Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins (born March 3, 1948) is an American mystery writer. He has written novels, screenplays, comic books, comic strips, trading cards, short stories, movie novelizations and historical fiction. He wrote the graphic novel Road to Perdition (which was developed into a film in 2002), created the comic book private eye Ms. Tree, and took over writing the Dick Tracy comic strip from creator Chester Gould and one of the Batman comic books for a time. He wrote books to expand on the Dark Angel TV series. He has also written books and comics based on the TV series franchise CSI. More recently, he has written a book, Buried Deep, based on the TV series Bones.

He has also written two sequel novels to Road to Perdition: Road to Purgatory and Road to Paradise. He also wrote three more graphic novels starring the characters from Road to Perdition. These graphic novels, called collectively On the Road to Perdition, form the basis of the film.

He also co-founded the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers with Lee Goldberg. The IAMTW is an organization for writers of tie-ins and novelizations.

Collins studied in the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Collins was a fan of the mystery writer Mickey Spillane from childhood and later became friends with him. The two collaborated on a comic book series in the 1990s called Mike Danger. Upon Spillane's death in 2006, Collins was entrusted to finish several uncompleted works by Spillane including Dead Street, The Goliath Bone, and The Big Bang. Several other uncompleted works may be finished by Collins and published in the future.