name Max Collins (even though he had submitted the books under the name Allan Collins – his father’s name was Max.) But another writer, Michael Collins, whose real name was Dennis Lynds asked him to stop using the name. He didn’t at first and both of them wrote books entitled The Slasher, “and the two ‘M. Collins’ mystery writers caused all sorts of bibliographic nightmares." He later used the pseudonym, Max Allan Collins, which is his real name.

Collins also expresses accolades to Donald Westlake/Richard Stark for the Parker series which became a sort of model for Nolan. BTW, if you find Nolan’s first name listed anywhere, in some old card catalog, perhaps, as “Frank,” that’s incorrect. It was added by an editor who felt Nolan should have a first name for the cover copy, much to Collin’s distinct displeasure. Nowhere in the books is Nolan’s first name identified. ( )
  ecw0647 | Sep 30, 2013 |
I have heard that Collins is best known for humorous, unthreatening whodunits... but as far as what I've read, he does "bad-ass" really well. A fun pair of novels about an old school tough guy.
  MarquesadeFlambe | Jan 18, 2007 |
The first two books in Max Allan Collins' Nolan series, featuring a one-name-only nightclub manager turned heist man par excellence -- Bait Money (1973) and Blood Money (1981) -- have been collected in a mass market paperback omnibus edition from Hard Case Crime under the title Two For the Money. I liked Two For the Money more than I feared I would, but am somewhat annoyed at the "touch-ups" that were made to Bait Money to try to bring it forward in time by about ten years: Collins and/or the editors tweaked some stuff (a T-shirt commemorating the tenth anniversary of Woodstock [p. 117]; a girl is described as having "Bo Derek breasts" [p. 118]) but forgot to tweak others (the Centennial Bridge connecting Davenport, Iowa and Rock Island, Illinois, has an improbable-for-the-early-1980s toll of U.S. $0.15, although the Wikipedia article about the bridge states that the toll never rose above fifty cents for cars, and was discontinued in 2003; a gunsel's "late-model Dodge Charger" [p. 121] suggests, given that Bait Money has been revamped to take place in the early '80s, a Charger from 1976-78, which was patterned on the Chrysler Cordoba -- a luxury model -- and not the performance model of Bullit and The Dukes of Hazard; and I flat-out don't believe the prevalence of so many warmed-over hippies in the early 1980s, even in five-years-behind-the-curve Iowa), and improbably has Nolan referring to homosexuals as "gays" (p. 102), when most likely he would've said "fags," "homos," "fairies," or some less-PC term, given his age and his background; a section in Blood Money told from Nolan's point of view does have him using "fag" instead of "gay" (p. 242).

Bait Money finds a middle-aged Nolan ready to try to bury the hatchet with the Chicago mob underboss who's been laying in for him for the past sixteen years due to Nolan's murder of his brother, robbery of his nightclub, and making him look like a prize chump to the rest of the Family, not necessarily in that order; unfortunately for our "hero," the boss' flair for melodrama is easily the equal of his sadism, and he demands that Nolan pay him off with the proceeds from one last heist -- he has proof of Nolan's false identity, so Nolan can't tap the sizable nest egg he's already built up -- upon pain of a likely hideously slow death. Since word has traveled that the Chicago mob is gunning for him, no professional thief will come within a hundred miles of Nolan, which forces him to collect a team of rank amateurs so that he can hit a bank in the process of converting from a state to a federal bank, which means that it is flush with long green. Nolan's plan is excellent, but the players aren't. And then there's that mob boss...

Blood Money takes place nearly a year after Bait Money: Nolan must track down the people who've cleaned out his proceeds from the job in Bait Money and murdered an old friend and working associate while at the same time keep the new powers-that-be in the Chicago mob on his side and out of the way; meanwhile, death touches anyone whom Nolan visits....

I liked Bait Money slightly better than Blood Money: both books are heavily informed by comic books (and not just in the comic book-collecting character of Jon, who serves as Nolan's sidekick), and in Blood Money Nolan and Jon must contend with a contrasting father and son pair who really are father and son, the disgraced Chicago mob underboss Charlie (the main villain of Bait Money) and his son Walter, but the waters are muddied somewhat by the introduction of a gunsel named Greer who seems set to be Nolan's foil for the next book. (No bets that Walter doesn't turn into a major villain in subsequent books of the series.) While the racial banter between Nolan and an ex-NFL footballer turned Mob enforcer named Tillis is heavily reminiscent of similar banter in Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm series, it grew pretty tiresome. Two For the Money was an entertaining, often amusing, read, despite the aforementioned editorial bobbles: if I see other books in the series for a cheap price, I'll probably pick them up, but I'd be interested to read other (non-TV or movie tie-in) books that Collins wrote. If the genre hijinks never quite reach the level of the better Matt Helm books, you shouldn't feel guilty about enjoying them. ( )
1 abstimmen uvula_fr_b4 | Jan 15, 2007 |
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A brand-new edition of the first two classic Nolan novels, Bait Money (1973) and Blood Money (1973), now with a beautiful new cover painting. AFTER 16 YEARS ON THE RUN, WOULD NOLAN BURY THE HATCHET WITH THE MOB... OR WOULD THEY BURY HIM FIRST? They don't come tougher than Nolan - but even a hardened professional thief can't fight off the entire Chicago mafia. So when an old friend offers to broker a truce, Nolan accepts the terms. All he has to do is pull off one last heist - and trust the Mob not to double cross him. Fortunately, Nolan has a couple of things going for him: an uncanny knack for survival and an unmatched hunger for revenge...

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