I love history and always have–to the point where it became my college major. More specifically, I relish learning about the colorful and free-wheeling history of Chicago, which along with an assortment of its suburbs has been home for all of my seven decades.

After I concluded that I had written enough Nero…

My interest in blending historical and fictional characters in a novel came with the reading of E.L. Doctorow's 1975 book Ragtime. In that panoramic story, which covered the first two decades of the 20th Century, Doctorow weaved a cornucopia of real people through his colorful tale.

Theodore Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington, Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Sigmund Freud, and famed architect Stanford White are among…

If Max Allan Collins is not the most productive writer in the mystery and suspense field, I would be hard-pressed to find another nominee. He has written more than 80 novels, many of them components of seven different series. His works include his 14 highly acclaimed Nate Heller books, the CSI series, and the New York Times bestseller "Saving Private Ryan."

In addition, he has been a scripter of the "Dick Tracy" comic strip, and his graphic novel "Road…

Private boys’ schools have supplied rich fodder for novelists over the years. Witness Charles Dickens and the horrors of a 19th Century British school in “Nicholas Nickleby.” Witness “The Catcher in the Rye,” J.D. Salinger’s classic 1951 tale of Holden Caulfield, an abysmally unhappy and conflicted student in the process of leaving an eastern boys school. Witness John Knowles and his…