Max Allan Collins's Blog, page 13

Dig the New Mike Hammer Novel & The Real Perry Mason

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Over the years, I’ve had many a bad review from the notoriously tough Kirkus book reviewing service. Lately they have liked me more – perhaps it’s my age. I keep remembering John Huston as Noah Cross in Chinatown observing, “Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”

Dig Two Graves, the new Mike Hammer – right now scheduled to be the penultimate book in Titan’s Mike Hammer Legacy series – will be published August 22nd and can be pre-ordered now.

Here’s how Dig Two Graves is described at the Amazon site:

Mike Hammer, the iconic PI created by the master of noir Mickey Spillane, takes on the mob in the first of two gripping final novels for the deadly private eye.

Winter 1964. After a hit-and-run accident nearly kills her mother, Mike Hammer’s partner (both in life and the PI business), Velda Sterling, learns her father is not who she thought he is. Seeking to uncover her true, troubling heritage, Velda and Mike travel to Phoenix, Arizona – and sunny Dreamland Park, where retired law enforcement officers protect and corral notorious criminals held under Witness Protection.

Mike and Velda find themselves swept up in escalating violence, fueled by the missing millions from an armored-car robbery, which leads them to a deadly midnight confrontation in a cemetery – where secrets are buried and open graves await.

Speaking of Mike Hammer, a Facebook scribe in the midst of a bunch of nice praise by others for the Spillane/Collins novels tried to dissuade Spillane fans from reading these novels, thusly: “The parts by Mickey are great, (but) when it shifts, it stops reading like Mickey and I’ve studied Mike hammer novels for my own writing back when and can tell the difference. I like when Collins writes his own characters but not much on the hammer.”

Here’s the thing: this reader makes the assumption that when Mickey’s material runs out, I take over and finish up the book. Some of you may recall, from previous posts and from an essay in the back of Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction – that this assertion is as inaccurate as it is confident. With the longer Spillane manuscripts – the 70-page to 100-page ones – I expand the material to fill to double that length. So my work is interspersed with his from the start. That’s partly to create a consistently shared voice that I can continue when the Spillane material runs out.

But that’s an over-simplification, because I have used the material in Mickey’s extensive files in a bunch of ways. For example, I sometimes combine manuscripts – Lady Go, Die! is mostly from the late ‘40s, but I weave in a similar serial killer chapter from the ‘60s to provide more genuine Spillane material. In Complex 90, the books begins with Spillane (expanded by Collins), then flashes back to a Hammer in Russia sequence I wrote, then when we come forward and Mike is back in New York, I’m working from Mickey’s material again.

Also, I have scraps of Spillane, paragraphs that he jotted down – descriptions of Manhattan, action scenes – that I weave in when I can. Sometimes he has provided plot and character notes that I use; other times he has written a rough draft of the ending. I worked from the more extensive manuscripts at the beginning, because I wanted to get that stuff out there – The Goliath Bone; The Big Bang; Kiss Her Goodbye; Lady, Go Die!; Complex 90; King of the Weeds; Kill Me, Darling; Killing Town. Murder Never Knocks had several chapters and a last chapter from Mickey; The Will to Kill had a few opening chapters but the mystery was wholly set up as if a blueprint had been given me; Murder, My Love and Masquerade for Murder came from Spillane synopses with scraps of description and action by him from the files woven in.

Both Goliath Bone and Kiss Her Goodbye had two versions of their partial manuscripts, which in both cases I combined. The former also had half a dozen versions of the first chapter. The latter shared the same basic premise but went off into two entirely different mysteries, which I combined. Kill Me If You Can utilized an unproduced TV pilot Mickey wrote. The upcoming Dig Two Graves combines two unfinished manuscripts, including a first pass at Dead Street, and this – Dreamland Park – was the major building block of Graves. But the other unfinished manuscript suggested an evocative back story involving a gangster who had fathered Velda.

A lot of work and, frankly, ingenuity goes into this process, and I frankly resent it when supposed hardcore Spillane fans turn their noses up because I’m involved and not every word choice sounds to them like Mickey would have made it.

I don’t try to write like Mickey – I don’t have to. I took in his words like vitamins starting when I was 12. I concentrate on getting Hammer himself right – Mickey considered character all important. Now and then I have a spooky burst like he is taking over. I was watching TV one Sunday morning (during the writing of Goliath Bone) and I suddenly reached for a scrap of paper and in a blistering array of words recorded the last few paragraphs of the novel. To me, they read like the Mick. It felt like automatic writing.

Here’s the thing: when Mickey, not long before his passing, asked me to complete the unfinished material in his files – in part to keep his name out there, but primarily to provide some income for his wife, Jane – he made it clear that these would be collaborations. When Jane reminded Mickey that I was not a Jehovah’s Witness and would likely indulge in more sex and violence than had been in his more recent work, he was fine with it.

Listen, these books are not pure Spillane. They are Spillane/Collins collaborations. I am not writing them by working with a Ouija board. I bring my own sensibilities in, but do not let them swamp Mickey’s. There are differences between Spillane and Spillane/Collins, just as in any good collaboration the end result is two plus two equals five. My Hammer novels reflect my wise-guy sense of humor more than Mickey’s Howard Hawksian male kidding. I do some of the latter, but I am not about to leave my wit behind when I work on Hammer.

I also tend to give Velda more to do. Mickey created a great character in her that I like to utilize, particularly in the post-Girl Hunters material. I also pay more attention to continuity than Mickey did. Like Rex Stout, Mickey paid scant attention to the details of continuity, though time-passage shifts in character (echoing his own over the years) are a huge part of his work.

I have tried to make sense of some things, to make them hang together. The origin for Velda (in the LP Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer Story) I re-reworked giving her a vice cop background that made it possible for Velda to get a PI license in New York state, and for her to have a reason to abruptly abandon Mike (in Kill Me, Darling) to pursue her vice cop boss’s murderer in Florida. (That novel, by the way, combined two Spillane manuscripts.)

So, yes, to some degree this is my take on Hammer, not Mickey’s. But, as I say, my mandate is to be consistent with the character as Mickey conceived him. And, further, to keep each Spillane/Collins novel in the context of when Mickey wrote the material I am working from. This means when I write King of the Weeds, I’m doing the older, Killing Man/Black Alley Mike Hammer; and when I’m putting together Kill Me, Darling and Killing Town, it’s the young Hammer of I, the Jury and My Gun Is Quick. Many of the books – The Big Bang, Kiss Her Goodbye, Complex 90 – were begun by Mickey in his “comeback” period, after The Girl Hunters (1962).

Some Hammer fans only like those first wonderful six ‘40s/’50s novels, from I, the Jury to Kiss Me, Deadly. Understandable, as those are masterpieces of the genre. I most enjoy writing about early, psychotic Hammer – from the very first novel about him (Killing Town) to exploring his descent into the bottle (Kill Me If You Can). But my job was to complete the books Mickey began – so if it was a ‘60s manuscript, the ‘60s Hammer was who I wrote about; if it was an early 21st Century manuscript, I wrote about that older Hammer. It was Mickey, not me, who put a cell phone in his hero’s hands.

I don’t mean to suggest that I’ve had a lot of criticism from Hammer fans – quite the opposite. And the reviewers have largely come around to the once reviled Mickey and Mike, through my efforts. It’s gratifying.

Still, it’s disappointing that a few hardcore Spillane/Hammer fans are denying themselves these novels, particularly ones like The Big Bang and Complex 90, which were announced during Mickey’s lifetime. When I remember how frustrating it was to be waiting for those books to come out – waiting and waiting and waiting – and now to glance across my office to the bookcase where the shelf of the Spillane/Collins hardcovers reside, and see those very titles looking back at me…wow. The long wait is over.

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Elsewhere – and here, a little – I’ve discussed the HBO reboot of Perry Mason. And I’m going to do that again – right now.

First, an interesting take on reboots from my eight year-old grandson, Sam. His father, Nathan, was telling him about the upcoming Teenage Mutant Turtles movie. Both Nate and Sam are Turtles fans, you see. Sam has a remarkable sense of what he’s ready for, in terms of pop culture that may not be appropriate for a boy his age.

Sam Collins is astonished to see his grandfather’s name on a book at the local library.

When Nate told Sam about the upcoming Turtles movie, Sam thought it might not be right for him. Nate asked him why.

“It’s a reboot.”

Nate said it was a reboot, yes.

“Well,” Sam observed, “reboots are dark.”

And isn’t that the truth. The Michael Keaton Batman, decades ago, started the trend – reboots had to be dark and serious and grown-up, even when the subject matter was inherently juvenile.

The HBO Perry Mason, which has considerable merits, is a case in point, sort of. Erle Stanley Gardner was one of the best mystery writers of his day, and remains eminently readable. His Mason novels are like James M. Cain stories combined with a mystery – the same Cain-like subject matter, sex and money, and (again, like Cain) display a genuine interest in how businesses work. Perry and his secretary Della Street had a warm relationship that one assumed was sexual, away from work…but we rarely saw them away from work. Mason and his detective, Paul Drake, reflected the way criminal lawyers work, i.e., with an investigator or investigative staff.

Mason, well into the 1950s, was something of a sleaze. Remember the line in Better Call Saul? “You don’t need a criminal lawyer…you need a criminal…lawyer.” Perry hid clients, messed with evidence, switched guns, broke and entered, and it was just delightful.

A lot of that went into the first few seasons of the original Raymond Burr series. Some of that gets into the good but not great HBO reboot. The second season of the new Mason was a big improvement, but it still suffers from anachronisms (it’s set in the early ‘30s) and with a subservience to current sensibilities. Some of that doesn’t hurt, even helps. Paul Drake, for example, is Black here, and lives in a Black part of town; this puts flesh on the Gardner Drake’s bare bones and is an enhancement. But do both Della and Hamilton Burger have to be gay? Isn’t one of them enough? Must Della be Perry’s pal and not sly lover? Must she really be a superior lawyer to Perry, even though she isn’t one? Did I really see him (and an unsympathetic judge!) allow her to handle a key courtroom cross-examination in a murder trial? In 1934?

Yikes.

But if you’re young enough, you won’t care; and if you’re old enough, and haven’t thrown anything through the screen yet, you’re in for some good acting, crafty plot twists and great production values.

My advice to the producers of this series (which will not be heeded) is to at least make Della bisexual so she and Perry can be more than good buddies. And stop using phrases like “throwing shade” and “gaslighting,” and instead make use of actual colorful ‘30s argot.

Also, read some Gardner and watch some Raymond Burr Perry Mason episodes. (I did a project with Burr and he was a wonderful, smart man with a great sense of humor. He was planning to have Perry marry Della in the final of the later TV movies.) Right now Paramount Plus is running the first eight (of nine) Perry Mason seasons. The series is also available on DVD.

Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale as Perry Mason and Della Street

To you mystery fans out there, I would recommend the many episodes based directly on Gardner’s novels. The non-Gardner-derived episodes are entertaining but cookie-cutter, where Gardner is a wild, unpredictable ride, rarely telegraphing which character will be the murder victim. The first season of the series consists almost entirely of adaptations of Gardner Perry Mason novels (or short stories) – something unique in the history of American broadcasting. The second season is about half Gardner adaptations, and then after that it’s more sporadic. As it progressed, the show was actually adapting Gardner novels within a year or so of publication! Toward the end of the long run of the series, remakes of adaptations were also made, under new titles.

I tried hard to find a list of the Gardner adaptations on the Internet, to no avail. I decided to put just such a list together, for myself and Barb and, dear reader, you. You are very welcome.

Perry Mason Episodes
Based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s Novels and Short Stories

Season 1 (1957 – 1958)
1. The Case of the Restless Redhead
2. The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece
3. The Case of the Nervous Accomplice
4. The Case of the Drowning Duck
5. The Case of the Sulky Girl
6. The Case of the Silent Partner
7. The Case of the Angry Mourner
8. The Case of the Crimson Kiss
9. The Case of the Vagabond Vixen
10. The Case of the Runaway Corpse
11. The Case of the Crooked Candle
12. The Case of the Negligent Nymph
13. The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink (pilot)
14. The Case of the Baited Hook
15. The Case of the Fan-Dancer’s Horse
16. The Case of the Demure Defendant
17. The Case of the Sun Bather’s Diary
18. The Case of the Cautious Coquette
19. The Case of the Haunted Husband
20. The Case of the Lonely Heiress
21. The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister
22. The Case of the Fugitive Nurse
23. The Case of the One-Eyed Witness
25. The Case of the Empty Tin
26. The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife
28. The Case of the Daring Decoy
29. The Case of the Hesitant Hostess
30. The Case of the Screaming Woman
31. The Case of the Fiery Fingers
32. The Case of the Substitute Face
33. The Case of the Long-Legged Models
34. The Case of the Gilded Lily
35. The Case of the Lazy Lover
37. The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde
38. The Case of the Terrified Typist
39. The Case of the Rolling Bones

Season 2 (1958 – 1959)
41. The Case of the Lucky Loser
44. The Case of the Curious Bride
45. The Case of the Buried Clock
50. The Case of the Perjured Parrot
52. The Case of the Borrowed Brunette
53. The Case of the Glittering Goldfish
54. The Case of the Foot-Loose Doll
58. The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat
59. The Case of the Stuttering Bishop
62. The Case of the Howling Dog
63. The Case of the Calendar Girl
65. The Case of the Dangerous Dowager
66. The Case of the Deadly Toy
68. The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom
69. The Case of the Lame Canary

Season 3 (1959 – 1960)
72. The Case of the Garrulous Gambler
79. The Case of the Lucky Legs
86. The Case of the Mythical Monkeys
87. The Case of the Singing Skirt

Season 4 (1960 – 1961)
111. The Case of the Waylaid Wolf
121. The Case of the Duplicate Daughter

Season 5 (1961 -1962)
139. The Case of the Shapely Shadow
144. The Case of the Mystified Miner

Season 6 (1962 – 1963)
166. The Case of the Shoplifter’s Shoe
175. The Case of the Velvet Claws

Season 7 (1963 – 1964)
184. The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito
187. The Case of the Reluctant Model
188. The Case of the Bigamous Spouse
197. The Case of the Ice-cold Hands
204. Case of the Woeful Widower (Fiery Fingers)

Season 8 (1964 – 1965)
224. The Case of the Blonde Bonanza
235. The Case of the Careless Kitten
239. The Case of the Grinning Gorilla
241. The Case of the Mischievous Doll

Season 9 (1965 – 1966)
244. The Case of the Candy Queen (Silent Partner)
246. The Case of the Impetuous Imp (Negligent Nymph)
255. The Case of the Golden Girls (Vagabond Virgin)
258. Case of the Vanishing Victim (Fugitive Nurse)
260. Case of the Sausalito Sunrise (Moth-eaten Mink)
265. Case of the Fanciful Frail (Footloose Doll)

M.A.C.

Rule #1: Never Respond to a Reviewer

Before we get started, I want to share this link for a nice if unexpected endorsement of the first Nathan Heller novel, True Detective, by Paul Davis of the Washington Times.

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I am going to share a review with you from the Borg site, a mixed one by C.J. Bunce, who has generally liked my work and to some degree likes it here. It’s almost never a good idea to respond to critics, but one aspect of the Borg review touches on a topic I feel requires at least some response. So I am going to take this opportunity – one writers generally do not get or at least have sense not to avail themselves of – to respond to that objection, and a few other negative aspects of the review. Let me say that as the author, my view is skewed and biased to say the least, and Bunce – a solid reviewer – has every right to his opinion.

Retro fix–Max Allan Collins’ giant Nolan novel “Spree” returns in 2-for-1 volume “Mad Money”

BORG: If you were going to stage a heist at a shopping mall, how would you do it? Would you steal from all the stores in the mall in the same heist? Back in 1987, when malls were still in their prime, Max Allan Collins made an attempt in the pages of Spree, his longest novel in the Nolan series. His anti-hero Nolan is the Michael Corleone of grime fiction – they keep trying to pull the retired thief back in just as he’s ready to settle down (Collins pulls him back in each of his 9 novels). Collins knows how to reflect the ugliest people in the ugliest of underworlds, and he does it by creating criminals in Missouri that would make New York mobsters look like wimps.

COLLINS: Is “grime fiction” a knowing pun or a typo? Is it a term that’s previously been used by Bunce and others? Just asking. If it’s purposeful, I might use it myself sometime.

BORG: Spree sees a reprint this year thanks to Hard Case Crime in a 2-for-1 edition called Mad Money. It’s bundled with Mourn the Living, another Nolan novel, and the last of a series of reprints that provide some of the best value around for pulp crime readers and fans of Collins’ unique voice. I thought the hillbilly Comfort family of Missouri was vile in the last Nolan novel I reviewed here at borg: Hard Cash, the fifth Nolan novel. I had no idea.

As you see in the cover of Mad Money and the other novels in the series with art by Mark Eastbrook, Nolan is Collins’ Lee Van Cleef lookalike, a bad guy who thinks he’s a good guy in a world of creeps and criminals even worse. With Spree, Collins again pushed the boundaries of pulp crime. It’s full of the writer’s brand of rough sex, racist characters, and violence we’ve seen in his Quarry series and earlier Nolan stories, but this time that includes threats of incest and underage sex, the kind of cringey content that paints the darkness into the story’s villains. It’s also the kind of shock and awe that would later make Quentin Tarantino win movie awards. It all goes full circle, because Nolan was inspired by Donald E. Westlake’s Parker novels, which inspired every other pulp crime writer, including Tarantino. Spree takes Collins into horror territory, something that may give readers a Silence of the Lambs vibe.

I’m still reading and enjoying Nolan novels, with five more to look forward to, but I think Collins’ effort to stretch out the word count of this book is reflected in page after page of padding. Collins is a master of brevity in his books, and he spent more time in this book with descriptions that neither enhance the mood and setting nor further its plot. At a few points his leads Nolan and frequent sidekick Jon even make mistakes that the characters I thought I knew from Bait Money, Hard Cash, and Skim Deep were too smart to do. Maybe I was wrong about them?

COLLINS: I don’t ever knowingly pad. I understand it might come off that way, and I do get accused of it from time to time; but it’s not something I do to plump up page count or whatever. Nor am I in particular a “master of brevity.” If anything I am criticized for writing too much description of setting and wardrobe, which has irritated some readers and reviewers. I don’t care. My object is to use setting and wardrobe for purposes of characterization.

The book is a longer one than the other Nolans and was, like Stark’s Butcher’s Moon, designed to be more in depth than the somewhat brief paperback originals preceding it, and in a way to sum up the series (also like Butcher’s Moon). If by padding, Bunce means more characters than usual, I am guilty. The narrative technique in the Nolan books is to immerse the reader in point-of-view chapters of various characters, some rather minor. I learned this – borrowed (stole) this – from Westlake’s “Richard Stark” persona. This technique is an effort to make the world seem bigger.

BORG: Here’s the set-up for Spree: Nolan’s nemesis, hick Comfort family patriarch Cole discovers where Nolan has landed: owning a restaurant/nightclub named Nolan’s attached to a typical 1980s mall in Davenport, Iowa. Nolan previously killed some Comfort family members in a past exploit, and Comfort decides it’s time for payback. He stakes out Nolan and his mall and, along with his son and daughter, kidnaps Nolan’s girlfriend Sherry. Cole tells Nolan he must help him rob all the mall stores or he’ll kill her.

Collins provides the minimal details to show how the heist might be possible, but not quite enough to make it believable. The players are numerous: a few guys who worked jobs with Nolan before, plus a set of shoot-first triplets who can fence the loot later. Sherry, the great, tough, equal to Nolan, is relegated here to the victim role, and the 1980s shine through with Sherry as the only woman lead of the story. The only other woman is Cole’s “slutty-looking” daughter, who Cole hits on because she looks like her mom. Yikes. In no doubt Jon’s worst moment of the series, he has sex with the teen (who worships Jon from his days as small-time rock band member), which is bad choice #1, then instead of holding her to swap for Sherry he just lets her go (bad choice #2). Nolan has his worst moment by not grinding the story to a halt and holding the girl for a swap, maybe slapping Jon a few times. The story also just stops, and we don’t get to see the aftermath, which is a disappointment after all the build.

COLLINS: Sherry is held captive and (SPOILER ALERT) frees herself by way of a combination of her courage and ingenuity. Hardly a “victim” role. The structure becomes a back-and-forth report on the heist Nolan and Jon are forced into mounting for Cole Comfort and Sherry’s captivity and her efforts to free herself. At the time, I considered this effective and well-handled…and I still do.

The punchline of the massive robbery is (SPOILER ALERT) when Nolan makes his accomplices put everything back. The last dozen pages are devoted to the “aftermath.”

Of course, Bunce has every right not to like how I handled this, and for it not to work on him. Fine. A novel is a collaboration between writer and reader, and sometimes that collaboration goes better than other times.

Now, however, we arrive at the reason I have chosen to respond to this review. Bunce appears to be object to (or be offended by?) Cindy Lou, Cole Comfort’s seventeen-year-old daughter, being described as “slutty-looking.” But that description comes not from an omniscient author, rather a character in the novel, in that character’s point of view. The reviewer considers Jon’s “worst moment of the series” as having sex with this teenage girl. It’s a “bad choice.”

As we say in the funnies, “sigh.” I run into this with modern reviewers all the time. They object to sexism but not to homicide. Jon is a traveling rock musician in his early twenties; Cindy Lou is seventeen (the age of consent in Iowa is sixteen – making their consensual tryst “cringey” perhaps, but not “underage”). Still, that may indeed be a bad choice. You know what else is a bad choice? Being an armed robber. This is similar to the reviewers who criticize Quarry for sizing up women based on their attractiveness. I guess you’d expect better behavior from a murderer.

Nolan’s “bad choice,” Borg informs us, is that the retired thief does not kidnap Cindy Lou and try to swap her for Sherry. So we’re in favor of kidnapping now. In fact, the second section of the book concludes with a discussion, almost an argument, between Jon and Nolan about whether to kidnap Cindy Lou for this purpose, and how that might play out (not well)…or instead to manipulate this unhappy, abused girl (yes, manipulate – shame on them!), into helping get Sherry back. One of the darkly comic aspects of the novel, and that specific scene, is that Nolan and Jon are not as bad as Cole Comfort. Still, that doesn’t make them “good.” And the story does not “stop” here – it’s a cliff-hanger at the end of a section.

Also, and this is key, certain aspects of how the heist will go down are not revealed until (wait for it) the heist goes down.

BORG: Nolan, Jon, Sherry, and the reader know there is no way Sherry is going to get out of this alive. That’s the story Collins tells, but not quite where it lands – Collins doesn’t stick the landing as satisfying as in his other works (whether in his Nolan, Quarry, Heller, or Mike Hammer novels). Nitpicking aside, appropriate bad guys get theirs, just not directly proportionate to their level of vileness, and that’s a shame. But the bookending Collins incorporates is clever and almost delivers some satisfaction.

COLLINS: This grudging praise is for an aspect of the novel that I am rather proud of – the resolution of both Sherry’s escape from captivity and what Nolan does about the mall robbery he’s been forced into engineering. The fates of Cole and Lyle Comfort are very satisfying to the author and I believe probably are to most readers.

BORG: Jon returns as a slightly older young version of Nolan – who also has all those interests of a young Max Allan Collins – a guy who wants to create comic books for a living. He’s lost his apartment, which drives him back to Nolan for help, where he meets Sherry. He’s at a down point in his life with Nolan, but that doesn’t explain his extra dose of bad judgment this round.

COLLINS: Again…it just may be possible that Jon’s bad judgment was when he decided to be a fucking armed robber. Here, when he (like Nolan) has moved away from that into a more acceptable mode of living – the ironic theme of the series is that all Nolan wants is to realize the American Dream – Jon is still paying for the genuinely bad choice he made in this series, i.e., robbing a bank with Nolan in the first novel (Bait Money).

By the way, the supposed aspects of my life and interests as expressed in the Jon character are exaggerated by Bunce and others. I use my knowledge of comics and being a rock musician to provide some verisimilitude. But nothing else in Jon’s background or frankly character is drawn from me. On the other hand, the Mallory character (in No Cure For Death and other early novels of mine) is me, which is why I don’t write about him anymore – too boring.

BORG: Is there a worse pulp crime family than Collins’ Comforts? I don’t think so. Spree is not a typical Collins quick read, and that epic mall heist only gets to what you could imagine as the montage sequence in the movie adaptation. If the film rights were exercised today, the cast would need to be better developed and the execution a bigger part of the story. Here the idea is so good, but the delivery not so much.

COLLINS: I guess faint praise is better than no praise at all. In the context of my career, Spree was the first Nolan novel I wrote after the early Nathan Heller books (none of which is a “typical Collins quick read”). In fact, the success of those early Hellers got me the contract to do Spree (and Primary Target). Spree was a hardcover (not a paperback original, like the previous entries) and was a story designed to have some heft (not padding).

BORG: It may not be Collins’ best, but it’s still fun, and it will keep you engaged. Order Mad Money, including Spree and Mourn the Living, here at Amazon, and check out the other double-trouble sets, Two for the Money, Tough Tender, and Double Down, and the final novel in the series, Skim Deep (reviewed here). I reviewed Hard Cash here and Bait Money here. Keep coming back to borg where we’ll double back to the second novels in these 2-for-1 editions from Hard Case Crime later.

COLLINS: I am grateful for the attention Borg/Bunce brings to this series, and mean zero offense by this response. But I consider Spree the best Nolan novel, and feel it resolves the larger issues of the series, and the specific ones of the narrative at hand, rather well. So much so that I considered the series finished till editor Charles Ardai talked me into doing a coda by way of Skim Deep.

I also know that Spree is the Nolan novel most often cited as the favorite (or best) in the series by readers. Considering Bunce’s speculation that a modern screen version of Spree would probably improve it, I’ll mention two related facts: my own screenplay of Spree was optioned several times (twice by Bill Lustig), and right now Lionsgate is developing a Nolan film…based on Spree.

I want to make it clear that C.J. Bunce is an able reviewer and the Borg a worthwhile review site. Visit them here.

The issues I touch on above are nothing I usually would have bothered discussing – they are strictly a matter of opinion, and no one is more biased than the author. What made break Rule #1 (never respond to a reviewer in print) (or otherwise) is what I’ll call (for want of a better term) the Political Correctness Issue.

The first time I encountered this was with the publication of Bait Money in 1973, when I was criticized for Nolan thinking of young women as “girls.” A forty-eight-year-old-man in 1971 (when I wrote the book at age 21) would hardly think of a young woman in any other terms. But I began being careful about that.

Nate Heller was another matter, and he continues to be. Reviewers would occasionally complain about his sexism and racism, among other isms. Heller is a man in this twenties in the early 1930s and we are with him until he’s in his fifties in the mid-1960s. I try to be true to who the character would logically be, and what is appropriate to the year at hand. I tend to use “colored” and “Negro” most often, but have occasionally been beaten up for that. Heller indeed sizes women up by their looks, and has certain sexist tendencies (he hangs out at Hefner’s Chicago pad and dates Playmates, Bunnies, strippers, models and showgirls). A early lost love followed by an unhappy marriage made him a shallow swimmer in the male/female relationship pool. But he also treats women as equals and I am proud of the depiction of the major female characters in the novels, from Sally Rand to Amelia Earhart to Marilyn Monroe.

None of these offended critics has ever commented on the fact that Heller frequently murders the bad guy, Mike Hammer-style. Not once. As Tarzan might say, “Sex bad. Violence good.”

Quarry, similarly, is mostly a ‘70s and ‘80s character with views and modes of expression appropriate to those times. (Quarry’s Blood is modern-day and an exception; but Quarry remains a guy born around 1950) (a murderer, by the way).

Is a guy in a rock band in the mid-1980s, in his early twenties, making a bad choice having casual, consensual, legal sex with a teenage groupie? I’ll leave that up to you. But reviewers cheerfully accepting murder from Jon, Nolan, Quarry, Hammer and Heller, without comment, is an interesting commentary on what we consider acceptable in a fictional narrative.

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A nice mini-write-up about the Antiques series is here (scroll down).

Finally, here’s an analysis of the graphic novel Road to Perdition.

M.A.C.

The Awesome ‘80s Prom & Memorial Day Thoughts

This past Saturday evening (May 27) Barb and I attended the Awesome ‘80s Prom put on by my buddy Chad Bishop, who is the producer of the Blue Christmas project. Chad is a fun, funny, gifted guy and the evening he put together was a blast. There were Arcade games (a whole room of ‘em), New Wave music, food and (spiked) punch, and potential prom kings and queens trolling for votes. It’s one of those almost-a-plays that have structured elements but also have a large cast circulating as characters (prom attendees) and make it an interactive event.

We were accompanied by Barb’s sister Judy and our brother-in-law Gary, who admittedly looked a little more like he was attending the Manson Family Reunion than the Awesome ‘80s Prom.

’80s Prom Goers!
Manson Family Reunion?* * *

J. Kingston Pierce, who for my money is the best friend the mystery/crime genre has here in the 21st Century, has posted info about the Blue Christmas crowd-funding effort – now in its final few days – that is better and more complete than I ever could:

Efforts by Iowa novelist Max Allan Collins to raise the money necessary to turn his A Christmas Carol-like detective short story, “Blue Christmas” (published in a 2001 collection), into a movie seem to be going well. With less than two days still to raise $5,000 through the crowdfunding site Indiegogo, he’s already brought in … $5,750!

Contributions are still being accepted here. As an incentive, if you pony up $25 to $500, Collins says you can write him at macphilms@hotmail.com to request copies of his older books to add to your collection. Click here to learn more about that offer.

Meanwhile, the author is hoping to score matching funds for this endeavor from the Produce Iowa-State Office of Film and Media’s Greenlight Grants program, which is designed to “support entrepreneurial projects that can accelerate business and careers in film.” Collins acknowledges, however, that there’s no guarantee he will succeed in this second venture, given the caliber of rival proposals. If Produce Iowa turns him down, he says he’ll mount a live production of Blue Christmas, which will be recorded.

More news on this matter to come.

Here is a link for the Rap Sheet post that includes this write-up.

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Girl Most Likely will be promoted via Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle book deals at Amazon, starting 6/1/2023 and running through 6/30/2023. The novel will be offered at 2.49 USD during the promotion period. If you haven’t tried one of the two Krista Larson novels, now is the time!

Fate of the Union (the second Reeder and Rogers thriller) is being offered during this same period at $3, and Flying Blind – one of my favorite Nate Heller novels – will be available at $1.99. The first of the three Reeder and Rogers novels, Supreme Justice, will be available at $2.99 for one day – June 3rd.

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The great Paperback Warrior has posted a terrific review of Double Down, focusing on one of the two Nolan novels therein: Fly Paper.

Nolan #03 – Fly Paper

Max Allan Collins’ Nolan series is his pastiche of Richard Stark’s Parker series. The third novel in the chronology was Fly Paper written in 1973 but not published until 1981. The book has recently been repackaged by Hard Case Crime in a twofer marketed as Double Down.

For the uninitiated, Nolan is a hard-nosed thief who makes a living pulling heists that inevitably run into problems. Much of this book’s focus is on Jon, Nolan’s comic book collecting sidekick. The action kicks off with a colleague named Breen, who has a good thing going with a parking meter rip-off scam. Breen was working the coin theft organized by the redneck Comfort family before those hillbillies shot and double-crossed Breen landing him squarely in Nolan and Jon’s orbit.

This leads to a plan to rip off the Comfort family in a heist-the-heisters kinda deal. The action moves from Iowa to Detroit in the shadow of a large comic book convention. The heist itself is really a side-dish in the paperback with the main course being the commercial airline getaway that is interrupted by a skyjacking.

Between 1961 and 1972, there were 159 skyjackings in American airspace with the majority between 1968 and 1972. It was a vexing criminal social contagion without a clear solution – similar to the problem America currently faces with mass shootings. Collins draws upon this phenomenon as the backdrop of Fly Paper when a married guy plans a D.B. Cooper style airplane heist with a parachute getaway.

When Nolan and Jon are coincidentally on the plane as the dude takes control of the jet, the plotting and action soar. These are the best scenes in a book I’ve read in ages. The creativity at work with the dilemma facing Nolan and Jon sets Fly Paper apart from other heist novels of the paperback original era.

Fly Paper is also unquestionably the best of the first three Nolan novels. The inclusion of Jon as a sidekick gives the book its own identity rather than just being a cover song from a Richard Stark Tribute Band. The skyjacking storyline was brilliant, and everything about his slim paperback leaves the reader wanting more. Highest recommendation.

I would take slight issue with this review only in that it describes the Nolan series as a “pastiche” of Westlake’s Parker series. I usually describe it as an homage, but Westlake himself said that the series was distinct from its inspiration by the inclusion of the surrogate father-and-son relationship of Nolan and Jon, which humanizes Nolan in a way Parker never approached (nor wanted to).

The review got me to thinking, though. The first Nolan and Jon novel, Bait Money, was designed as a one-shot and really was me trying out everything I had learned from the Parker novels – not just the heist artist aspect, but the strict Point of View approach. As some of you already know, my original version of Bait Money had Nolan dying at the end. My then-agent Knox Burger, who had always disliked that ending, encouraged me to do a different ending in which Jon came back and rescued Nolan. After the original version got six or seven rejections, the new version sold first time out.

The second Nolan novel, Blood Money, was a direct sequel to Bait Money, really the second half of the first story. The two novels have been reprinted in the single volume, Two for the Money, by Hard Case Crime.

So in a very real way, Fly Paper was my first shot at doing a Nolan novel in a series format. I would always leave dangling aspects to be picked up in later novels; but this was nonetheless a self-contained series entry. More would follow.

Don Westlake and I made several appearances together, notably at Mohunk Lodge mystery weekends (see Nice Weekend for a Murder), where in my speech to the assembled fans/mystery gamers I shared the fact that Don referred to me as the Jayne Mansfield to his Marilyn Monroe, and I corrected him, saying I was the Mamie Van Doren. I remember seeing him laughing his generous laugh in the audience upon hearing that.

Don is a friend who is gone, however vividly he lives in my memory. Mickey Spillane is gone, too, of course, though he is with me every day. So many writers I’ve known and read and liked, who I’ve gotten to know personally, are gone now – one of the aspects of being 75 that never occurred to me till I got here.

On Memorial Day I reflect on my Dad, who served in the Navy as described in USS Powderkeg, and my Uncle Mahlon and Barb’s dad Bill Mull, who both endured horrific combat and came home with memories that must have been a burden.

It’s risky for me to do this, but as I write this Update on Memorial Day, friends who have passed seem to be looking over my shoulder. I will cite some, but not all of them. A good number were in either of my two bands, the Daybreakers and Crusin’ (or both), starting back around ‘65.

Paul Thomas was my chief musical collaborator for decades in both the Daybreakers and Crusin’. He came in as a tech wizard who ran sound, developed into a fine bass player and later was our lead guitarist. He was funny as hell and it’s a rare day when I don’t think of him.

Others of my bandmates have passed and yet remain vivid in my mind. Bruce Peters, the troubled genius who was the best showman, the finest guitar player, the most incredible songwriter, and the single funniest human being I ever knew. I quote him regularly.

Terry Beckey was a great singer and bass player and also very, very funny – murdered, goddamnit, on the road. Like Paul Thomas, he came into the Daybreakers as the sound man and worked his way up to front man.

Chuck Bunn was our first real bass player, a guy who didn’t hold grudges, he cherished them. But no one was ever a better band member, putting together lighting systems and other gizmos for us in his spare time – he lived for the band. He died shortly after this appearance at Bouchercon.

Brian Van Winkle came in as the brother of our then guitar player Jim after Chuck passed. He developed into a fine bassist and performer, and was incredibly fun to be around. Like so many of my bandmates, he had a wonderful if unprintable sense of humor. He also was the gentlest and sweetest member either band ever had. He appeared with us at the Indication Concert at the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.

Most of my best friends – maybe all of them – have been creative collaborators. People like Phil Dingeldein, who is alive and well. But some of our film collaborators are already gone, like Steve Henke, the skinny, cranky pro who kept us honest. Steve was my chief collaborator on Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop.

Probably the loss among my Film Family felt most deeply is Mike Cornelison, the actor who guided me through all of my indie projects. Mike appeared in Mommy, Mommy’s Day, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market, and of course Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life. He also took the leads in four short films of mine and was the narrator of both Caveman and Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane. He played Pat Chambers in both of Stacy Keach’s audio productions of my scripts, The Little Death and Encore for Murder.

Mike had spent almost a decade in Los Angeles appearing on top TV shows and movies as well as starring in a trio of pilot films. He was knowledgeable in ways that turned me from a rank amateur into, well, an amateur who knows a little about what he’s doing.

On the Mommy movies, when Mike wasn’t working as an actor, he was my right-hand man, whispering in my ear when I got something wrong or needed to be doing something. He was also a pop culture expert and our conversations in that area were more fun than should be legal.

These are the friendly ghosts who walk with me through the remainder of my Act Three.

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The Dave Thomas/Max Allan Collins episode of Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast got rerun recently, and has generated some nice buzz for our novel The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton (have you read it yet?). And let’s raise a glass to Gilbert, as well, gone way too soon.

M.A.C.

55 Is Not the Limit! Barb and Me

Our wedding anniversary is coming up on June 1. It’s our 55th, a number that sounds more like a speed limit than a designation of how long two people have been together in a marital partnership. Barb and I have been a couple longer even than that – the fall of 1966 – and have known each other since childhood.

In the West Junior High band, here in Muscatine, Iowa, Barb was first chair trumpet and I was second chair. I was okay (not false modesty) but she was excellent. I tried several times to “challenge” her, the process by which you could unseat the person occupying the chair above yours. I failed miserably, and I would even say trying to play “Golden Gate” (the difficult piece she sadistically chose) was one of my more humiliating experiences, even in junior high terms, which is basically one humiliating experience after another. The band director actually interrupted my performance, saying, “I lost you somewhere, Mr. Collins.” Barb had already completed the impossible number flawlessly.

And yet I wound up marrying the girl who had visited upon me the most withering humiliation of my youth. This only goes to show how weak a male can be when a beautiful blonde is willing to go out with him. (I should also note that I quit band after junior high, concentrating on chorus.)

We were thrown together, in a way, because we were the only two of our extended crowds who had, after high school graduation, wound up at Muscatine Community College and not at the University of Iowa or some other institution of higher learning. Our first date in MCC days was to Wild Cat Den as part of a group that may have been a church one – I don’t recall. I only know I made clear to Barb how little I enjoyed the Great Out of Doors. Despite her lovely company, I had a terrible time, looking out for snakes and other small creatures bent on my destruction.

How we wound up on a second date, I will never know. We went to the nearby Quad Cities to a movie – possibly a drive-in – and I was trying to impress her with my brilliant gift of gab. She was quiet, occasionally nodding, and doing her best not to look glazed (she still does this when I am off on some verbal tear, which is frequent). She states that the moment she fell in love with me was when I put my hand in a water glass (during some brilliant monologue) and she had smiled and thought to herself, “He’s not so smart. I can put up with this.”

We were an item by Thanksgiving, disgusting our fellow students with our lovey-dovey behavior. It became obvious to me that, within this quiet lovely girl, was a smart, funny human being worth hanging out with forever. A crisis having to do with her mentally ill mother dragging Barb and two of her sisters across country (to Arizona) to get one of those sisters well from a supposed illness (undiagnosed) had only brought us closer together upon her inevitable return. Her mom’s general erratic behavior had a lot to do with why we decided to get married right after graduation from MCC – Barb was nineteen, I was twenty.

When I look back on these fifty-five years, I realize how very lucky I was and continue to be. While I tend to focus on my career, I don’t value anything more than my relationship with Barb. She has continued to amaze and amuse and delight me, and occasionally put me in my place. I had no idea – nor did she – that she would develop into such a wonderful writer. The Antiques series is a unique accomplishment and my co-authorship of Barb’s novels is among my proudest achievements. The son we produced, Nathan, is another.

Then there’s how beautiful she still is. I am obviously a shallow soul. I have been criticized for celebrating attractive women in my fiction – apparently I should have been celebrating harridans – but I admit that one of the great pleasures of my life is the many times each day when I glance at this lovely girl (yes, I know she’s a woman!) and think, “Wow. How can I be this lucky?”

On the other hand, it’s another reason for people to hate me. I get it. I would feel the same way. I’d be right there with you saying, “That lucky effing stiff.”

She may or may not read this. She reads my updates sporadically – after all, she is subjected to what I think every time we go out together. We’re easy to spot. She’s the beauty. I’m the beast with his fingers in the water glass.

* * *

The day this appears we will have seven days remaining on the Blue Christmas Indiegogo fund-raising effort. Just in case you were wondering what to get Barb and me for our wedding anniversary.

I will continue, this week, to honor requests from anyone who puts in $35 or more to do my best to fill in some blanks on their M.A.C. want list. Barb and I have sent out around fifteen packages so far, often containing one-of-a-kind items that I’ve parted with in gratitude for this support.

We do not know yet (soon, I hope) if we’ve nabbed a Greenlight grant, but even if we don’t, we intend to go forward with the best version of Blue Christmas we can. The Indiegogo $5000 (we are at 85% now!) will go toward matching funds, if we get the grant, or into the production itself, if we don’t.

Chad Bishop is the mastermind here, aided and abetted by Karen Cooney. Karen is the go-getter who went and got me to do Encore for Murder as a fund-raiser for the local Art Center. If I hadn’t had the experience of turning that one live performance into a multi-camera movie (or “movie”), I would not have got my filmic juices flowing again. Right now Chad and my longtime collaborator Phil Dingeldein (and a talented young woman named Liz Toal) are working hard to get other projects going, including Reincarnal and even Road to Purgatory.

I did not imagine at this age (75, choke) post-open-heart surgery that I would be back at filmmaking again. Few in that field have trod a weirder road than mine. Mommy and Mommy’s Day had respectable low budgets (half a mil and a quarter of a mil respectively); but after that, my then best friend slash producer stole most of the profits, and my subsequent productions have been put together with spit and chewing gum – Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life are respectively $10,000 and $15,000 productions but managed to get national distribution and some decent critical reaction.

And yet my graphic novel Road to Perdition became a $90 million movie (at the same time Real Time was shooting on a budget that maybe covered one day of stocking Perdition’s craft services table) and I made respectable money on two films I wrote but did not direct, The Expert and The Last Lullaby. The Quarry TV series at Cinemax, for which I wrote two scripts, also paid some bills.

Along the way there have been two documentaries (Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop) I wrote and directed, and three short films, and one I didn’t direct – A Matter of Principal – but wrote; that one was an award-winner and led to the feature, The Last Lullaby. By the way, that’s a Quarry movie with a great Tom Sizemore performance and it’s available on Amazon Prime right now.

I am the rare writer of prose fiction who will admit that he likes movies as much as books. I feel lucky, even honored, to have been able to do as much as I have in that arena, even if my own little movies have never made me a dime. The joys of collaboration – my friendships with the likes of Phil and Chad and the late Steve Henke, my creative collaboration with the late Mike Cornelison – are more reward than anyone could dream of.

Should I have gone to Hollywood and pursued that dream, as opposed to joining the fiction-writing ranks of Hammett, Chandler, Cain and Spillane? No. I do not have the temperament for what Hollywood puts writers through. Because movies are my side hustle, screenwriting for Hollywood on occasion is something I can abide. I would also probably have been married three or four times by now, and I refer you to earlier in this post for the reasons why that would have been a tragedy.

Last night I watched Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder on the local public access channel. Because we have landed a deal with VCI that includes both home video release and streaming for both the new expanded Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and Encore for Murder, we have decided not to offer either to the Iowa or Quad Cities branches of PBS. But my collaborator Chad Bishop runs Channel 9, Muscatine’s public access channel, and his participation in the project includes the right to show Encore there.

I had worked on Encore on a computer screen – on several actually – and have seen it projected on a full-size movie screen at our recent premiere showing. But this was the first time I’d seen it on my TV at home. And that was a thrill, because that’s the venue we had in mind. I refer to it as a “movie,” but really it’s a TV program. I thought it held up pretty well. When you consider that we only decided to record the play a few days out from dress rehearsal and its one public performance, it’s another of the small miracles that seem to litter my life.

And there’s nothing wrong with small miracles. You can enjoy them. The big miracles are so overwhelming, you can’t really enjoy them.

But I’m willing to try.

* * *

I did an interview with Jason Dehart on his podcast Words, Images, & Worlds that is fairly wide-ranging and covers some things that have rarely come up, like the influence of Hong Kong movies on my work.

This is a really good interview with my frequent collaborator, Matthew Clemens.

Here’s a way to access my Batman comic strip continuity with Marshall Rogers.

Here’s a free-wheeling interview that I really enjoyed doing – you might, too.

Finally, he’s a largely positive review of Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life.

M.A.C.

The Movies Keep Pulling Me Back In!

I’ve spent a lot of time here, at this update/blog entries, over the past year or so talking about Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer, and my efforts to complete Mickey’s work and to specifically celebrate the 75th anniversary of Mike Hammer’s first appearance in I, The Jury.

Hardcover:
E-Book:
Digital Audiobook:

A good deal of these posts have centered upon the biography written by Jim Traylor and me, Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction (and published by Mysterious Press). The response to that book has been terrific, and I have reason to hope our bio will be considered the definitive work on Mickey and will play a major role in getting this great and very influential mystery writer his due.

Lately here I’ve discussed certain Spillane-centric efforts of myself and longtime collaborator Phil Dingeldein, the Director and Photography (as well as Editor) on my indie films Mommy, Mommy’s Day, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life. We have expanded my 1998 documentary, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane, from 47 minutes to 61, covering the later few years of Mickey’s life and work as well as my project of completing his unfinished manuscripts (at his request in the final weeks of his life).

We also – and as I’ve reported here, did so last-minute and somewhat on the fly – recorded the performance last September in Muscatine, Iowa, of my Golden Age Radio-style play, Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder, capturing Gary Sandy’s charismatic performance as Hammer (he had starred in productions of Encore at Owensboro, Kentucky, and Clearwater, Florida, previously, and of course was Patty McCormack’s co-star in Mommy’s Day).

This fall the expanded Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane with Encore for Murder presented as a second feature will be out on home video from VCI Entertainment. VCI will be taking both the documentary and the edited/recorded play performance out to the streaming services, too. We are also in early stages of putting together definitive versions of Mommy and Mommy’s Day, having finally located their un-Filmlooked masters (not coincidentally Mickey appeared as Mommy’s lawyer in both).

Things on these updates will begin swinging back toward my own (and Barb’s) work, as only two more Hammer novels (one already delivered, Dig Two Graves) are planned. That may change, as Skydance has optioned all the Hammer novels (the solo Spillane and collaborative Spillane/Collins ones). A renewed interest in Mike Hammer and his creator, due to a new big-deal movie, could inspire me to go back to the files and see what of Mickey’s unfinished work remains.

Encore for Murder has led to a reawakening of my interest in filmmaking. I’ve continued to do the occasional screenplay (director David Wexler is prepping Cap City, based on the Spillane/Collins novella, “A Bullet for Satisfaction”) but I had thought, after my heart surgery and other medical fun-and-games, my moviemaking days were over, save for the occasional scripting job.

But working with editor Chad Bishop has revitalized me, and so we are moving from Encore – that little “movie” that sort of willed itself into existence – to Blue Christmas, based on my novella, a sort of Scrooge/Maltese Falcon mash-up. We have only a couple of more weeks on our Indiegogo campaign to raise $5000 that will provide some of the matching funds needed if our Greenlight grant comes through (and if it doesn’t, those funds will go into the production itself).

A good number of you have supported this effort and I appreciate it…very much. I have been offering perks here that are not part of the Indiegogo descriptions of levels of participation. What I’m doing is working with contributors to fill items on their M.A.C. want list, according to the level of their contribution; most of you will be thanked on screen. Here’s a window on the Indiegogo page. We are at nearly $3000 at this stage.

Anybody who contributes $35 will be recognized on screen. (Keep in mind my postage and handling for your perk, once we’ve decided via e-mail what you’d like, comes out of that $35.)

Our budget is probably going to be around $150,000, with “in kind” figured in – in kind covers things like meager-to-no salaries for actors and crew, local businesses supporting us with free lodging and food, etc. We are seeking a relatively small amount but need it to secure matching funds, often a requirement with grants, or to help cover cash outlay. Much of what we’re doing is volunteer and includes the support of Muscatine Community College, where we’ll be shooting much of the production in their Black Box theater.

Really, I anticipate putting on screen something like looks like at least a half-million-dollar production. (We did Real Time and Eliot Ness for $10,000 and $15,000 respectively.)

I am a believer in the notion that if the story is strong, and the performances and production professional

enough, you don’t have to have huge stars and Hollywood production values to make a satisfying movie. It’s a small miracle that we’ve done five features, two feature-length documentaries, and three award-winning shorts right here in this corner of Iowa. If you want to help us work another minor miracle, consider stepping up.

We are coming down the pike here. If you’ve been thinking about participating, now’s the time.

* * *

While I did not attend the Edgars this year – I can lose so much more easily at home than in a New York hotel – I was asked by the MWA to write about Mickey for their nifty program book. In that publication, a number of mystery writers were celebrated by other pros in the field in brief essays about why each of the chosen artists were worth, well, choosing.

This is what I wrote:

MICKEY SPILLANE
by Max Allan Collins

In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, TV private eyes were the rage. Among the first was Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958) with Darren McGavin, which I started watching when I was ten. Video P.I. series were often directly based on literary sources – The Thin Man, Phillip Marlowe, 77 Sunset Strip, Perry Mason – with the biggest hit, Peter Gunn, a Hammer variation. I haunted the spinner racks, using my buck a month allowance to buy 25-cent paperbacks by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Spillane books were considered “dirty,” and for a while I satisfied my urge just reading the jaw-dropping endings. I researched Hammett, Chandler and Spillane, discovering the first two were admired and celebrated, whereas Spillane was attacked as juvenile delinquent-breeding trash. I loved all three, so this made no sense to me. So began a lifetime of reading, defending and eventually getting to know Mickey, and having the privilege of turning his unfinished material into books.

Mickey defies literary appraisal – he is an unpretentious blue-collar ex-comic book writer, his first seven novels (six Mike Hammer mysteries) his most popular, significant work. But his amazing first and last chapters, distinctive first-person voice, and noir poetry on every page makes him more than just a pop phenomenon. For reasons explored in Mickey Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction (2023, co-written by James L. Traylor and me), he stopped writing novels for ten years at his popular peak. Returning for a longer run in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, he was back on the bestseller lists but overshadowed by Ian Fleming, the obscure British thriller writer Mickey’s publisher promoted during their star’s absence. Much of Mickey’s later career was media-driven – he starred in two movies (as Hammer in The Girl Hunters, 1964) and spoofing himself in an eighteen-year (!) run of Miller Lite commercials. A household name in the 20th Century, Spillane demands reappraisal as the writer who re-invented private eye fiction, and whose success sparked the creation of paperback originals, with Hammer the template not just for Bond but Dirty Harry, John Shaft and every vigilante-tinged tough guy who came after.

* * *

Here’s a nice gallery of Hard Case Crime covers, including some of mine. [The site creates galleries from Tumblr hashtags and may contain NSFW content –Nate]

Here’s a mixed review from the somewhat accurately self-described B-Movie Enema. What this reviewer doesn’t understand is that reviewing a movie off You Tube is not the ideal place to judge its lighting, production values or audio (very hissy on You Tube, we’re told – like Gomer Pyle once said, “Surprise, surprise!”). Still, he makes some interesting points. But the major point he makes, inadvertently, is that we are lucky we found the original pre-Filmlook masters for a re-release of both Mommy movies next year.

By the way, the same reviewer liked Mommy a lot more. A lot. He really appreciates Rachel Lemieux’s terrific performance.

I do hope this reviewer will revisit the sequel when he realizes (a) you shouldn’t judge how a movie looks or sounds on You Tube, and (b) you shouldn’t expect the sequel to be exactly like the original.

M.A.C.

Encore for “Encore”!

It was a big weekend for the movie version of our Golden Age Radio-style play, Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder.

M.A.C. and Editor/Producer Chad Bishop introduce Encore for Murder

Friday evening at Muscatine Community College, with much of the cast in attendance, Encore received its first public screening at the college’s “Black Box” theater. The turnout was fine – around 75 humans, some of whom came a considerable distance.

Uber-fans Mike and Jackie White from Bloomington, Illinois — they attended the live performance back in September, too!

My son Nate came from up the street, but that was a trip much appreciated by his pop. Others, like my old bandmate Charlie Koenigsaecker and his sister Karlyn (and a friend), came from Iowa City.

M.A.C. and Karen Cooney, co-director of the stage play, answer questions from the audience at the Muscatine Community College ‘Black Box’ theater.

I had not seen our little movie in a theatrical setting – or on a big screen at all – and didn’t know what to expect or how I’d react. The intention of editing our considerable amount of footage – four HD cameras shooting two dress rehearsals and the one-time-only performance – was to create (a) a record of what we accomplished, and (b) a video presentation that could be enjoyed at home.

The latter is how Encore will likely be experienced almost exclusively, as we have not entered it in further film festivals (more about that below) much less plan to offer it for theatrical exhibition. The most significant aspect of our little flick’s big weekend was that Friday afternoon I signed a contract with VCI Home Entertainment for them to bring out Encore as a sort of double-feature with our recently expanded (from 47 minutes to 61 minutes) documentary, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane, which we shot and assembled back in 1998. Encore is essentially a bonus feature, although it is actually half an hour longer than the film it supports.

It’s possible Encore will be issued separately and may be offered to streaming services as well. Seeing how well it played to the audience at MCC’s Black Box theater on Friday night is certainly encouraging. From the start, I wasn’t sure what we had.

The VCI release may happen as early as next October, by the way. Stay, as they say, tuned.

As some of you know, Encore began as one-page synopsis Mickey wrote for a book that he never wrote (it may have been intended to be a Stacy Keach TV movie). In 2009 I was approached to write two Mike Hammer audio novels, each of which would be around three hours long, with Keach as Hammer supported by full casts drawing upon Chicago talent, including the likes of Saturday Night Live’s Tim Kazurinsky, and with my pal Mike Cornelison as Pat Chambers. The first, The Little Death, came out in 2010 and won the Audie for Best Original work. The second, Encore for Murder, came out in 2011, and was nominated for the same award.

In 2010, I was asked to stage Encore, in Golden Age Radio style, at a mystery festival in Owensboro, Kentucky. Gary Sandy, an area resident there in Kentucky, would play Mike Hammer – Gary had been one of the leads in my movie Mommy’s Day (1996) and we were old pals. The director and several cast members were veterans of the great comedy group Firesign Theater, so I would be in good hands.

Encore was well-received at Owensboro, although the production was strictly Golden Age Radio-style – actors with scripts at microphones, a Foley artist in the pit.

In 2018, Encore for Murder, again with Gary Sandy as Mike Hammer, was staged in the Murray Theater at Ruth Eckerd Hall by legendary Broadway producer, Zev Buffman. Zev presented it as a hybrid of a Golden Age Radio-style production (i.e., actors using scripts at microphones) but mixed in theatrical elements, including costuming, and a musical score, with the Foley table on stage and utilizing a big projection screen for scene-setting slides. I had been skeptical of this approach, but I was wrong.

Last year, when I was approached by local theater maven Karen Cooney about doing a Golden Age Radio Show-style play as a fund-raiser for the local Art Center, I offered Encore for that purpose. Karen pushed me to approach Gary to reprise Hammer, but I was reluctant, as we had zero budget. But I gently broached the subject with him…and he was immediately on board. And he had no intention of asking for a fee for a fund-raiser.

The cast rehearsed without him for several weeks – I sat in as Hammer. We had two Iowa-to-Kentucky phone calls with Gary and ran the script in our first run-throughs with our star. Privately, he gave me notes for the cast, but was overwhelmingly positive and, like me, was surprised by how on target they were. I had already dragged Barb to the second rehearsal to see if my judgment was correct – were these people good, or did I just want them to be? Barb, a tough critic, said they were indeed very good.

Gary showed up a day early for the two days and one performance he’d agreed to, and I got in touch with my longtime movie collaborator Phil Dingeldein. I convinced Phil to shoot the performance and encouraged him to grab the two dress rehearsals. I was starting to think we had something.

So the shooting was both spur-of-the-moment and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants. Fortunately Chad Bishop – our contact with the college, where we’d been rehearsing, and the very funny, skillful Foley artist who would be on stage throughout – was adept with camera himself, and collaborated with Phil in camera placement. We would have a surprising number of angles to choose from, since we were shooting two rehearsals.

The audience at the live performance was pretty much standing room only, and the whole cast was good, but Gary – a very skilled stage performer – owned the place. His Hammer struck me as just right – tongue-in-cheek when he needed to be, gently kidding the material (much as Darren McGavin and Stacy Keach both had) but tough as nails when necessary. The audience got on board quickly with the potentially off-putting format of actors using scripts in what split the difference between a performed play and a staged reading.

It’s a bit of blur how we edited it together, Chad and I. But we did and I enjoyed working with this imaginative and very skillful editor. And I loved being back in an editing suite again, which is where a movie is made. I shake my head when I hear about bigtime directors walking away while an editor does a “first assemblage.”

When we finished, I was well aware we had something that was neither fish nor fowl. Encore really required an audience to get on board with the Golden Age Radio format to enjoy it. Live, Gary’s infectiously enthusiastic performance swept up the crowd. I didn’t know whether that would be conveyed in a recorded version, and was too close to the material to tell.

One of the first things I did, when we completed the edit, was enter Encore in the Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival and the Iowa Motion Picture Awards, competitions where I have done very well in the past. Cedar Rapids did not nominate us and that was a blow. But the four categories we entered in the Iowa Motion Picture Awards resulted in three nominations. Ironically, the one category in which we were not nominated was Editing, and I knew that if Encore was anything, it was a triumph of editing over material that had not been intended for the purpose we were putting it to.

For example. We had four cameras going on performance night, and only two camera persons on them – Phil and Chad’s assistant Jeremy Ferguson. One of those cameras shut itself off – the crucial angle – and did not record the last fifteen minutes of the performance. So we had to create a new last fifteen minutes from the recordings of the two dress rehearsals and the remaining three camera angles from the performance.

Other times, where a line was flubbed on performance night, we had to loop in dialogue from a dress rehearsal. All the sound mixing (music included) was done live, on stage, by Foley artist Chad. We turned the two-act play into one continuous narrative, cutting about five minutes.

Really, we shouldn’t have been able to come up with anything at all…and maybe Cedar Rapids was right.

Saturday night, in Forest City, Iowa, at an event I could not attend (more later), I won the Award of Excellence for Direction and the feature itself won an Award of Achievement (essentially, second place in the feature film category).

In defense of any judge looking at Encore, they would be quite within their rights to squint at what we did and shake their heads and say, “What is that, anyway?” Because Encore is something of a unique animal.

It has a strong, even charismatic performance by an actor with a classic TV sitcom and Broadway starring roles on his CV. But the rest of the cast is unknown – semi-pros and amateurs, all from a little town in Iowa. The actors hold scripts. Mike Hammer’s gun is a pointing forefinger. Actors play several roles. It’s radio. But you can see it.

I will not likely enter Encore in any festivals because what happened at Cedar Rapids is likely to happen again. The judges either won’t know what it is they’re supposed to judge, or they will only sample the piece – watch the first five minutes or so – and dismiss it…when you have to take the ride to get anywhere. If you experience Gary’s performance, and my snappy, pretty funny script, which progressively builds, you will have a good time.

I am told some excellent films were shown at Cedar Rapids, and I don’t doubt that. It’s a fun festival and I wish we’d been in it, and I think their walk-in audience – the theater is on Collins Road, after all – would have got a kick out of Encore. But we will settle for our two IMPA awards, and a signed contract for home video and streaming release.

Iowa Motion Picture Association President Jim Brockholn accepts two awards for the absent M.A.C. for Encore for Murder.* * *

I mentioned in passing that Barb and I weren’t able to drive to Forest City, Iowa, to attend the Iowa Motion Picture Awards. Though it’s a long drive (four hours one way), we were looking forward to it. Hotel booked and everything. But then last Sunday I had another episode with a-fib and wound up at the hospital on Tuesday.

I wasn’t in over night, but I had what I think is my fifth cardioversion procedure, and this one has been a bitch from which to recuperate. Today (Sunday again) I am finally feeling like me. I was fearful I wouldn’t be up for attending my own movie premiere Friday night (!), but I did fine. Nothing like laughter and applause to make an old ham’s aches and pains go away.

My future likely holds another procedure – ablation – and I must assure my friends and readers that considering the laundry list of things wrong with me, I feel fine and am doing fine. But this has finally slowed me down.

On the other hand, I am at my best when I’m working, so I think you’ll see more stuff flying out of my printer in the days, months and maybe even years ahead. Maybe not as much, but more than most.

* * *

At the Encore premiere, we did something of a pitch for support (financial and otherwise) for our next planned production, Blue Christmas. We should know this month if we get a piece of that Greenlight grant. If not, we’ll find a way to make it just the same.

But I continue to offer perks here that are not on the Indiegogo site. Depending on how much you pitch in, I will work with you to come up with things from your M.A.C. want list that I can fill. Write me at macphilms@hotmail.com. Make your donation at the Indiegogo site and then e-mail and let me know how much you’ve kicked in.

In the Q and A after Encore, Barb called out that she had paid $500 to be an Associate Producer. I responded, “Young lady, if you sleep with the director, you can be an Executive Producer.” Got a huge laugh, including from her.

We are past the half-way mark money-wise with about twenty days to go. Your name will be on screen and NOT in tiny letters, I promise.

M.A.C.

About Losing the Edgar

Before I discuss losing the Edgar, I want to mention a winning promotion from Thomas and Mercer on certain of my titles on e-book.
True Detective () and True Crime () (the first two Nathan Heller novels) will be offered at $1.99 via Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle book deals in the US marketplace, starting 5/1/2023 and running through 5/31/2023. Also on sale at Amazon during that period are three titles by me and my buddy Matt Clemens – What Doesn’t Kill Her () ($1.99), Fate of the Union () ($.99) and Executive Order () ($3).

* * *
Trade Paperback:
E-Book:
Digital Audiobook:

I, of course, did not win the Edgar for Best Paperback, but I assure you I was convinced I wouldn’t. I didn’t go to New York for the ceremony, which – if I thought I had a hootin’ chance in hell – I would have.

Quarry’s Blood is the 16th entry in a series that began in 1976 (actually 1971), and novels in long-running series almost never get nominated by the Edgars. Furthermore, the Quarry novels are perceived by more delicate readers as nasty, and they aren’t necessarily wrong. In any event, I am grateful to those of you who have made Quarry and me a cult success.

This experience – sitting at home, not even remembering that the Edgars were going on in New York while Barb and I watched a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode – was a very good one. Why? Because I have always taken awards too seriously. I have always wanted to win them, being naturally competitive, which has largely been a positive thing in my career, a driving force if you will.

But at this ripe old age I now realize how meaningless awards are. Well, relatively meaningless. If Jim Traylor and I do not get an Edgar nomination for Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction, I guarantee you it will disappoint me. But if we don’t get an Edgar nomination, what is the difference, ultimately? Our Spillane bio is no less definitive and ground-breaking if it does not receive a nomination.

On the most basic level, I have looked at awards as the kind of validation that can keep me in business – much the same way good reviews can benefit a writer’s reputation. A wise soul once said, “If you believe the good reviews, you have to believe the bad reviews, too.” So I have never allowed myself to believe that an award, or a good review, is anything but an opinion, and a potentially useful sales tool. Awards don’t make me a good writer, nor do good reviews. Readers liking my work make me a good writer; editors liking my work make me a good writer; sufficient sales make me a good writer. Or anyway keep me in business.

My father was a respected, even beloved member of our small community (Muscatine, Iowa, has a population of around 25,000 residents). In the early ‘50s, he was the first high school music teacher to mount productions of Oklahoma and Carousel, attracting national attention (they were excellent productions, too). When he left teaching to go into industry as a personnel man, he hired hundreds of people in this community who loved him for it. At the same time he directed a male chorus (the Muscatine Elks Chanters) – for fifty years! – that won so many national championships that the competition was shut down and the Chanters were made the permanent champs. That chorus is gone now because my father is gone – he was their engine and a genius who could make any group of random men sound like a professional chorus.

When he passed, Barb and I stood looking at a wall of award plaques and a tabletop of awards representing all his triumphs and achievements. All but a handful went into the trash. We did not do this cavalierly, but realistically – where would we display them? Where would we store them? We selected the most important ones and the rest of these once precious items, we tossed.

I have – what is the polite term? – a shitload of awards on display in my office and the really important ones are in the living room. Of these, I think my family is likely to hold onto the ones I prize most highly – my Grand Master Edgar from the Mystery Writers of American and my three Shamus awards. Maybe my lifetime achievement from the PWA. Otherwise, it’s probably into the landfill with awards that at the time (and for some time thereafter) meant a lot to me.

Artists – and I am one – are always looking for validation, because the two inescapable facts about all artists (every damn one of them) is their insane confidence in the value of their work and their inner fear that they are frauds. Too much confidence, and no confidence at all. That is the cocktail from which every artist drinks.

If they say otherwise, they are lying, or about as reflective as a broken mirror.

You bet I would like to have won an Edgar for Quarry’s Blood. But I was lucky, incredibly lucky, for that kind of recognition for my fifty year-old series, which happens to be littered with sex scenes and carnage and sometimes black humor (in questionable taste). There were over 250 submissions for Best Paperback, and I made the cut.

Charles Ardai, my great editor at the great Hard Case Crime, insisted I write an acceptance speech, “just in case” (he, too, accurately felt the odds were very much against me).

Anyway, this would have been my acceptance speech (delivered by Charles):

“Quarry was created at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop in 1971. Looks like we both have finally graduated. My thanks to editor Charles Ardai (who did not insist I say this) for giving me the opportunity to revive this cult character. And also, for inspiration, to my late mentor Donald E. Westlake, who reminded me that a cult author is seven readers short of making a living.”

* * *

Paul Davis, who writes about crime fiction at the Washington Times, wrote an astonishing three pieces about Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction. This incredible attention was followed by a favorable reaction to the new Nate Heller novel (from Hard Case Crime), The Big Bundle. He interviewed me about it, and here it is:

A Private Eye Witness To History: My Washington Times On Crime Column On Max Allan Collins ‘The Big Bundle’

This interesting and insightful crime novel is about a fictional private eye traversing through a begone era and a true and once famous child kidnapping.

In “The Big Bundle,” Max Allan Collins’ 18th novel featuring Nathan Heller, the private detective appears alongside Robert F. Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa, as well as historical crime and law enforcement figures involved in the real-life kidnapping of a millionaire’s son in 1953.

I contacted Mr. Collins and asked him to describe “The Big Bundle.”

“In many respects, it’s a private eye thriller in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane,” Mr. Collins replied. “I was moving to a new publisher, Hard Case Crime, and knew their audience was steeped in hardboiled fiction and might be put off by the famous crimes I usually look at in a Nathan Heller novel. The real-life case in ‘The Big Bundle,’ quite well known in the 1950s but forgotten now, allowed me to put the emphasis on the noir aspect of the Heller novels and not be accused of teaching a “history lesson.”

How would you describe Nathan Heller?

“Heller is a businessman who starts out in a small office where he sleeps on a Murphy bed and winds up with a coast-to-coast detective agency. He is not the typical Phillip Marlowe-style modern-day knight who would never take a bribe or seduce a virgin — Heller has done both and often indulges in situational ethics. Unlike most fictional private eyes, he marries (more than once) and is a father and had a father and mother and even grandparents. He ages with the years. At any age, Heller recoils at injustice in society and serves up rough justice when he feels it necessary. He not only knows where the bodies are buried, he has buried more than his share.”

Why have you written a series of crime novels based on historical events with a fictional character interacting with historical figures?

“Rereading ‘The Maltese Falcon’ for a college class I was teaching in the early 1970s, I noticed the 1929 copyright. I had a light-bulb moment: The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was 1929 — Sam Spade and Al Capone were contemporaries! Instead of Mike Hammer meeting a Capone type, I could have Capone meeting a Mike Hammer type. It was a fresh way into a form that had gone stale,” Mr. Collins (seen in the bottom photo) explained. “What evolved, from the initial novel about Frank Nitti’s Chicago (“True Detective,” 1983), was Heller solving famous unsolved or controversially solved crimes, like the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Black Dahila murder, the assassinations of Huey Long and JFK. Often, I substitute him for a real detective involved in a case. Heller becomes a sort of ‘private eye witness’ to history.”

How did you research the history that you use in “The Big Bundle”?

“Less was available about the Greenlease case than with most mysteries Heller has tackled — both Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, the Roswell incident, required dealing with a staggering number of books and voluminous newspaper and magazine material. Only a handful of books about the Greenlease kidnapping existed to draw upon in “The Big Bundle.” But the political aspect — Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa’s involvement in the aftermath of the ransom’s disappearance — meant referring to several dozen nonfiction works, as well as the usual newspaper and magazine articles, which the kidnapping itself also generated. The idea is that I prepare to write the definitive nonfiction book on a real crime or mystery. Then I write a private eye novel instead.”

Did you discover anything in your research that surprised you about the kidnapping and other elements you use in your novel?

“Automobiles were everywhere in the narrative, befitting the postwar boom in car buying and interstate travel. Key events took place at a famous no-tell motel, the Coral Court, outside St. Louis. A crooked taxicab company was caught up in the probable theft of half the ransom, and every criminal in the case seemed either to drive a Caddy or want to — purchased inevitably at one of the many Midwestern Cadillac dealerships owned by the kidnap victim’s father.”

Do you plan to continue the Nathan Heller series?

“Too Many Bullets” has been completed, with Heller present in the pantry at the Ambassador Hotel when Robert Kennedy was shot. It’s an open-and-shut case, supposedly, yet the research indicates otherwise. In many respects, the real story is like something out of Raymond Chandler: hit men, crooked cops, a crazy hypnotist, a duplicitous showgirl. That comes out in October, again from Hard Case Crime. There may be one more after that. The degree of difficulty here is high, however, and I just turned 75, so it depends on how well Heller and I hold up.”

* * *

CBR.com has this good article about the comic book roots of Mike Hammer.

For those of you close enough to Muscatine, Iowa, to consider attending, here’s the info about the screening of Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder starring Gary Sandy this coming Friday, May 5.

And finally thanks to those of you who have contributed to the Indiegogo campaign for Blue Christmas, and I hope more of you will consider pitching. We’re just under $1700 (of the $5000 goal) with about a month left to go.

M.A.C.

Encore for Filmmaking

This new e-book collection of the three John Sand spy thrillers by Matthew Clemens and me is available from Wolfpack and, for the first time, includes Murderlized, a collection of our stories, one of which is the first John Sand story.

E-Book:

An informal meeting of Quad Cities area filmmakers was put on at dphilms on Saturday, April 24. Since I‘ve largely been away from indie filmmaking in the area – though of course I’ve done some screenwriting in the interim – it was a nice opportunity to see some new and old (and in between) faces.

Quad Cities Filmmakers Meet at Dphilms, Rock Island. Chad Bishop and Max Collins at far left, Phil Dingeldein centerstage (next to colorful painting).

I had frankly thought filmmaking was behind me. The last thing I shot was an award-winning short in 2007 called “An Inconsequential Matter” starring my friend and longtime collaborator, Michael Cornelison (it’s a bonus feature on the Eliot Ness Blu-ray (), with excellent cinematography by Phil Dingeldein). Mike had starred in both the stage and movie version of Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life in 2005, as well as narrated Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and my comics-history documentary, Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop (). Mike worked with my right up to the end of his too short life, appearing as Pat Chambers on both Mike Hammer audio presentations, “The Little Death” (winner of an Audie for Best Original Work) in 2010 and “Encore for Murder” (nominated in that same Audie category) in 2011.

Losing Mike – who was as valuable a collaborator to me as is my friend Phil – took the wind out of my filmmaking sails. I have, of course, had some things happen since then in the movie realm – we sold Heller to FX and I wrote the pilot (never produced), Quarry became an HBO/Cinemax series in 2016 (and I wrote an episode) and I’ve written a screenplay, Cap City, for director David Wexler. Recently, Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher by Brad Schwartz and me has been optioned by CBS Films, Nolan has been optioned by Lionsgate, and Mike Hammer (not just Mickey’s novels but the joint Spillane/Collins ones) just closed a deal at Skydance. Some serious interest is also afoot for the Antiques series, Ms. Tree and Fancy Anders.

With Hollywood, you never know, but there has been a lot going on. The truth is, on these projects my direct involvement is likely to be limited to being the source writer and a consultant, and maybe getting to write an episode of anything that goes to series (Hammer appears to be on track for a feature film, which is great, but there’s no way I would get to write it).

After my heart and cancer surgery, I figured my moviemaking days were over, and they may largely be. We shall see as we shall see. But the “instant” movie that Encore For Murder with Gary Sandy became – a rather last minute decision to shoot the live semi-pro production with multiple cameras – is what really got me going. Sitting with the gifted Chad Bishop in his editing suite, seeing our little movie come to life, reminded me how much I love doing that kind of thing.

This is a good time to remind you that – if you are close enough to Muscatine, Iowa, to make the trip (the Merrill Hotel is great, by the way) – Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder, the movie, will be shown at 7 p.m. on Friday, May 5, at Muscatine Community College. The details are here.

We will also be answering questions about our upcoming production of Blue Christmas, my return to serious indie movie production. Chad Bishop, my producer on the project, will be present as well as much of the Encore cast (not Gary Sandy, though).

If you’ve dropped by here in recent weeks, you’ll know that we have launched an Indiegogo crowd-funding effort to raise a mere $5000 (of course in Iowa five grand is not “mere”) intended either to provide some matching funds required by the Greenlight Iowa grant we’re going after, or (should we not get that grant) to help fund a version of Blue Christmas along the lines of a recorded live production a la Encore (however not Golden Age Radio style – plenty of bells and whistles).

As an incentive strictly to those of you nice enough to show up here at my weekly Update, I will offer a perk to anyone who comes in at any level by way of some item from your M.A.C. want list. Now somebody at the $25 or $35 level needs to be sane about what books and such they put on their want list. Larger contributions mean you can shoot higher and, in any event, I will do my best to make it worth your while. (This has a nice Nate Heller sleazy sound to it, doesn’t it?)

Your name will go in the credits at the $100 level, and at $500 you get screen credit as an Associate Producer, enabling you to impress your more gullible friends. There are other perks mentioned at Indiegogo, and at that level you can probably talk me out of something rare from my private stash.

An Executive Producer credit is available at (choke) $2000.

As I write this we are at $1440 – 28% of our goal, with a little over a month left on the campaign.

* * *

For those of you with a twisted sense of humor, I have a couple of film recommendations for you.

Just debuting this past week on Hulu – wholly unexpected to me – is the latest from the Broken Lizard comedy team, Quasi, the only Quasimodo movie that lacks a bell tower. I love Broken Lizard. They are masters of smart dumb comedy. The movie everyone knows – and most comedy fans adore – is Super Troopers. They write the scripts together and – with the exception of the crowdfunder Super Troopers 2, produced a decade and a half later – always go after a different subject or genre. Hence, Super Troopers 1 & 2 (cops), Club Dread (horror films), Beerfest (well, beer), Slamin’ Salmon (the restaurant game), and now Quasi (historical epic). Various team members have taken the “hero” role in these films, and various of them have directed, most often prolific TV director, Jay Chandraskekhar, although Kevin Heffernan directed both Slamin’ Salmon and Quasi.

The humor in Quasi comes from a cheerfully anachronistic approach to dialogue and a sweetness surprising for a film depicting somebody’s ballsack being nailed to a wooden block. It recalls Monty Python’s Holy Grail (the Broken Lizard guys each play multiple roles) and Start the Revolution Without Me, but despite the nonstop silliness, Quasi is more concerned with story than either of its two probable inspirations.

I watched it twice.

As I’ve mentioned before, a while back Barb and I saw Broken Lizard perform live at the Englert Theater in Iowa City and got to spend some time with them after. They were nice, normal human beings, funny and approachable, exhausted from the show they’d just presented but signing all of our DVDs and Blu-rays with patience and even joy. (Probably helped that I had their somewhat obscure first outing, Puddle Cruiser.)

Streaming on Peacock, the already notorious Cocaine Bear proves to be the funniest gory movie since Evil Dead 2. Its humor is a blend of Coen character eccentricities, Three Stooges slapstick, and jawdropping carnage. It’s largely about parenthood – specifically, motherhood. I realize some horror fans want it to be even gorier and dislike the amount of humor – for me, the fact that I’m laughing to the point of pain while watching humans getting torn apart strikes just the right balance.

* * *

Back Issue, an outstanding magazine on comics history, covered my brief run (one continuity) on the Batman comic strip. It’s really in depth with lots of Marshall Rogers art, and I would encourage you to seek it out.

Finally, here’s a decent Kirkus review of the imminently forthcoming Mad Money, collecting Spree and Mourn the Living, the last of Hard Case Crime’s reprint series of the Nolan novels.

M.A.C.

Please, Sir, I Want Some More…Money

We have about a month and a half to raise $5000 for our movie of Blue Christmas (we’re at $550 as I write this). It’s your opportunity to help us make a good little film, and to see your name on screen – being thanked, or even given a claim to fame as an Associate Producer or (if you’re flush and really want to pep up your resumé) Executive Producer.

Physical media-type perks have not been offered, but I’m going to give the nice folks who drop by here an opportunity that isn’t part of the Indiegogo page. If you contribute $25 to $500 range, write me at macphilms@hotmail.com and include a list of books by me that you are lacking in your M.A.C. collection…hard to find, out of print, and/or pricey stuff. I’ll do my best to send you something, signed (personalized if you like) from that list. If I can’t comply, we’ll discuss other options via e-mail. Don’t ask for first editions of True Detective, True Crime, Stolen Away (hardcover), or the original trade edition of Road to Perdition unless you are going in at the Associate Producer level (a few pages of original art from Ms. Tree, Wild Dog and Mike Danger would be available at that level). If you’re interested in being an Executive Producer, we’ll talk.

Associate Producers and of course any Executive Producer will be able to arrange a visit to the set.

Again, this offer is not being mentioned on the Indiegogo page. This is for readers of the F.O.M.A.C. blog.

As I’ve mentioned before, there is a Plan A and Plan B for Blue Christmas. Plan A will require our receiving a grant from Produce Iowa’s Greenlight competition. Chad Bishop has put together a presentation for us that is absolutely outstanding, but the competition is considerable. Reaching the goal in the Indiegogo campaign will help us come up with the necessary matching funds, should we prevail.

If we are not a recipient of funds from Iowa’s Greenlight competition, we will go forward with Plan B: a play version of Blue Christmas, which would be produced live and recorded much as we did Encore for Murder, only with full-on pre-production (Encore’s shooting as very much a last-minute decision, based upon what we felt was emerging as a strong production, thanks to a strong local cast and a wonderful guest performance from Gary Sandy).

For those of you in (or near) Eastern Iowa, we are presenting the premiere of the movie version of Encore for Murder on May 5 (having postponed it due to weather). The info accompanies the photo here.

Courtesy Muscatine Journal
[Correction: The time is 7pm, not 7am. There will be no breakfast showing of Encore for Murder.]

Speaking of Encore, we have delivered it and the new expanded edition of my documentary Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane to VCI Home Entertainment. With Phil Dingeldein backing me up, I recorded a commentary for the documentary (which now runs 61 minutes) at TAG (the ad agency affiliated with dphilms).

I am not doing a commentary for Encore because it’s being presented (I think appropriately) as a bonus feature with the documentary. The new approximately fifteen minutes of footage that Phil and I shot as a wraparound for the doc brings it up to date, including Mickey’s passing and the efforts to bring his unpublished material to completion and publication. It also includes interview footage with Encore actors (Gary Sandy discusses playing Mike Hammer) which provides me an opportunity in the commentary to explain the circumstances of the production of the Golden Age Radio-style play as a fundraiser for our (Muscatine, Iowa’s) local art museum. Essentially, this sets up the bonus feature.

Please note that, in our Indiegogo effort to raise 5K for Blue Christmas, we are not going after a s**t-load of money. I have designed the screenplay to be shot on a bare bones budget, though I think without compromising the material.

Compare this to the kind of money that Riff Trax (God bless ‘em) raises just to lambast somebody else’s movie (half a million bucks on their current one, and we’re seeking a “mere” five thousand).

Imagine me pleading with giant kitty eyes and see if your heartstrings (and pocket book) aren’t touched.

Blue Christmas is, frankly, an experiment to see if I’m up to directing a film, starting out with this low-budget affair that is designed not to be a challenging shoot in terms of locations, stunts, length of shoot, etc. I had assumed, after my heart and cancer surgeries – and the continuing medications that have followed them – that my movie-making days were over…that my contribution to film would be relegated to providing source material by way of my prose and comics work, and by the occasional screenplay.

But the “instant movie” that was the stage production of Encore for Murder got my filmic juices flowing again. Blue Christmas is designed in part to see what I am capable of at this ripe old age. My health, for someone with so much wrong with me, appears to be pretty damn good.

So we shall see, as they say, what we shall see.

* * *

Remember how I whined a few weeks ago about my lack of support at the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Barnes & Noble? A return visit found one (count ‘em, one) copy of The Big Bundle available, no copies of Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction, but a nice display of some Nolan Hard Case Crime titles.

The Davenport Barnes & Noble, however, is giving me stellar support, as these photographs indicate. No need to whine here.

* * *

Here’s a nice review of Kisses of Death, the Nathan Heller short story collection from some time ago. These stories were rearranged with additional ones in two volumes from Thomas & Mercer, Chicago Lightning and Triple Play, short stories in the former, novellas in the latter.

The first six volumes of the collected Dick Tracy are coming out from Clover Press, making them physically compatible with the subsequent IDW printings. Each has an intro by me.

Here’s a nice little review of Kill Me If You Can, the current Mike Hammer novel.

Finally, this is a nice assessment of the film version of Road to Perdition.

M.A.C.

Encore Nominated, A Documentary on…Me?!?

The documentary about me that was shown at the Muscatine Community College “Legends” dinner last week can be seen here. I think MCC’s video guru Chad Bishop (who also edited Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder) and college president Naomi DeWinter did an excellent job putting the half-hour program together. You can see it right here.

Meanwhile, Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder has been nominated for three Iowa Motion Picture Awards in the following categories: Best Feature, Best Director, Best Director of Photography. We are honored and Barb and I plan to attend the festivities in Forest City, Iowa, in May. Details are here.

I am not being falsely modest when I say I do not expect us to win in any of these categories, and that I’m quite pleased just to have been nominated. (This echoes my certainty that Quarry’s Blood is a shoo-out and that I was incredibly lucky just to be nominated.) We are up against some “real” movies, as opposed to our feature, which is a recorded play edited together from a live performance and two dress rehearsals, with our actors (in costume) holding scripts from which they read. The ubiquitous Chad Bishop is the (quite funny) on-stage foley artist. Encore is an odd duck, if entertaining, largely due to our guest lead actor, Gary Sandy.

Another indicator of the unlikelihood of any win is that we entered four categories, and the one we did not get nominated in is the one that to me is the most impressive: editing. I was with Chad in his editing suite throughout the process, and editing our little feature was a big job. We had four cameras going on three nights, and that means a lot of selecting of shots as well as looping in audio from one night into footage of another when a line was flubbed or inaudible.

I have found, over the years, that editing a feature seems to bewilder judges in film festivals, largely because these judges can’t appreciate invisible editing – so necessary in putting a narrative feature together – and go for flashy stuff right out of TV commercials. I recall Don Westlake saying, “Good writing is invisible,” though it’s the overwriting in our genre that gets the most attention, and that seems to parallel this situation.

Nonetheless, it’s an honor and even a relief to have Encore singled out in this way. As I’ve mentioned here before, it will be included as a bonus feature (a 90-minute bonus feature!) on the VCI release of Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane – the 75th Anniversary Edition.

We have a few more pictures to share from the Legends evening.

Here, once again, is where you can participate in bringing Blue Christmas to the screen. Kick in enough and you’re thanked on screen or become a credited producer or even executive producer on the film. Just what your CV lacks! We don’t have any perks listed (physical stuff) but that will likely come; if you have ideas about what kind of perks would spur you to participating, write me at macphilms@hotmail.com with suggestions.

We have had a few hearty (generous) souls donate to this project so far. Again, this is about raising enough money to provide some of the matching funds needed for the grant we’re going after. If we don’t get the grant, we will use the funds to do an even lower-budget production. I don’t relish that, but we did put both Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life together for about fifteen grand each. That wouldn’t cover the craft service for one day on a Hollywood production, but with an indie film you have to will it into existence.

The plan A and plan B both involve shooting largely in studio conditions, mostly on one set (a private eye’s office in the wartime 1940s). This would likely have us bringing Gary Sandy back in a major role (Jake Marley). Plan B would be producing Blue Christmas as a play and shooting it much as we did Encore for Murder, but with much more meticulous pre-production planning.

(Encore was rather put together on the fly – when Gary came in three days before the performance and I saw that we “had something” I enlisted Phil Dingeldein with shooting the play. I saw an opportunity and took it. Recording it as a “film” was something we put together in under a week…not counting rigorous post-production editing, of course.)

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Not sure how long the 99-cent e-book price on the collected John Sand novels (by Matt Clemens and me) will run, but check this out if you’re interested.

I do know that the “featured author” sale at VJ books is still under way.

This is a podcast about Road to Perdition, supposedly about the novelization; but I admit I couldn’t get through it. I’m nonetheless happy for the attention.

For those of you who have been putting off buying I, the Jury on Blu-ray because the package (which includes 4K and 3-D discs in addition to Blu-ray) seems overly expensive…it’s on sale right now at Classic Flix, at a much lower price ($24.98, virtually half price). Even if you don’t have either 4K or 3D capacity, the Blu-ray alone is worth that. This is a much underrated Mike Hammer film, a beautiful transfer of the great cinematographer John Alton’s moody noir. I do the commentary. They also have a DVD at $13.98.

I’m signing off early this week, to encourage those of you who like to spend time here to take that time to look at the nice documentary above.

M.A.C.