Max Allan Collins's Blog, page 19

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STOP THE PRESSES: Supreme Justice and Midnight Haul are on sale for $1.99 each as Mystery, Thriller and Suspense Kindle book deals till the end of May. Amazon links: Supreme Justice | Midnight Haul

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Stand Up and Die!, the new Mickey Spillane collection from Wolfpack’s Rough Edges imprint, goes on sale next week (May 17) as both a Kindle e-book and a physical book. I edited it (and introduced it) and contributed a new version of my very first collaboration on a Mike Hammer story with Mickey, “Tonight I Die” (originally titled “The Night I Died” and published in the Spillane/Collins-edited anthology, The Private Eyes, 1998).

These novellas and short stories are culled from two long-out-of-print anthologies I edited, Tomorrow I Die (1986, Mysterious Press) and Together We Kill (2001, Five Star). This represents all of the crime stories from both volumes collected here in one place.

Here are the contents:

“Stand Up and Die!” (1958)
“Everybody’s Watching Me” (1953)
“Together We Kill” (1953)
“The Girl Behind the Hedge” (1953)
“The Pickpocket” (1954)
“I’ll Die Tomorrow” (1960)
“Tomorrow I Die” (1956)
“Hot Cat” (1964)
“The Gold Fever Tapes” (1973)
“Tonight I Die” (2022)

The final story is a Mike Hammer tale, and the reason why I’ve done a new version – not radically different, but enough so to rename it – is a story unto itself.

The basic story of “Tonight I Die” appeared in three versions in Mickey’s files – a radio play, a thirty-minute TV show, and a sixty-minute or more TV movie. There are significant differences between versions, and I did not become aware of all three until much later.

In 1998, when we edited the anthology Private Eyes for NAL, I felt it was key that we include a Hammer short story. But there weren’t any and getting Mickey to write a new one would have tough to impossible. He had already begun to share his unpublished materials with me, just for my interest (and perhaps he was already thinking of what I might do with his unfinished work some day), and I had run across the radio play version. It seems to have been written for the radio series That Hammer Guy, possibly as a pilot. It was not to my knowledge produced, though the series ran three years.

The script was heavy with narration and I asked Mickey if I could turn it into a short story, sticking to his script. He gave his blessing. The script was heavy with narration and the transfer was not difficult, though I felt some of it could have used some work, chiefly for clarity. But I did as little as I could in that regard, basically turning the script’s present tense script into past.

Now that I’ve done so many posthumous collaborations with Mickey – with his blessing – I felt this story should be properly prepared for publication…again, without taking too many liberties.

The things I did not include from the Tomorrow I Die and Together We Kill anthologies in this new one are interesting but not vital – like the science-fiction tale “The Veiled Woman,” ghosted by Howard Browne when Mickey missed deadline; a few memoirs for True magazine; a comic book “filler” story (now available in Vintage Spillane); and the script of a Mike Hammer screen test film starring Spillane’s policeman pal Jack Stang (a short story version appearing in the forthcoming Kill Me If You Can, this year’s Hammer 75th anniversary novel, which includes five bonus short stories). Also intentionally M.I.A. is Mickey’s good but non-crime tale, “Affair with the Dragon Lady.”

Stand Up and Die! is the definitive collection of Spillane crime/mystery short fiction, and its existence is due to not just my efforts but also Wolfpack’s Mike Bray, Paul Bishop and James Reasoner.

Mickey allowed a number of his crime novellas to be collected by NAL as paperbacks, mostly two-to-a-volume. This was part of his effort to raise last-minute funds for the troubled production of The Girl Hunters film. Possibly because that need for money was over, he did not bother to collect his other novellas and short stories similarly. Over the years I collected these in their original men’s adventure magazine appearances, sometimes off the newsstands, other times in used book stores. Convincing Mickey to let me collect some of them for the Mysterious Press anthology led to our first professional project together.

Not our last.

I can’t recommend a collection of tough fiction more highly than this one.

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Here’s a good review of Quarry’s Blood by a reader who can’t seem to make up his mind whether he wants me to write more Quarry books or not.

This review of the film The Outfit, streaming now, says it’s a combination of Collins (me), Mamet (a writer whose work I don’t care for), and Sorkin (a writer whose work I do care for). So I went into watching it with one eye squinted. It’s an okay crime chamber piece, with a strong central performance by Mark Rylance. You may like it. I made it all the way through, Barb didn’t. Interestingly, Barb loves the film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (as do I), and the reviewer here in passing calls Tinker, Tailor “dreadfully boring.” Still, having my work referenced in a review like this was fun.

Some short, smart reviews here of three Quarry books and one Nolan. I’m blushing.

Road to Perdition is listed as one of the seven best movies debuting on Netflix in May 2022.

Here’s an interesting in-depth look at Wild Dog.

Finally, this brief, admiring look at the graphic novel and film of Road to Perdition.

M.A.C.

Paging Dr. Tongue, Plus Neal Adams and Martin & Lewis

In case you haven’t been listening, 2022 is the 75th anniversary of Mike Hammer’s debut in the 1947 novel I, the Jury. A lot of exciting things are already underway. So far we’ve got The Shrinking Island and The Menace out there from Wolfpack’s imprint, Rough Edges Press. And coming up in about two weeks from Rough Edges is a great anthology of Spillane novellas, Stand Up and Die!

But perhaps most exciting of all (next to the January 2023 prose biography, Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction by Jim Traylor and me from Mysterious Press) is the long, long-awaited release of the 1953 film version of I, the Jury…and in 3-D!

ClassicFlix – who specialize in (not surprisingly) Blu-rays and DVDs of classic films from Hollywood’s 1930s/’40s/’50s Golden Age – is bringing it out (likely in the fall).
I will be doing the commentary.

The 1953 I, the Jury is a very underrated film (including by Mickey). Biff Elliot makes a fine Mike Hammer and the script and direction by Harry Essex are faithful to the source. Peggie Castle and Margaret Sheridan make the definitive Spillane women, and the great noir specialist, cinematographer John Alton, works in 3-D with his usual artistry. I put only Kiss Me Deadly ahead of it and would call the first I, the Jury a tie with The Girl Hunters for second place.

The publishing schedule for the Hammer anniversary includes The Menace, with me writing a horror/crime novel from an unproduced Spillane screenplay; a collection of the three YA novels, The Shrinking Island, with the previously unpublished title tale a Spillane fan Holy Grail; and the soon-to-be-published Stand Up and Die! (with a Spillane/Collins Hammer story) the best collection of Mickey’s novellas ever assembled.

In August Titan will bring out the novel Kill Me If You Can, again with me working from an unproduced Spillane screenplay and dealing with the period between Kiss Me, Deadly and The Girl Hunters – the direct aftermath of Velda’s disappearance. The book includes five Spillane/Collins short stories, including two Hammers.

And the capper of this wave of Spillane publishing will be the 100,000-word bio from Jim Traylor and me.

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Two legends: Neal Adams (left), Batman (right)

I suppose being my age – 74, damnit – means a progressive thinning of the ranks of my heroes and friends (two groups not mutually exclusive). Now we have lost Neal Adams, at 80, who for my money is the best Batman artist of the “serious” period, which – let’s face it – he and Denny O’Neil (also gone) invented.

He did much more, of course. His work on the comic strip Ben Casey, in his very early twenties, is stellar – I have an original daily example on my wall. I loved his Deadman, the Green Arrow/Green Lantern work was groundbreaking, and, really, everything his pen touched turned to great.

But he also was a champion for the rights of his fellow cartoonists, and he was a big part of getting some recompense for Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the teenagers from Cleveland on whose bones the DC empire was built.

I knew him a little, and I was complimented that he knew who I was…something which still seems to me a little unbelievable. I have a small but cherished memory of standing in line with him getting ready to ship things home from the San Diego Comic Con. I introduced him to my wife as a beginner I knew, and his grin couldn’t have been wider. He had a smile as dazzling as his artwork, and that’s plenty dazzling. We chatted and laughed for about five minutes, a small encounter that I will never forget. I always stopped by his booth at the con in subsequent years just to say hi.

Not a big relationship, by any means. But a big loss.

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Another sign of advancing old age is my reading habits. I’ve never been one to start a book and then put it down without finishing it. But now I won’t waste my time if a book doesn’t engage me in a chapter or so. Like most of you, I have an ever-growing stack (stacks) of books I can’t wait to read. So some of this stuff just has to get out of the way if it can’t grab me.

Related to this is my experience with Judd Apatow’s new book, Sicker in the Head, a follow-up (of course) to his Sick in the Head. Both books are Apatow interviewing individuals in the world of comedy. I read every page of the first book. This time I read about a third of it.

Not the first third – I selected interviewees I was interested in – like the late John Candy, John Cleese, David Letterman, Peter Davidson, John Mulaney, Kevin Hart, Sasha Baron Cohen, Samantha Bee, and Will Ferrell. But I have no interest in people I have barely (or not at all) heard of – for example, Amber Ruffin, Ed Templeton, Hannah Gadsby, Lulu Wang, and on and on. Please don’t write telling me who they are, and/or defending their presence in a book with the comic legend likes of Candy and Cleese. I just don’t have time to let these people in unless they get up on their hind legs in the pop culture and make enough noise for someone my age to notice.

Now a book I read every word of is the massive, inch-and-a-half thick, 8.5″ by 11″, 772-page (!) Marketing Martin and Lewis by Richard S. Greene…with a foreword by Eddie Deezen! (Why didn’t Apatow interview him?!?). This is a Martin and Lewis fan’s dream, and worth the fifty-buck price tag (although I got it through Barnes & Noble for $40 using a coupon).

The book is predominantly pictures – movie posters and ads, TV ads, magazine covers, publicity photos, comic book art (Neal Adams!), and on and on; but the text is substantial and thorough, with every Martin & Lewis film discussed and the individual, post-team careers of both are examined. Greene is the ideal fan – his knowledge and the collectibles he shares are mind-bogglingly vast, but his opinions are frank, fair and well-articulated.

It also has the greatest cover of any book ever published. I shared this opinion with my wife, who looked at me as if about to say, “Are you for real?”

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Here’s a New Yorker article about a Muscatine, Iowa (my hometown) resident who inspired my Mallory novel, No Cure for Death.

An interesting Road to Perdition article is here, looking at the film’s shooting locations (cameras, not guns).

Netflix has added Road to Perdition to its roster.

This review of the Nolan two-fer, Double Down, begins with a left-handed compliment but evolves into a pretty decent write-up. I wrote these books around 1974 and it’s peculiar to see them judged in terms that don’t acknowledge it’s not unusual for writers to grow over time.

Finally, this article wonders whether Road to Perdition is based on a true story (the answer is “sort of”).

M.A.C.

Menace & Shrinking Island Giveaway…And Robert Morse

The publication date of The Menace by Mickey Spillane and myself (from Wolfpack’s Rough Edges Press) is August 27 (Wednesday of this week, as I write). To jump-start some reviews of this and of The Shrinking Island (the collection of Mickey three YA adventure novels), I am announcing right now a book giveaway. Winners agree to write an Amazon review; other reviews are also encouraged.

I have five copies of The Menace and five copies of The Shrinking Island for the first ten who request a book by writing me at macphilms@hotmail.com. Tell me which book you prefer, but if your choice is gone, the other will be sent. You must include your snail mail address, even if you’re entered before. These will go fast.

As usual, USA only.

The Menace is a special book. It is unusual in several respects. The Mike Hammer novels under the Spillane/Collins byline reflect me finishing books of Mickey’s in progress or put aside at the time of his death in 2006, or novels developed from synopses he left behind. I’ve also done from partial Spillane manuscripts two non-Hammer novels – The Consummata (with Morgan the Raider from The Delta Factor) and a standalone (Dead Street), with a very Hammer-like protagonist.

The Menace was developed from an unproduced screenplay in the Spillane files. It was apparently written shortly before or around the time he and I became friends in 1981, and he spoke to me of it frequently. He seemed to have an independent production in mind; he was friendly with South Carolina indie producer, Earl Owensby, who had his own studio, and the two had explored doing projects together. Nothing came of it, but The Menace indicates something might have.

But the screenplay was short – around 40 pages – and seems either to be a condensed version designed to attract investors or a version that could have been a pilot for a one-hour anthology series, probably with Mickey hosting. (In the forthcoming Mysterious Press biography by Jim Traylor and me, Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction, we explore Mickey’s efforts to put a mystery/crime anthology on the air with himself as the on-camera Rod Serling or Alfred Hitchcock).

What is particularly interesting about The Menace is the genre – while one foot is in a crime/mystery story, the other is in horror. Elements of horror were a part of Spillane’s novels from the beginning – he brought the horrors of graphic violence to his post-war crime fiction – the endings of Kiss Me, Deadly and My Gun Is Quick come to mind – and flirted with horror themes in The Twisted Thing and his last Hammer-in-progress, The Goliath Bone.

But The Menace is specifically Mickey reacting to the success of Stephen King. I go into this in my intro to The Menace, and will only say here that it was a Spillane reaction to King’s enormous success as a writer who became a media star and who carved out his own new niche in popular fiction. It’s fair to say that King has been imitated in much the same way Mickey was in his heyday.

Spillane did not, however, like the supernatural aspect of King and that other huge success, The Exorcist (book and film). As a Jehovah’s Witness, he took demons and the devil very seriously and did not consider them appropriate subject matter for fiction. He didn’t cry out for censorship, and in fact called King “a great writer”; but that type of horror was not for him.

The novel I’ve fashioned from his compact screenplay is unusual in its crime/mystery aspect having no Mike Hammer substitute at its center, though a tough small-town police chief is one of the two protagonists. The story is about a family where the husband (a self-made-man doctor) and wife (an artist from a wealthy family) have been driven apart by their disagreement over how to raise their ten-year-old “special needs” son. During much of the action, the estranged couple and their boy are in a big old spooky house, the grounds behind walls, which becomes the setting for a siege of sorts involving an Aztec mummy who may or may not still be breathing and a creature who may or may not be human. And at its heart is the story of a family coming back together in adversity.

Not typical Spillane elements, but typically compelling Spillane storytelling. Like the adventure stories he wrote in his last decade – The Shrinking Island, Something’s Down There and The Last Stand – The Menace indicates an author trying to break away from Mike Hammer and flex other storytelling muscles.

I am very proud of the book and think it shows a whole other side to Mickey Spillane. It’s a relatively short novel – 40,000-words – but we have included as a bonus the original, previously unpublished version of the short story “The Duke Alexander” and a rare non-fiction crime story by Mickey, “The Too-Careful Killer,” unseen since 1952.

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Yet another of my heroes has left the planet. As if losing Norm Macdonald and Gilbert Gottfried weren’t enough, a selfish God has taken Robert Morse away. Granted, Bobby Morse had a 90 year-run, and I admit when Barb and I screened How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in his honor over the weekend, we could not mourn. We could only get caught up again in the joy of experiencing the magical, shamelessly mugging musical comedy performance that is Robert Morse playing J. Pierpont Finch.

I started thinking about what I was going to say about How to Succeed and Morse, but thought I should check on what I’d said on the subject in this space before. And I discovered that in a post in 2017, I had already said the things that my mind was putting together for me to share now. So I’m going to do something I don’t believe I ever have here – I am going to rerun my response to seeing the Twilight Time Blu-ray edition of How to Success in Business Without Really Trying.

* * *As you may have gathered, if you’ve stopped by here at all frequently, I am a collector of movies on Blu-ray and DVD. Many of my favorite films have made it onto Blu-ray, like Kiss Me Deadly and Gun Crazy (though I had to get that from Germany). And a fairly short list of my favorites remain on DVD only, like the Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes, and the great film version of the Broadway musical, Li’l Abner.

One of my favorites, poorly represented with a terrible transfer on DVD, has finally made it to Blu-ray, in a limited edition of 3000, from Twilight Time, the boutique label that has brought us any number of terrific films, from The Big Heat to the Hammer Hound of the Baskervilles, from a Sinatra Tony Rome double feature to Pretty Poison.

But this time – and my birthday month yet – they have given me (and Barb and for that matter son Nate, who also loves it) a film I could watch once a week – How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

There are those who can find reasons not to like this movie, just as there are people who can find a reason not to like ice cream. They are to be pitied. How to Succeed features a brilliant, witty, acid but not hateful score by the brilliant Frank Loesser. A Pulitzer Prize-winning musical (yes, Pulizter Prize-winning musical) in 1961, the Broadway version skewered the shallowness of big business in an up-to-the-moment manner. Unfortunately, the timing of the film’s release – 1967 – made How to Succeed’s cutting-edge satire seem dated, a lot having happened since ‘61.

Fortunately, time has been kind to this early ‘60s musical, with its bright Batman TV colors and cartoon images come to life (cartoonist Virgil Partch – VIP – was a consultant) and Bob Fosse choreography that is as witty and biting as the original play itself. (Fosse is not the actual choreographer of the film, but he’s credited as the source.)

A number of players from the Broadway show are retained, including Michelle Lee (who was the second Rosemary Pilkington in the original cast), the very funny Rudy Vallee, Ruth Kobart, and Sammy Smith, with Charles Nelson Reilly’s Bud Frump M.I.A., though decently replaced by Anthony Teague. Maureen Arthur – a live-action Little Annie Fannie – was in the national company of the musical and joined the Broadway run later.

I saw the national company in Chicago when I was in high school and fell in love with the musical then. The cast included Dick Kallman as Finch (later star of Hank on TV), who was excellent, with the second Great Gildersleeve, Willard Watterman, in the Rudy Vallee role. And of course the eye-popping Maureen Arthur was Hedy LaRue (“O.K. Charlie!”).

Two things make this film one of the best transitions of a Broadway hit to the big screen. First, director/writer David Swift – with credits like Pollyanna and Under the Yum Yum Tree enough to make one doubtful – had the surprising sense to film faithfully a show that had won seven Tony Awards, the New York Drama Critics Circle award, and the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The other thing is Robert Morse.

His J. Pierrepont Finch is my favorite performance in any musical film. He shamelessly recreates the Broadway role with only the slightest concession to movie technique. He understands, as does the rest of the cast (though not on this level), that he’s appearing in a cartoon. His character, who climbs from window washer to the chairman of the board in a few days, following a self-help book that provides the film’s narration – should be unsympathetic. He’s manipulative and dissembling and is never seen really working (not really trying, remember?); but the boyishness of Morse himself smooths the edge off.

Morse brings a remarkable energy to his songs and his loose-limbed dancing brings James Cagney to mind. In the ensemble, “Brotherhood of Man,” in the midst of a sea of Bob Fosse choreography, brilliant scene-stealer Morse knows just how to draw the viewer’s eye, chiefly by lagging like a jazz player behind the melody just enough to seem improvisional among all the precise dancers. He alone seems spontaneous.

Does he mug? Almost constantly. His performance is basically Jerry Lewis Goes to Graduate School. Somehow, playing a ladder-climbing nogoodnik, he seems joyful – the perfect conveyer of Loesser’s lyrics, with their hidden dark side.

Famously, the big hit love song from How to Succeed is sung by Morse’s Finch…to himself in a mirror. Few scores rival this one, though like Sondheim, Loesser writes to the story. The songs that were left out (“Paris Original,” “Happy to Keep His Dinner Warm”) are the weakest in the show. The only loss, besides Charles Nelson Reilly, is the great “Coffee Break,” which was filmed but cut for time. Too bad it doesn’t seem to have survived to be a special feature.

Morse and Reilly, by the way, were so successful on Broadway that they made an album together, “A Jolly Theatrical Season,” in 1963.

If the name Robert Morse seems vaguely familiar to smart younger people, he played Bertram Cooper on Mad Men, a role he was cast in, in tribute to his star turn in How to Succeed. Toward the end of Mad Men’s run, Morse was given a lovely song-and-dance farewell.

Morse’s career on Broadway was a stellar one, particularly his roles in Sugar and his one-man play, Tru, in which he played Truman Capote, winning his second Tony. But his film legacy is, largely, How to Succeed. No other film caught his magic, and a few really did him no favors – Honeymoon Hotel; Quick, Before It Melts – though The Loved One and Guide for the Married Man are worthy credits. I used to feel sad that this great talent had only one film to do him justice.

But with How to Succeed finally on Blu-ray, and with Mad Men as a wonderful, Emmy-nominated coda, I can only smile.

Nice modern-day (separate) interviews with Morse and Michelle Lee are special features. No “Coffee Break,” alas.

Buy it here.

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UPDATE: The Twilight Time Blu-ray is still available but is pricey from some sources, although Screen Archives still has it at $20.

Let me add a few thoughts. Morse, who I describe above as “Jerry Lewis Goes to Graduate School,” shared with Lewis an inability to move from boyishness into anything else. It took the heavy make-up of his Truman Capone one-man show to briefly change that – he won a second Tony for it, after all – but he remained a boyish persona.

His rise to success (and Succeed) came from a string of stand-out youthful Broadway roles that culminated in J. Pierpont Finch being designed as a star vehicle for him. Two Broadway revivals have not shown their popular stars able to make their performances anything but reminders of how good Morse was.

He worked. He had a career. For a while he remained hot on Broadway, with Sugar (the musical version of Some Like It Hot) in 1972 a particular highlight. But mostly it was episodic TV and TV movies (he played Grandpa Munster in one), Pringle commercials and lots of cartoon voiceovers (Teen Titans, toward the end) – not what his dazzling How to performance promised.

That he had Mad Men as a last act is wonderful. But he deserved more. And we deserved more Morse.

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Richard Piers Rayner’s phenomenal work on Road to Perdition gets some nice notice here in a piece on movies that recreated panels from the comic books they were based on.

M.A.C.

The Amazing Colossal Gilbert

Last week my son called me with the bad news – Gilbert Gottfried had passed at 67, an age that seems terribly young to me now. Nate was apologetic about having to share word of another death with me, but at my age that comes (as the Music Man said) with the territory.

Frank Santopadre and Gilbert Gottfried

I hope Gilbert’s podcast partner, Frank Santopadre, will be able to continue their Amazing Colossal Podcast, which has been a glorious celebration and look back at all kinds of popular culture of the 20th Century, particularly film, but also TV and radio and even vaudeville. Gilbert was a master at impressions of obscure character actors, and a font of knowledge about show biz trivia (as is Frank).

When I did the show a few months ago, I was knocked out by Frank’s research, and his glee at being able to ask me, for example, why I liked the Ritz Brothers. Later, on the podcast, I explained myself – something I never expected to do in public, let alone in front of the smart, knowledgeable audience that had the sense to listen to this one-of-a-kind show.

The podcast, of course, is just one (if significant) part of Gilbert Gottfried’s contribution to popular culture. He laughed (and boy did he have a laugh) about me being a fan of his Saturday Night Live year (actually, twelve weeks); but I truly had been a fan (I liked Gail Matthius, too, and that Eddie Murphy kid showed promise). I have sympathy for that whole cast, who’d had the not enviable task of following in the original Not Ready for Primetime Players – after all, I followed Frank Miller into Batman, making me the Charles Rocket of Caped Crusader writers.

Gilbert’s character parts in various films were always funny stand-outs, from the Problem Child movies to Beverly Hills Cop II. Kids got to know that voice by the Aladdin movies and TV shows. But Gilbert’s bold adult delivery of the Aristocrats joke at the Friars’ Club roast of Hugh Hefner, less than three weeks after the 9/11 2001 terrorist attacks, was a shot across the bow at a humorless media. Perhaps the first victim of Cancel Culture – he lost his famous, lucrative Afflac duck gig after tweeting jokes about the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami – Gilbert’s public exposure of the can-you-top-this backstage filthy private joke shared by comics became the subject of The Aristrocrats, an excellent 2005 documentary film by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette.

If you’ve never seen it, track down Gilbert, the 2017 documentary that charts the life and some typical days and nights of a truly sweet, unique eccentric. More than any comedian in history, Gilbert Gottfried could make the punchline of a joke irrelevant – it was always about his delivery, the set-up, the commentary along the way. The journey, not the destination.

For those who are not faint of heart, I recommend Gilbert’s stand-up DVD, Dirty Jokes (2005); it’s also on Amazon Prime.

On the podcast, Gilbert always introduced his guests with long, elaborate, well-researched (thanks, Frank!) bios. I was stunned hearing Gilbert’s (shall we say) distinctive voice going on for several minutes detailing my accomplishments as well as a few embarrassing details.

Perhaps some of you will understand what a treat and frankly honor it was for me to be guesting with my co-author, Dave Thomas, on Gilbert’s show. It’s still unbelievable that as a stone SCTV freak I am now friends with Dave Thomas. And to have shared space with two of my comic heroes for a couple of hours – I will treasure the memory.

Dave said to me, recently, “You really love comedy, don’t you?”

Yes. Yes I do. But some of it died with Gilbert Gottfried, and we really could have used him sticking around in this horrific, humorless era, when people would rather take self-righteous offense than just fucking laugh.

* * *

Here, for your enjoyment, is the Amazon France translation to English of their description of my novel A Life in Red (aka Bait Money):

Among the thugs, quarantine is already the third age. It is still a matter of clinging to it. Nolan, an unlucky thug, tries to find a place in the sun. A nice combination, yes! With accomplices two inexperienced kids and a girl who has the fire in the buttocks and nothing in the cigar. And all for an old debt to the Mafia. What would it be like if he had to pay her to society!

I would love to read this novel!

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Are you going to Bouchercon in Minneapolis this year? September 8-11, 2022? If so, and you’re registered, you’ve received an Anthony Awards ballot. The deadline for nominations is May 1st.

Here is a list of my books (some with Barb, one with Matt) that are eligible. If you haven’t voted yet, and liked any of these books, your vote would be appreciated. Here are the books (or in one a case a short story) that are eligible. You can vote for up to five in each category.

BEST HARDBACK NOVEL:

Antiques Carry On, Barbara Allan

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL:

Skim Deep, Max Allan Collins

The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton, Dave Thomas & M.A.C.

Fancy Anders Goes to War, M.A.C.

To Live and Spy in Berlin, M.A.C. & Matthew V. Clemens

BEST SHORT STORY:

“What’s Wrong with Harley Quinn,” Barbara Allan in EQMM July/August 2021

BEST ANTHOLOGY:

Suspense – His and Hers, M.A.C. & Barbara Collins

Reincarnal & Other Dark Tales, M.A.C.

Turning the Tied, Jonathan Maberry (editor) – includes a story by M.A.C. and Matthew V. Clemens

This voting is only open to registrants of Bouchercon.

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Paperback:
E-Book:
Digital Audiobook:

Speaking of To Live and Spy in Berlin, the audiobook is out now – which puts the entire trilogy on audio. A great Brit-inflected job by Brian J. Gill!

Check out an excerpt here:

* * *

The Menace by Mickey Spillane and me comes out next week. Read about it here.

M.A.C.

Robert Rydell/Siodmak/Odenkirk

Last week I talked about Bobby Darin. Since then, my second favorite pop-music artist of the pre-Beatles era has passed – another Bobby.

Rydell.

Robert Ridarelli has received less acclaim than Darin, and he would have been the first to say he was fine with that. He was a humble man whose great accomplishments came early in life, as was the case with almost all the teen idols of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. But he deserves better than just having a mythical high school named after him in Grease.

When Barb and I saw him perform with the other two Golden Boys of Bandstand, Frankie Avalon and Fabian – and while Avalon and Fabe were very entertaining – Rydell was the show stopper. For one thing, he was the only Golden Boy whose set was almost entirely his own hits; although the other two are somehow more emblematic of teen idols of the period, only Rydell was a consistent hitmaker. The only song he sang at the performance we saw that was not a chart hit of his was “Mack the Knife” – part of an excellent, obviously heart-felt tribute to Bobby Darin.

Darin was clearly Rydell’s model for moving into material that straddled teen and adult tastes – his “Old Black Magic” was patterned on Darin’s “Bill Bailey,” and Rydell’s biggest, arguably most memorable hit, “Volare,” was his “Mack the Knife.” “Sway” was another Dean Martin hit reimagined (Dino’s version of “Volare” informed Rydell’s) but his more rock-oriented numbers indicate the great “Wild One” and such fun numbers as “Wildwood Days” (which didn’t even make the Golden Boys set we saw) and “Swingin’ School.” His post-Beatles hit, “Forget Him,” is a fine ballad.

I met him twice and had an e-mail exchange with him once.

At the Iowa State Fair in 1981, Barb and I were strolling through the grounds one afternoon when I heard someone singing, “New York, New York.” I told her it sounded like Bobby Rydell and we made our way quickly to a bandshell stage in front of which fairgoers were on benches listening. It was indeed Rydell, and we heard most of a set that mingled standards with hits, including “Swingin’ School,” which I had always loved, though it’s a fairly idiotic song. But it had been in the Dick Clark-starring “Because They’re Young,” a major film event for the junior high kids of my era.

After the show, I tracked the performer to a small trailer – one of those two-wheel jobs, which would have provided him with just enough room to freshen up a little, maybe catch a nap and avoid pests. Well, not this one. I knocked and he came out and was very gracious to both Barb and me, giving me five minutes to gush about how I owned all of his albums. Which I did. Which I do.

We spoke a little bit about Darin and he seemed genuinely moved by my enthusiasm for that other teen idol of his era.

Very softly he said, “Ah, Bobby…Bobby….No one like him.”

Ten years or so later, Barb and I took in that Golden Boys of Bandstand show in Cedar Rapids. It really was a wonderful concert, but Rydell stole it. His “Mack the Knife” brought down the house, and he had more hits of his own to share than Frankie and Fabe put together.

Barb and I hung around the stage door like the wide-eyed fans we were, and all three came out and greeted a small group of fans, and took their time chatting and signing autographs. Rydell claimed to remember meeting us before. Avalon and Fabian were clearly impressed by how beautiful a woman I’d somehow convinced to go around with me.

In 2010 Rydell released a terrific CD, “Then and Now,” which was two albums – a re-visitation of his greatest hits, very nicely done, and a swing album in the Darin/Sinatra vein. I thought it was an outstanding job and wrote Rydell saying so, and got a warm personal reply – clearly not canned, as it responded specifically to my remarks. I dropped him a few notes after that, when he was suffering from health problems – he underwent several transplants (kidney and liver).

I tried, perhaps twenty years ago, to get a contract to do a book on the Bobby’s – Darin, Rydell and Vee. Bobby Vee I also met and he was a wonderful rock entertainer and a warm, lovely guy. My late musical collaborator Paul Thomas got to know him really well.

As for the other famous Bobby of that era, I’m not a big Bobby Vinton fan (don’t dislike him) and have one small connection. At a Vegas show, Vinton asked for a volunteer to duet with him and my father was enlisted. I wasn’t there, but I’m told Vinton was startled by my dad’s trained, commanding voice, and smilingly accused him of being a ringer sent to embarrass him.

The absence of Rydell and Vee from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame is criminal. I feel the same about Pat Boone, for his importance (his cover records opened doors for the original artists, plus for several key years he out-sold Elvis), and for the Association and Vanilla Fudge for obvious reasons.

When Rydell passed away at 79, the Hall of Fame oversight came jarringly to the fore.

John Lennon, by the way, confirmed that the “Yeah, yeah, yeah’s” of “She Loves You” were inspired by Rydell’s use of them in several songs (“We Got Love,” which “She Loves You” started out as an “answer” song to the Rydell hit).

Anyway, here’s a taste of two of Bobby Rydell’s hits performed years later.

And from the same show, here’s a look at his Darin/”Mack the Knife” Tribute.

* * *

I’d like to call your attention to two excellent films noir that had somehow slipped under my radar.

Shakedown (1950) stars Howard Duff, whose big success on radio as Sam Spade led many in Hollywood to think he was a natural for big league stardom. That never quite happened, though he had success as a B-movie star and wound up on TV starring on Felony Squad (earlier, he and his then-wife Ida Lupino had a somewhat successful sitcom, Mr. Adams and Eve). His career was likely compromised by McCarthy-era accusations, but Shakedown reveals him as an interesting screen presence whose rather putty-like features (while handsome) suggest an unspoken moral laxity that really power this particular noir.

Directed by Joe Pevney – whose other noirs are pretty middling and whose claim to fame is helming episodes of the original Star Trek – Shakedown charts the rise and abrupt fall of a newspaper photographer who climbs to the top over anybody in his way and who blithely blackmails dangerous gangsters until (of course) it all catches up with him. The pace is fairly breakneck and the cast is amazing – Brian Donlevy and (yikes) Lawrence Tierney are among those Duff betrays or blackmails. Noir veteran Peggy Dow and former screen Tarzan Bruce Bennett are cheerfully trampled along the way. With a script co-written by Martin Goldsmith, who wrote both the novel and the film Detour, you know what you’re in for.

The Devil Strikes at Night is a 1957 German film directed and written by noir master Robert Siodmak, after his long stay in Hollywood (Criss Cross, The Killers). It’s an anti-Nazi film made in Germany, a little more than ten years after war’s end. If that weren’t enough, it has a remarkably rule-breaking structure, cutting between a wounded war veteran who returns to his job on the homicide squad and the crimes of a serial killer who is presented with startling sympathy. On top of that, the film seems to wrap up at the one hour mark with a half hour remaining. That it continues on in its bleak, uncompromising way – including a “happy” ending that has the protagonist heading off to the front to likely die – is pleasingly head shaking. By the way, it turns out the SS were a bunch of crumbs.

Both Shakedown and The Devil Strikes at Night are available from Kino for you other dinosaurs who still like physical media.

* * *

People are always asking me what I’m reading.

Well, I just finished the excellent Comedy! Comedy! Comedy! Drama!, the autobiography of Bob Odenkirk. The triple comedies of the title should indicate to potential readers (perhaps even warn them) that there’s more here about Odenkirk’s many years as one of our best comedy performers and writers than on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Both of the latter get paid attention, each about a chapter’s worth. But Mr. Show gets more space, probably because Odenkirk was a writer/creator (with David Cross of course) on it, whereas he’s “just” an actor on the great Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

To put this in perspective, I said to Barb, “I love this book! You wouldn’t like it.” Keep in mind we’ve been married over fifty years, so I have reason to know her fairly well.

But Odenkirk conveys his own voice in the book – you hear him speak, you crawl around in his brain, you understand how he thinks and how he makes career choices, about which he frequently, frankly criticizes himself.

The book also has some strange resonances for me. Odenkirk lived next door to Dick Locher, my second Dick Tracy artist, who had been his Scoutmaster. Odenkirk’s best friend was John Locher, he was his father Dick’s artistic assistant who I worked with and liked very much (he tragically died very young, while he was preparing to take over the strip from his dad).

Also, Odenkirk knew Del Close – even met him in a bookstore in Chicago (as did I, when Del came to a Nathan Heller signing). Some here may recall that I directed Del in Mommy’s Day. Odenkirk invokes Del many times in his book.

My son Nate (then living in Chicago) met Odenkirk at a Second City event; Bob signed a Mr. Show DVD to me. We have never met, but I feel we have.

* * *

Here’s an article on the making of The Expert, the movie I wrote back in 1994. I make some comments clarifying issues made in the piece.

Remember, The Menace by Spillane and Collins will be available later this month, and The Shrinking Island by Spillane (introduced by Collins) is available now.

M.A.C.

Mickey Spillane and Bobby Darin

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The Shrinking Island – the YA novel by Mickey Spillane (collected with the preceding two novels in the Larry and Josh Trilogy) – is out now from Wolfpack/Rough Edges. It is unlikely (though not impossible) you’ll find it in a brick-and-mortar book store, so please seriously consider ordering it from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

This third Josh and Larry was announced in the mid-‘70s, so it has been (ahem) a long wait. Spillane fans should be used to that by now. Among the novels that were announced but did not come out during Mickey’s lifetime are The Consummata (the sequel to The Delta Factor), Complex 90, and King of the Weeds. I completed all of them from the unpublished, unfinished manuscripts. Novels whose stories he clearly referred to in interviews (though sans titles) include The Big Bang, Murder Never Knocks and the non-Hammer Dead Street. All of these I have completed, Mickey having requested I do so with his unfinished manuscripts.

Another announced (but never published) example is the Mike Hammer novel, Tonight I Die, which existed in Mickey’s files in three forms: radio, TV and movie scripts. One of these became a short story, “The Night I Died,” the radio play version of which I adapted during Mickey’s lifetime for the anthology The Private Eyes. I have done another pass on that and it will finally appear under the original title, “Tonight I Die,” in the forthcoming Wolfpack/Rough Edges collection, Stand Up and Die! Another version (the screenplay one) has become Kill Me If You Can, a Hammer novel that will be published in August.

Confused yet?

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Allow your head to clear, then pre-order The Menace, which will come out later this month, again from Wolfpack/Rough Edges. The outstanding cover appears here for the first time. This is a novel I developed from a screenplay that appears to have been either a feature film or the pilot for an unrealized anthology series. Mickey had been toying with an Alfred Hitchcock Presents type of show for years, intending to host it himself. This script dates to the early ‘80s (possibly a bit earlier) and, while he always spoke to me of it as a movie project that he would produce and perhaps direct, the surviving version is rather short (under fifty pages).

That required fleshing it out some, and it became a full-length (but not lengthy) novel of 40,000 words. (We are including a short story and a non-fiction true crime piece by Mickey to round out the book somewhat.)

The Menace is unusual in that it’s a horror story, although it does have mystery elements (but then horror stories often do). Mickey conceived it as a sort of response to the overwhelming success of Stephen King in the literary marketplace. He disliked King’s use of the supernatural – he avoided that in his own writing – but considered King “a great writer.”

More on this later.

* * *

Those of you who have followed these updates over the years are well aware of my enthusiasm for Bobby Darin, the late great singer who gave us everything from “Splish Splash” and “Dream Lover” to “Mack the Knife” and “Beyond the Sea,” as well as “If I Were a Carpenter” and “Simple Song of Freedom” and memorable film appearances in Pressure Point and Hell is For Heroes.

I discovered Darin at age eleven when I saw him singing “Mack the Knife” on a Heart Fund special. I have never been the same since. The combination of a confident, sardonic singer, who moved with a dancer’s grace, and the dark story of a Jack the Ripper figure, widened my eyes in a way that hasn’t shut them yet.

I’d been aware of him, a little, because of “Splish Splash,” which at age ten I’d loved as a novelty record in the vein of “Purple People Eater” or “Witch Doctor.” “Mack” was something entirely different. I somehow scraped together enough to purchase his swinging standards album, “That’s All,” and received “This Is Darin” for my birthday, 1960. I collected everything I could get my hands on, searching record stores for his (even then) rare Decca releases going back to ‘56. A year or so later, I discovered Mickey Spillane, and my classmates at Grant Elementary (and later Central Junior High) were divided into two groups: those who knew me as the Bobby Darin guy, and those who knew me as the Mickey Spillane guy.

The bloody storytelling of “Mack the Knife” was the connective tissue. As I grew older – something Darin did, too, but not for long, dying at 37 in 1973 – I came to learn Darin had suffered a heart condition from childhood and had been told he wouldn’t live past thirty. And I now understand that “Mack the Knife” – and “Artificial Flowers” and such lesser known fare as “Gyp the Cat” and “Goodbye Charlie” – were the singer thumbing his nose at death. Even “Beyond the Sea” seems to have that resonance.

Darin has never gotten his due. I have long felt that if one singer/songwriter of the 20th Century was chosen to represent every facet of popular music, Darin was the obvious choice – not that he was the best in every category, but his curiosity as an artist, and his death-sentence desire to explore everything that interested him while he had time, makes him unique. His two major areas – rock ‘n’ roll and the Great American songbook – tend to get him dismissed in both genres. But try to imagine Frank Sinatra singing “Splish Splash” or Jerry Lee Lewis doing “Mack the Knife” and you’ll get the idea.

The other day I stumbled onto something that might be called an epiphany, if I could put it into words. Having turned 74, I feel more and more removed and detached from the younger world. For the first time, I can find nothing in popular music that I can relate to. Even movies interest me less, and pop music and mainstream movies have always been at the center of my adult (and childhood) life. It’s easy for people my age to feel the world moving away from them. Maybe it’s God’s way of making it easier to let go.

But then, quite by accident, I came upon something delightful. Something that made me smile and even laugh and feel a sense of common humanity with people decades younger than me. None of these people were old and white; most were Black and young. And I got such a kick out of sharing time with them on You Tube.

You may be hipper enough than me to already know about this, but a genre of You Tube posting has people younger than me (which is most people) reacting to music from earlier generations, hearing for the first time very famous songs from another era. Mostly this is ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s rock and pop music. Now, as someone who has difficulty – extreme difficulty – finding anything to admire about Rap and Hip Hop, with the notable exception being that those forms are at least not Country Western – I can’t properly express the life-affirming joy I felt seeing young people listening to Bobby Darin for the first time and being blown away.

There are at least a dozen of these out there, but I’m going to share a few of my favorites with you.

Here’s the Rob Squad, a cute, smart couple hearing “Mack the Knife” for the first time. Watch the young woman start picking up on the subject matter of the song, and then nudge guy – who’s been grooving along – to pay attention to the lyrics.

India Reacts has a very fun young woman picking up almost immediately on the murder spree and her reactions are wonderfully entertaining. She had earlier heard and loved “Dream Lover” and is not prepared for the dark alley Darin goes cheerfully down.

Another fun couple, Shawn and Mel, discover the magic of Darin doing “Beyond the Sea.” It should be noted this is Darin lip-syncing on a Dick Clark nighttime show (the standard practice) and he is probably all of 24 years old…but his smooth confidence and humor and ease is on full display. But the real point here is the infectious, positive energy of Shawn and Mel, and the power of Darin and good popular music spanning the decades like they’re nothing.

Dani’s “I’d Rather Be Listening” gives us a great live performance of “Mack the Knife,” and her reaction is smart and fun.

This older gent, Harry, reacts beautifully to “Beyond the Sea.” And then he looks Darin up and lets his audience know what a genius he’s stumbled upon. A great post. Thank you, brother!

I am so relieved to known that smart, cool people will be here after I’m gone.

M.A.C.

Perdition Years Later, Proofing Copy-Edits & New Spillane

As you may know, the Antiques books – the current one, Antiques Carry On is out now in trade paperback – are now published by Severn, based in the UK but also distributed here (and of course Mike Hammer’s publisher, Titan, is in England as well). So perhaps that explains the photo of a satisfied reader that we received, courtesy of our friend, Gene Eugene.

* * *

Screening of Road to Perdition last week at the Figge art museum in Davenport was fun – it was nicely attended by a somewhat captive audience of Scott Community College students who’d been assigned the graphic novel, among others whose arms had not been twisted to attend.

There was a hitch that took it from the auditorium to the lobby, where the presentation was not ideal but it served the purpose. Matt Clemens and Barb and I took questions after, and I talked too much. Apologies to one and all on that score.

I hadn’t seen Road to Perdition since the Blu-ray came out in 2010 – twelve years! I was struck that my reaction to everything I liked about the film on first seeing it and everything I hadn’t liked (big and small and in between) remained exactly the same. I still wish I’d had a crack at the dialogue, some of which I find stilted, and that the ending were mine – that Jack Lemmon hadn’t died and left the narration (obviously written for an adult looking back on his life, as in the graphic novel) to young Tyler Hoechlin, the book’s real ending scrapped for a Hollywood one.

But I still love the thing. It has such a nice mood, and it picks up on so many visuals from the book (Richard Piers Rayner, God bless you), and stays mostly true to my story. I was after a combination of big city gangster film and rural outlaw movie, and the filmmakers got that. The Paul Newman/Daniel Craig father-and-son relationship is handled better than I did. The cast remains amazing, and I still feel like I’ve won the lottery. And the speech in the church basement is beautifully written.

Over the weekend, Barb and I watched the new 4-K remastering of the three Godfather movies, and how much influence the first Godfather had on the Perdition film was incredibly obvious – in a good way. Several critics at the time called Perdition the best mob film since The Godfather and Godfather 2, and I don’t disagree.

One of my few career regrets is that we never got Road to Purgatory made. My buddy Phil Dingeldein and I worked mightily to get that done. I still have a script for it that I’m proud of…and which I hold the rights to.

If anybody’s interested, now’s the time. Hoechlin has grown up in a super fashion, and Stanley Tucci can be found in a kitchen somewhere. (We killed everybody else.)

* * *

Things in publishing have two speeds: slooooooooow, and effing fast.

I just delivered The Big Bundle to editor Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime last week, and he had it copy-edited and back to me by the weekend. Charles is incredibly fast, and has a terrific eye. He is respectful of what I write but calls ‘em as he sees ‘em, which is to my benefit. Amazingly, the book has been put to bed but for my eventually proofing the final copy-set copy.

On the other hand, Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction took quite a while to get to me from the editors at Mysterious Press (which is more typical). They have been gracious about giving me the time I need, but I will be tackling the job this week, which should be sufficient. A non-fiction book is a more demanding thing, at this stage, but I will face all kinds of fact-checking questions.

I dread the copy-editing stage, as I’ve made clear here many times. About one out of three times at bat, I get saddled with a copy editor who appoints him- or herself my collaborator, and not the person preparing the text for typesetting. I have been rewritten more times that the Holy Bible, and I take it just a little worse than God.

But this goes with the territory.

I also proofed the type-set version of The Menace, the crime/horror novel by Mickey Spillane and me, coming from Wolfpack’s Rough Edges Press. It’s a book developed by me from an unproduced film script Mickey wrote probably in the early 1980s. He had Stephen King on the brain, I think, seeing that King was developing into the kind of celebrity bestselling author that he (Mickey) had been.

In addition I read the galleys of Mickey’s The Shrinking Island (introduced by yours truly), which collects the three young adult adventure novels he wrote in the ‘70s. The title story has never been published before. It comes out soon – April 7 – and if you’re an adult Spillane fan, it’ll make a grinning kid out of you.

The first of the three Larry and Josh adventures, The Day the Sea Rolled Back, was a big influence on The Goonies. I was at Mickey’s house when he got a call from Steven Spielberg (not sure whether it was Spielberg himself or one of his “people”), inquiring about the availability of The Day the Sea Rolled Back for the screen. Mickey told whoever it was that he wasn’t interested in dealing with anybody in Hollywood except Jay Bernstein (his Mike Hammer TV producer). And before long came…The Goonies.

The other YA yarn is The Ship That Never Was. Check out this new collection. The cover, which I’m including here, is (obviously) a stunner.

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Mystery Tribune lists its favorite Irish mob movies and Road to Perdition is included (no mention of the book’s author, though – who was that again?).

Syfy rates the top best eleven R-rated movies based on comic books and suggests that Road to Perdition may be the best one.

Here’s a great Bookgasm review of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton.

And another great Bookgasm review of Fancy Anders Goes to War.

M.A.C.

A Late Announcement and Heller Behind the Scenes

This announcement is criminally late, and will serve only to inform potential attendees in the Iowa-Illinois Quad Cities area. How criminally late? The event takes place the evening of the day this update is posted.

I will be appearing at a screening of Road to Perdition at the Figge Art Museum, doing a post-film Q and A joined by my frequent collaborators, Barbara Collins and Matthew V. Clemens.

Here are the details as reported by Tristan Tapscott at QuadCities.com:

‘Road to Perdition’ Screening and Author Panel
March 22 at The Figge

Scott Community College, with the generosity of the Figge Art Museum, will host a screening of the award-winning film, Road to Perdition (2002), starring Tom Hanks on March 22, 2022, at the Figge Art Museum, 225 W. 2nd Street, in Davenport. The film screening will begin at 4 p.m. with the author question and answer panel to follow.

Following the film will be an author question and answer panel with Max Allan Collins, author of the graphic novel, Barbara Collins, critically acclaimed author and short story writer, and Matthew Clemens, author and frequent collaborator of Max Allan Collins.

This event is free and open to the public.

Road to Perdition by Max Allan Collins has been selected as the Great Scott Read 2021-2022. The graphic novel and text versions of Road to Perdition are being used by Scott Community College instructors in the classroom. Copies of the book and graphic novel are available to check out from the Scott Community College Library.

For general information, please call 563-441-4150. For venue information, please call 563-326-7804.

Okay, why such a late announcement? Two reasons – the official date of this event was originally announced at a time Barb, Matt and I had not cleared with our schedules. The correct information about a new date did not get announced until just recently, and that announcement did not fall neatly into when my weekly update/blog appears (each Tuesday morning).

Now, I could have done a special posting earlier last week, but I was caught up in writing the final chapters of the new Nathan Heller novel (for Hard Case Crime), The Big Bundle.

I’m going to talk about that now.

* * *

As I’ve said here before, the Heller novels are my proudest achievement and the series is what I consider my signature work. Quarry, which after Heller is my favorite among my series, has become my signature work in the eyes of some. I don’t resent that at all – I like that two things of mine are viewed with such enthusiasm by readers. And of course Road to Perdition (and its sequels and subsequent graphic novels) is the most famous…though I should note that Road to Perdition was an off-shoot of the Heller saga.

Keeping Heller alive throughout my career has been tricky. The day when a mystery series could keep going at the same publisher over many decades had already ended when True Detective (the first Heller novel) was published in 1983. Spillane, Stout, Hammett, Chandler, Christie, and any number of less household-name authors were able to stay with one publisher and one series for a long, long time. But for some while we have been in a situation where publishers cancel a series – somewhat in the network TV mode – as soon as they deem it to have run its course, i.e., as soon as sales begin to drop at all. Often after one or two of three entries.

Heller has been cancelled and pronounced dead (even by my own agent) more times than Dracula at Hammer Films. I have been encouraged to leave him behind and write something new. Well, writing something new is no problem – I like doing that. But when I have hold of something special, I want to stick with it.

That’s why, when I had the opportunity decades later to pick back up with Quarry, I grabbed the chance. I knew Quarry was among the handful of innovative things I’d done in my career – a first-person hitman “hero” was, in a field that is built on recycling the ideas of others (and your own), something unique. When you have writers as gifted as Lawrence Block and Loren Estleman following your lead, you must be doing something right.

Heller is probably my major contribution to mystery fiction because he went somewhere no private eye had gone before: real crimes, researched as if this author (me) had been preparing to write the definitive non-fiction account of each crime…and with fresh solutions to those crimes. Additionally, he would age and change, would have a father and mother, would marry and produce an offspring, his one-room office would over the years become a coast-to-coast agency, and he would do human things like cry, fart, lie and cheat while not losing his P.I. credentials of having a code and being the best man in his world. I consciously chose to examine the cliches and tropes of the private eye, to find the reality behind them – to take Heller back to when Race Williams, the Continental Op and Sam Spade took the private eye into public consciousness…and when in fact there were real private eyes more or less doing for a few decades the fanciful things fictional private eyes would do for many decades.

But continuing the Heller series over decades has a downside that perhaps publishers anticipated. The novels get less frequently reviewed. New waves of fans ignore the books and don’t even try them. Their cultish status – their historical nature – get them ignored by mystery fandom publications. Reviewers who love the Heller novels and rave about them will forget to include them on their year’s end “best of list,” perhaps because the Hellers are in a sub-genre of their own. Or maybe Heller is just a been-there-done-that for such reviewers.

Keeping him alive meant somehow bamboozling various publishers into picking up a series that another publisher deemed had run its course. I started at St. Martin’s, moved to Bantam, then Dutton, and (after a decade-long break) to Forge. Now, Charels Ardai – who understands the hardboiled field, including its history – has picked up my torch at Hard Case Crime.

What has caught up with me, after all these years, is all these years. By which I mean, I am 74 and doing a Nate Heller book is a bitch. It really is. The joy of writing Quarry or Nolan or Mike Hammer is that a fairly minimal amount of research is involved. Some research is necessary, particularly since all the recent books in those series are set in period. Even though I lived through those eras doesn’t mean I was paying attention. I still have to check things like what songs were popular and what night TV shows were on, and fashions and brand-names, and on and on.

But generally there are great stretches where I can just write – I can just follow one of my protagonists into and through a scene, and dialogue can ensue as well as mayhem and eroticism. That’s when writing fiction is fun – when you have room in the kitchen to cook.

And Google has made much research both possible and easier. For decades, research associate George Hagenauer (who did not participate much in The Big Bundle) and I would both spend hours in libraries and other research-friendly facilities digging out all kinds of things. We both have built voluminous libraries of books and magazines that we have scoured over the years to produce Heller and other historically-themed novels. Google – added to those already assembled personal libraries – has made doing Heller easier.

But not easy.

Let me put it into perspective. Quarry’s Blood was written in three weeks. The Big Bundle took two months of reading/note-taking followed by three months of writing. (I got paid the same for both Blood and Bundle. Not complaining – that’s just the reality.) At my age, the degree of difficulty for doing a Heller is considerable.

I have committed to doing another Heller for Hard Case Crime, Too Many Bullets, which with The Big Bundle will comprise what I will likely call The Kennedy Quintet (Bye Bye, Baby; Target Lancer; and Ask Not being the previous novels in this cycle within the Heller cycle).

I find myself wondering – assuming I’m able to stick around on the planet a while longer – if I have the energy to keep Heller going. I have wanted to do a Watergate novel with him for some time, and have considered a Martin Luther King assassination novel (although in the current climate that may be a bad idea). I had a George Reeves/Superman novel in the research stage, but the film Hollywoodland came out and explored the same subject, so I shelved it; but enough time has passed that I might reconsider. There are several other smaller crimes that might become shorter Heller novels.

Perhaps he will have run his course by the end of Too Many Bullets. Lord knows I don’t want readers to say I’ve written Too Many Hellers. But the practical consideration of the degree of difficulty of these things may decide it for me.

I am picturing this week a page from the manuscript of The Big Bundle. I have circled everything that required me to stop and do research before going on. You will see, I think, what I am up against.

And yet I love having written The Big Bundle. Unintentionally, it became – like Skim Deep for Nolan and Quarry’s Blood for Quarry – a meditation on what had come before. Quite accidentally, Heller finds himself in situations that resonate with his past, starting with the case at hand being the kidnapping of a child – summoning both the Lindbergh kidnapping and his own fatherhood. If not a coda to the Heller saga (chronologically it appears before Target Lancer and Ask Not), it is a reconsideration and a revisiting of what has gone before.

None of this is bitching by the way, or if it comes across that way, my apologies. These are just the thoughts that occur to me as, with Barb’s help, I prepare to enter my final corrections into The Big Bundle manuscript and get it sent to Hard Case Crime yet today.

* * *

In a list of favorite Paul Newman films, Connie Wilson includes a nice little write-up of Road to Perdition.

This is a lovely review of Quarry’s Blood, but BEWARE – it includes a MAJOR SPOILER.

And here’s a podcast featuring Brad Schwartz, discussing our Eliot Ness non-fiction tomes. (I passed on participating because I was deep in The Big Bundle.)

M.A.C.

Rondo Hatton Lives!

I wound up sending seven copies of No Time to Spy in the latest book giveaway. They just went out – big honking packages!

Now here’s something I need to call your attention to. Matt Clemens and I have are part of the anthology Turning the Tied, recently nominated for the very cool Rondo Award, “fandom’s only classic horror awards.”

The ballot is here: https://rondoaward.com/rondoaward.com/blog/

We are in Category 12: Best Classic Horror Fiction. If you’re at all a classic horror fan, check out the other categories, too.

Paperback:
Ebook:

Here’s a description of the anthology:

Turning the Tied, edited by Jean Rabe, Robert Greenberger (International Association Media Tie-in Writers, softcover, 453 pages, $19.99). Sherlock, Dracula, Frankenstein all figure in collection of stories by Max Allan Collins, Jonathan Maberry, Stephen D. Sullivan and others.

Back in 2016, Matt and I wrote a Sherlock Holmes short story, “The Adventure of Leonardo’s Smile.” We originally conceived it for a mystery puzzle and it was going to be done by the company that did our other puzzles (CSI, CSI: NEW YORK, NCIS: LOS ANGELES, THE MENTALIST, etc.). It was the last story I wrote before going in for heart surgery and at the time I wondered if it would be my last, period. When the puzzle didn’t happen, our Holmes story didn’t have a home.

And then the IAMTW antho came along and we were chosen as the lead story (among a bunch of really strong ones). I also contributed an afterword as the co-founder (with Lee Goldberg) of the organization.

It’s a wonderful book.

And as Al Capone said, “Vote early, and vote often!”

* * *

I am coming down the pike (as Barb puts it) on the new Heller, The Big Bundle…two chapters to go. With luck I’ll finish this week. That’s iffy, because I always re-read the whole manuscript and do final tweaks and sometime rewrites. So it could bleed into next week. But right now I’m caught up in the writing, so this week is a short update.

I had some very good comments come in last week and, rather than answer them in the comments section, I want to bring a few of ‘em centerstage.

Stephen Borer – a reader who has been with me for decades and is one of the nicest, most supportive fans Barb and I have ever been lucky enough to know – responded to my Chuck Berry stuff last week with this: Speaking of Mr. Berry, Max, could you please repeat your meeting him at an airport story for the newer readers?

Here you go, Stephen:

On the passing of CHUCK BERRY (from March 21, 2017):

I met him at an airport where we shared a gate. He was traveling with a guitar in its case, and appeared to be alone. But it was unmistakably him. As a longtime veteran of rock ‘n’ roll, I had to have a moment. I didn’t ask for an autograph, afraid I might start trouble for him, because a lot of people obviously didn’t recognize him.

“I just want to thank you for starting it all,” I said.

He smiled and said you’re welcome, and we shook hands.

I think I said something about having played rock ‘n’ roll for decades, and he said where he was headed, though I’ve forgotten. He was quiet but friendly.

What I said to him was about right. Little Richard and other black artists of the early rock days really were r & b starting to become rock, and Elvis fell in that category as well. But Chuck Berry, with his guitar-driven rock and his teenage subject matter, was not r & b, but at the very forefront of the new genre. Pure rock ‘n’ roll.

He was playing regularly in his home, St. Louis, until very recently.

Regan MacArthur made this observation:

Confession: I was initially intimidated by the heft of Stolen Away and I think it’s one of the best books in the series. Such a varied and interesting cast of characters. I thought, “Man, this is better than Twin Peaks!” Truly, I was riveted from beginning to end.

That’s great to hear, but I understand the reluctance of some to dive in to such big books. The Hellers do vary in size, however, and a couple – Chicago Lightning (short stories) and Triple Play (three novellas, with my beautiful wife on the cover) – are a way to try Heller out more bite-size. But, really, anybody who likes Quarry, Hammer or Nolan will probably like the Nathan Heller books. They have the same kind of violent action and steamy sex as my shorter noir novels. Because they endeavor to recreate eras, you might flip through and think the text looks at times dense (not in the dumb dense way!), but I like to think of them as rich.

Bruce Jones says:

I’m nearing the end of True Detective, and the insights into your process are fascinating. You’ve been using interesting locations from the start with Heller. The Chicago World’s Fair is beautifully recreated, and the Miami section with Cermak and FDR is a master class in historical crime fiction. I’m looking forward to the rest of the Nitti trilogy.

That’s great to hear, but I’d like to know if you are Bruce Jones the writer, because if you are, I’m a fan. And if you aren’t, that’s what you get for having a common last name like Jones or Smith or Collins.

Bill P is back to ask:

Max, I saw you gave recommendations on an earlier thread about where to start with Quarry. Any similar recommendations for places to start with Nate Heller?

That’s a tricky one to answer, and very similar to the Quarry dilemma. The books are written out of order. The excellent chronology from Bill Slankard will point you to reading the books and stories in chronological order.

But I am of several minds here. I would suggest reading The Frank Nitti Trilogy first: True Detective, True Crime, The Million-Dollar Wound. From an artistic standpoint, reading the books in order of publication follows the arc of my development as a writer…and Heller himself probably benefits from that. I am sure there are continuity goofs – I have been working on this saga since 1981, which is…forty years?

When someone asks me what a good book to try the series out on, I would suggest Carnal Hours and I think Angel in Black and Stolen Away are strong.

From a selfish standpoint, I’d say start with whatever is out there right now – The Big Bundle will be out this year! And supporting that one will get more written.

M.A.C.

Nate Heller, Chuck Berry, and Five Free Books!

E-Book:
Paperback:

Finally, our book giveaway of No Time to Spy, the massive collection of the John Sand trilogy, has arrived. We have only five (5) copies to give away. As usual, you agree to write an Amazon review (and/or at any other review site, like Barnes & Noble, Good Reads, your own blog, etc.). [All copies have been claimed. Thank you for your support! — Nate]

We really need the reviews, as No Time to Spy has stalled out at a meager 18 ratings. By way of contrast, the new Quarry’s Blood already has 34 (and thank you for that!). Now, I understand John Sand and Quarry are two different animals, but the individual titles in the Sand series have fared very well (229 ratings for Come Spy with Me for an average of four stars).

If you have read the trilogy as it came out, novel by novel, and liked what you read, please consider reviewing the collection at Amazon to help build up interest. Right now it’s looking like the fourth Sand, resolving a hell of a cliffhanger (if Matt Clemens and I may be so bold to suggest), will never be written.

On this subject – and I think I’ve made this clear before – I am well aware that not everything I write appeals to the same group of readers. Right now I’m working on The Big Bundle, the new Nate Heller novel (about 2/3’s in), and am cognizant of the fact that what some readers relate to in my work is my first-person voice. That’s not just one voice, of course – Mike Hammer and Quarry and Heller are not the same voice, but they are variations on my voice and reflect whatever facility I may have in first person. Some readers may not relate as well to a third-person voice, as used in John Sand, Nolan, the Perdition prose novels and more.

And some people who like, say, Quarry like to lambast me when I write anything else. But I need to stay fresh and nimble and that requires writing different things, although mostly I work in suspense/mystery. But I get it. I have writers whose work I like who occasionally throw me a curve I can’t catch. One of my favorite writers is Mark Harris – his baseball trilogy (The Southpaw is the first, Bang the Drum Slowly is the most famous) is to me a marvel of first-person storytelling.

Harris, who I met and then corresponded with, saw himself as a literary writer and throughout his career he tried all kinds of things. Usually I at least like what he did, at times I loved what he did, but on a few occasions I didn’t connect with him at all. When someone dislikes my work in general, I like to say the reader and I are not a good fit. When someone who likes some of what I do complains about a work that doesn’t work for him or her, I chalk it up similarly – that reader isn’t a good fit with that particular work.

A good example is the Antiques series that Barb and I write together. These are cozy mysteries, albeit somewhat of a subversive take on that sub-genre, told in the first person by two narrators. The novels combine what we think are good solid mysteries with a lot of fairly off-the-wall humor. A surprising number (surprising to me) of readers of noir-ish things of mine like Quarry, Heller and Hammer also like these books. But I completely understand the readers who, despite generally being fans of mine, don’t cotton to Brandy and Vivian Borne.

Writing this new Heller raises a number of issues in my aging mind. I understand that some fans of my Quarry and Nolan and Hammer novels don’t respond to Heller, despite my own feeling that the Heller saga is my signature work. While the Heller books have the violence and sex for which I am known and loved, they also are long books…this one will be 80,000 words and I believe Stolen Away was 125,000 words…and they are more detailed and explore the historical crimes they’re dealing with in depth. The violence and sex stuff is there, but not every other chapter.

Another factor I’m facing is the degree of difficulty. Even now I can write a Quarry novel in a month. The real-life case I’m dealing with in The Big Bundle is not as complicated (or frankly as famous) as, say, the assassination of Huey Long (Blood and Thunder) or the disappearance of Amelia Earhart (Flying Blind). But at this age I have to review the research extensively before working on a chapter covered by that material; this includes new research, beyond the several months of reading that preceded the writing, stuff I’m picking up on the fly.

I also find I am re-plotting several times as I go along. That happens with any novel, because I don’t let my synopsis dictate things – if characters want to do something different, I let them. If something occurs to me as an interesting turn to take, I take it.

That’s all well and good, but in a Heller novel I am dealing with history. The first book, True Detective, in the very title established the rules: these would be true stories. I allow myself some liberties – time compression and occasional composite characters are typical elements in a Heller. But mostly it’s just the facts, ma’am, presented in the context of a private eye novel and striving to come up with the truth…most happily (as has been often the case) with a new solution to a controversial real mystery.

What I am up against now is that pesky degree of difficulty. I think I’m writing as well as ever (possibly self-delusion, but it keeps me going). With Heller, however, the amount of time for me to feel I get it right is at odds with the speed at which I was long able to work. I understand that’s a function of old age; but knowing that doesn’t make it any easier. Just annoying. Frustrating.

I have committed to one more Heller after this one – the two books will complete the cycle of Heller novels involving JFK and RFK. Bobby Kennedy isn’t in The Big Bundle much, but he’s a vital element; next time he will be the focus.

I have been expecting to spend my remaining writing years with a focus on Heller. I am nearing the end of the Hammer manuscripts, and I’ve written and published endings to Nolan and Quarry (two each!). But I question whether I am up to the Heller degree of difficulty in relation to how much time it takes to arrive at what satisfies me.

On top of this are newer projects – like Fancy Anders and John Sand – that interest me. I am extremely proud of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton; it’s one of my best books (thank you Dave Thomas!). Barb and I are developing a standalone thriller, and I’m doing three novellas for Neo-Text on unlikely American heroes. There a few more Spillane/Hammer books left to write.

But Heller is what I’m proudest of. Probably the deciding factor will be if I can’t hit the mark, can’t write about him in a way that pleases me.

One interesting thing about Heller is how writing the books can lead me into rewarding areas that I didn’t anticipate. In Big Bundle, I decided to do a scene in St. Louis at a club where Chuck Berry was playing. Berry isn’t being used as a famous historical character in the novel – it’s just me looking for a fun setting for a scene.

That’s always a problem in private eye novels. The form is basically a series of interviews with witnesses and suspects – look at The Maltese Falcon. So I try in Heller (well, in all novels that touch on the PI form) to use interesting locations. With an historical saga like Heller’s, it’s an opportunity to suggest the times and put the place in context – using famous defunct restaurants, for instance.

I read about the Cosmopolitan Club, where Berry basically put rock ‘n’ roll on stage for the first time, and found that the documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll (1987) had refurbished the defunct East St. Louis club for a mini-concert celebrating (and sort of recreating) Berry’s tenure there. I got caught up in the documentary and it got me interested in Berry and his music, which I had frankly (stupidly) taken for granted. On reflection, I was reminded that everything from the Beach Boys to the Beatles came from him, and recalled how many, many songs of his my various bands had played.

So I sent for another documentary (Chuck Berry, 2018), and several books, and three CD’s. That’s a bonus that comes out of the Heller research – I stumble onto things that are only tangential to the book at hand but that roar into the centerstage of my personal interests.

If you’ve never seen Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, by the way, you haven’t lived till you watch Chuck Berry schooling Keith Richards on how to play rock ‘n’ guitar. One particular sequence is singled out as demonstrating how difficult Chuck could be; but for those of us who’ve played in bands, we know: Chuck was right.

One bittersweet aspect was my realization that I had blown a great opportunity. My son Nate lived in St. Louis for better than half a decade, and during that time Barb and I visited him (and later, Nate and his wife Abby, and later than that, grandson Sam too) often. Meanwhile, hometown boy Chuck Berry was playing once a month at Blueberry Hill, a fantastic club in the Delmar loop. And I – we – didn’t bother to see him.

As Fats Domino would say, “Ain’t that a shame.”

* * *

This Paperback Warrior review of Quarry’s Blood appeared on my birthday, March 3, and I couldn’t ask for a better present.

The New York Times recommended ten books last week, and Quarry’s Blood was one of them.

Finally, Daedalus Books has the hardcover of Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher for $6.95.

M.A.C.