Early Crimes by Max Allan Collins isn’t strictly a short story collection. Instead, it’s two stories and a short novel that will be of particular interest to anyone wanting to see work from the beginning of the writer’s career. The two stories were written in the late 1960s, though not published at the time. One of them, “Public Servant,” is in the Jim Thompson vein, and very effectively so. The other is a sort of Mickey Spillane/James M. Cain mash-up that’s interesting in its own right.