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The War of the Worlds Murder (Disaster) Paperback – Unabridged, December 11, 2012

by Max Allan Collins (Author)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 205 ratings
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Orson Welles is the bombastic wonder boy of radio and stage. But is he also a murderer?

Walter Gibson―creator of pulp superhero the Shadow―travels to New York City to collaborate on a script with Welles, star of the radio show The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The young Welles is a charming but difficult taskmaster who relishes dramatic blowouts with friends, lovers, and colleagues. So when a dead body is found in the studio minutes before the live broadcast of The War of the Worlds, Gibson knows Welles will be the New York Police Department’s number one suspect. Gibson has exactly one hour―while Welles is on the air enacting the infamous hoax story of a Martian invasion―to find the real murderer and clear the radio star’s name. With its brilliant reconstruction of the broadcast that hoodwinked the nation, The War of the Worlds Murder is a paean to radio’s golden age.

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  1. Part of series
    Disaster
  2. Print length
    270 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publication date
    December 11, 2012
  5. Dimensions
    5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1612185150
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1612185156
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Collins has an outwardly artless style that conceals a great deal of art."

About the Author

Max Allan Collins is the New York Times bestselling author of Road to Perdition and multiple award-winning novels, screenplays, comic books, comic strips, trading cards, short stories, movie novelizations, and historical fiction. He has scripted the Dick Tracy comic strip, Batman comic books, and written tie-in novels based on the CSI, Bones, and Dark Angel TV series; collaborated with legendary mystery author Mickey Spillane; and authored numerous mystery series including Quarry, Nolan, Mallory, Eliot Ness, and the bestselling Nathan Heller historical thrillers. His additional Disaster series mystery novels include The Titanic Murders, The Hindenburg Murders, The Pearl Harbor Murders, The Lusitania Murders, and The London Blitz Murders.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Thomas & Mercer; Unabridged edition (December 11, 2012)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 270 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1612185150
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1612185156
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 205 ratings

About the author

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Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins

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Max Allan Collins is a New York Times bestselling author of original mysteries, a Shamus award winner and an experienced author of movie adaptions and tie-in novels. His graphic novel ROAD TO PERDITION was made into a major motion picture by Tom Hanks's production company, Playtone.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
205 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Wryter
4.0 out of 5 stars Great for Old Time Radio Fans.
Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2021
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I enjoyed this novel, even though it was somewhat slow. The research was outstanding, and gives the reader an idea of what the “Panic Broadcast “ was all about. The main characters were very interesting, and most of the story was fairly accurate. The panic results were mostly taken from “The Invasion From Mars” by Hadley Cantril (1940) which has been largely discredited today. However, other than the mass panic, which is most certainly exaggerated, the characters described in the panic portion of the story, were based on actual people (as the author explains in his excellent afterwards of the book). Although the first half of the book is chronological, the second half skips around a lot. If you are looking for a solid murder mystery, you probably won’t enjoy this. But if you are looking for a tale about a fake disaster, this is a fun read.
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Susan Sloate, Best-selling Author, FORWARD TO CAMELOT and STEALING FIRE
5.0 out of 5 stars A jewel of a novel in a jewel of a series!
Reviewed in the United States on June 3, 2013
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If you like mystery served up with a great historical flavor, you'll love Max Allan Collins' 'disaster series', a set of 6 novels with different settings, characters and murders - but what they all have in common is a famous disaster and someone famous on the scene who's associated with mystery and/or murder, to solve the crime. (In THE TITANIC MURDERS it was Jacques Futrelle, the mystery writer who created The Thinking Machine - a detective who solved crimes with pure logic. Futrelle died on the Titanic but is the hero of Collins' first disaster. In THE LONDON BLITZ MURDERS, the detective is shy, quiet Mrs. Mallowan - better known as Agatha Christie - who's using her old pharmacy skills in service of WWII.)

These wonderful stories are packed with historical facts and draw the reader in to a time and place that no longer exist. THE WAR OF THE WORLDS MURDER is one of the best - including a marvelous sketch of Walter Gibson, the writer who created The Shadow - which provided Orson Welles with his most famous role on radio. Gibson was apparently a prolific writer, so prolific that according to Collins in this book, in the first 10 months of 1938 he wrote TWENTY-SIX 50,000-word Shadow novels.

When I read this I had to lie down with a cold cloth on my head. What writer today needs to know this kind of stuff?

But Collins manages to present a picture of both Gibson's life and work AND the famous work of The Mercury Theater On the Air - on the night of its most famous broadcast, The War of the Worlds. He manages to record the reactions of the participants, various listeners, and Gibson himself, as the broadcast unfolds. And yes, that part of the book really is gripping.

At the same time, we see Welles, the gigantic personality and talent, through Gibson's relatively unprejudiced eyes - along with his impressions of John Houseman (who was Welles' dearest friend and then his most dire enemy), the other members of the Mercury ensemble, and a gofer who turns out to be - who knew? - the very young Judy Holliday. Gibson is our window on this extraordinary world, and his point of view becomes ours.

I would recommend this book without reservation to anyone looking for a good read; Collins is a riveting storyteller who keeps the pace moving and never disappoints. I have followed him through several Nate Heller novels - STOLEN AWAY, FLYING BLIND, ANGEL IN BLACK, CHICAGO CONFIDENTIAL, among others -- plus a couple of Eliot Ness novels and the entire disaster series. I don't know about his contemporary stuff, but his historical books are outstanding.

If you enjoy mystery, history and hard-boiled fiction, don't pass him by. You'd be missing a treasure trove.
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Geetar Don
4.0 out of 5 stars A Fun Read
Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2013
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The War of the Worlds Murder is nor a "great" book, but it is heck of a lot of fun -- especially if you, like me, have a fascination with the genius of Orson Wells and/or the amazing national panic he caused with his famed 1938 Mercury Theater of the Air broadcast.

Max Allan Collins obviously shared this fascination and his extensive research paid off well. One can see and hear the boy wonder at the microphone, and the dialog Collins puts in his mouth sounds such that a Wells fan can almost hear him speaking it.

The "murder" mystery itself is only a small part of the book -- more than anything as excuse for writing it. But that is not put forth as a negative -- the book is what it is and for anyone with an interest in the broadcast, the psychology behind it, or in Wells himself this book is highly recommended.
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Hal 'Chisaiyama' Shaver
5.0 out of 5 stars Orson Welles had a reputation as a hell raiser and Collins' captures that persona perfectly.
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2015
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Note: My apologies for anyone who read this review previously when it was titled "Dame Agatha would be very happy with her portrayal in this tfictionalized mystery thriller.based on actual events." but I had accidentally pasted the wrong review onto this title. THIS is the one that goes with "The War of the Worlds Murders" and I will now put the other one onto "The London Blitz Murders" where it belongs. - H"C"S

This is, so far at least, the last in Collins' "Disaster" series of books featuring real life mystery authors involved in some of histories biggest shenanigans. I have loved them all and this was no exception though I have to question it's inclusion in this "Disaster" series. The hoax played on all of America by a young, ambitious Orson Welles was certainly an appalling pre-Halloween prank, if of incredible proportion. Yet unlike the other books in this series there was no actual murder involved so in and of itself that is a sort of hoax as well.

Despite these shortcomings and for the fact that because of them it was somewhat lacking in the energy and excitement of the other books in the series, I still liked it. It was a bit slow at time with more accent on the accents of the surroundings that on the grist of the story and it took half the book to get us up to the actual broadcast date of the program that changed the way America listened to the radio.

The remainder of the book was pure Collins storytelling mastery at it's best however and he kept the reader on his toes figuring out whodummit. Oh yes, there was a perpetrator of a "murder" but as usual I will give no more spoilers than that and I must apologize for giving away that fact in this review but then Collins telegraphs that info to his readers long before the end so it's not exactly a spoiler anyway. It was worth the price of admission and I will still buy another book in this series if he writes any more that is. The long windedness of the first half is why it only gets 4 stars out of me this time instead of the 5 I gave the other stories in this series.
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Top reviews from other countries

John Hopper
4.0 out of 5 stars an interesting phenomenon, but not one of the best of the Disaster series
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 15, 2019
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This murder mystery in the author's "disaster" series is set against the background of one of the most well known fake disasters, Orson Welles' notorious War of the Worlds radio broadcast in October 1938, in which Welles and his colleagues were able to fool many Americans that a real Martian invasion of New Jersey had occurred. The novel was rather uneven, with all of the action and excitement in the second half, where the murder is revealed and the broadcast takes place (there is only a tenuous connection between them). The first half was really an opportunity for the author to set the cultural scene around the worlds of radio broadcasts and low brow detective fiction of the era, showing his extensive knowledge of the era, but perhaps rather over-indulgent in terms of the proportion of the book this takes up. Not a great novel, though the fake broadcast incident is a very interesting example of how artificial panic can be so easily whipped up.
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LM13
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in Canada on November 8, 2016
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This series is a great "What if" scenario. Historical facts combined with fiction.
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Wm
5.0 out of 5 stars Historical fiction
Reviewed in Canada on December 30, 2012
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Taken an actual event in history using it as your backdrop and then building a story over it has been done before, but Max Allen Collins has it down to an art form. Great all the way around.
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P Bailey
5.0 out of 5 stars Fact or fiction. An intriguing blend!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 15, 2013
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I've read all the "Disaster" books by Mr Collins and loved them all. They blend desperate, true events, and real characters with fictional murders and detective work. Famous authors find themselves both in harm's way, and watching horrific, unforgettable, momentous disasters. Brilliantly researched, and lovingly told, through each tale I felt Mr Collins appreciation of his literary heroes. These events really did not happen in exactly the way they are related to the reader, but Mr Collins' skill is that when I'd finished each book I could still wonder if it ALL couldn't' t have been true!
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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars Educational as well as entertaining
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 21, 2013
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I love the concept behind this series of books.They are stand alone books meshing historical fact with fiction. I have read this book first as I was the most intrigued and excited by its plot line. Max Allan Collins sets the scene and the historical context really well and the story moves along at a reasonably quick pace. Sometimes the scene setting chapters break into the stories flow; but overall I was very impressed with the book and look forward to reading the rest of the series. Thanks to Amazon for introducing me to this author via the special offers on kindle.
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