Iowa writer Max Allan Collins has written a series of "disaster" novels, featuring "a real-life crime-fiction writer as the amateur detective in a fact-based mystery" as he describes them. The one I just read, The War of the Worlds Murder, features pulp writer Walter Gibson, creator of the Shadow paperbacks. Gibson has been invited to spend a weekend with Orson Welles, who is interested in making a movie based on the popular Shadow novels and radio show. Among Welles current projects, that weekend, is a radio play based on H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. When one of Welles' mistresses is found murdered just before air-time, Gibson must work fast to solve the mystery before the police are called and ruin the broadcast.

Collins has also written a favorite series of mine, the Nathan Heller mysteries, and wrote the graphic novel The Road to Perdition, on which the Tom Hanks movie was based.