Max Allan Collins's Blog, page 21

It Was Fifty Years Ago Today…

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Our Christmas card from Pee Wee Herman/Paul Reubens arrived today.

Christmas time is officially here!!!

My novella, Fancy Anders Goes to War: Who Killed Rosie the Riveter?, is out on audio from Skyboat and available at Audible. At my request, Skyboat used a female narrator – Gabrielle de Cuir – who did a wonderful job. This is a lovely way to get to know Fancy Anders.

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This update will appear on Tuesday Dec. 21, with Christmas a few days away, and – obviously – Christmas Eve a day sooner than that. For me this year, Christmas Eve is the day that resonates the most. Here’s why.

Fifty years ago, I was in grad school at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, studying at the Writers’ Workshop. I had already written two novels there (Bait Money and No Cure for Death) and begun a third (Quarry). I lived in nearby Muscatine with Barb – we’d been married in June 1968 – and she was working at the First National Bank and I was in my first year of teaching at Muscatine Community College. The teaching gig, which I disliked intensely, was part-time; two days a week I drove to Iowa City for Workshop sessions.

A number of good things had happened by this point. The great mainstream writer Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road) had taken me under his wing. Through him, I got my first agent, Knox Burger, the legendary Gold Medal Books editor who now was a one-man literary agency. When Yates wrote him, sending my novel and saying I might be the next Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, Burger wrote back, “No – but W.R. Burnett, maybe.” Yates didn’t understand why I took that as a compliment.

Burger said in the same letter, “I’m afraid young Collins is a blacksmith in an automotive age.” I rather like that line, because it’s probably the most accurate appraisal of me and my work anybody ever made. But the important thing is that Burger took me on as a client.

That had been something like a year and a half before, and neither Bait Money nor No Cure for Death had sold. I’ve written before about how Burger objected to the original ending of Bait Money, in which Nolan was killed; it was downbeat in a very late ‘60s/early ‘70s movie way, and had to do with me writing what I thought was a book about the death of the last American tough guy. It had been rejected seven times, I think, most recently by an editor at Pyramid who had spilled coffee on the manuscript.

In those days publishers would not accept a carbon manuscript and photocopying was strictly a Star Trek kind of thing. Burger said that since I had to re-type it anyway, I might as well put a better ending on it. Specifically he said, “Robin doesn’t leave Batman to die.” And that resonated, and so young sidekick Jon came back and rescued old (48!) Nolan.

That had been the last I heard of it. As I say, I hated my teaching job. I came to like it more, but that first year I was dealing with remedial students – functional illiterates who had somehow been granted high school diplomas, presumably to flush them from the public educational system. I had come home to our little apartment some time in the fall of ‘71 and broke down while Barb held me.

“Is this it for me?” I said. “Am I not going to be a writer?” I’d been writing books and stories since junior high, convinced I would be an author. Teaching had always been something to fall back on. But right now I felt like teaching had fallen on me. And hardly anybody at the Workshop, teacher William Price Fox included, thought much of my book in progress – Quarry.

On December 24, 1971, I received a letter from Knox Burger. I didn’t figure it for a Christmas card, and wondered if he might be dropping me. Instead he was informing me that Curtis Books was buying Bait Money.

You will not be surprised to learn that this was my most joyous Christmas ever. But I recall being a little frightened, too. I had that “Now what?” feeling that comes with getting blindsided by success. Curtis also wanted two more books in a Nolan series!

I called Don Westlake, who had been something of a mentor to me – he was a client of Burger’s too, coincidentally – and shared the news. His response about my learning I’d sold my first book on Christmas Eve was a memorable one: “Sometimes God acts like O. Henry and there’s nothing that can be done about it.”

He also gave me his blessing to write more Nolan books, despite the character being a shameless imitation of his Parker. He felt the Jon sidekick humanized Nolan and, if I kept Jon in the mix, the series could be something of its own. (He did, at times over the years, refer to me as the Jayne Mansfield to his Marilyn Monroe.)

In the first week or so of 1972, Curtis Books bought No Cure for Death, as well. I am fuzzy about it, but I think I waited to finish Quarry till after I’d written Blood Money, the second Nolan. At any rate, Blood Money was submitted early enough in 1972 for it to be published simultaneously with Bait Money in December 1972 (with a January 1973 publication date).

My comp copies came on Christmas Eve, 1972. God was still in an O. Henry mood, or anyway Knox Burger was.

As it happened, Curtis Books only published those first two novels, though they bought three more Nolans (Fly Paper, Hush Money and Hard Cash) and another Mallory (The Baby Blue Rip-off), before getting swallowed up by Popular Library. All of those books went into Popular Library’s inventory and weren’t published until the rights came back to me years later. That’s how Nolan wound up at Pinnacle Books in the early ‘80s and – around the same time – Mallory at Walker for hardcover and TOR for paperback.

That’s more detail than you need to know. And some of it I’ve shared before. But when it occurred to me that Dec. 24, 2021 would mark fifty years since I sold my first novel, I thought it worthy of mention here.

Fifty years is a long time.

And an eye blink.

The postscript is that Christmas came a little early this year – a few days ago, to be exact. A movie deal has closed on one of my properties.

Nolan.

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If you’re wondering what to get me for Christmas (and I know you are), you can…if you have already read (and liked) the three John Sand novels by Matt Clemens and me…post an overall review at Amazon of the trilogy, which has just been published on Kindle in an omnibus edition called No Time to Spy. The moment the boxed set went up, so did a negative overall review by markh (a fellow Iowan no less), a 600-word condemnation of the novels designed to convince no one to buy it.

I have no idea who markh is, but he’s one of that small, hardy group who profess to have liked my work in the past and are now attempting to make sure no one reads anything by me written in my doddering old age. His objection is chiefly that Matt and I are writing spy yarns in the mode of the early ‘60s James Bond craze, and trying to pass them off as serious espionage novels.

Of course, that’s not the case. The books are very slightly tongue-in-cheek, yes, but are rather tough, violent adventure stories that have everything to do with the Fleming novels, the Connery films, and the less spoofy spy stuff of the early ‘60s – Harry Palmer, Matt Helm (the books not the movies), I Spy, John Drake, first-season Man from UNCLE, etc. Nobody said these were realistic much less inside looks at the world of espionage. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold they ain’t. They are, we hope, fun.

I have no objection to somebody not liking my stuff, but the way markh was lying in wait to post his overall slam on the day No Time to Spy was published, is…what is the word?…creepy. He had already expressed his individual dislike of the books. But apparently, because he refers to my blog in his review, he takes offense that I don’t sit still and shut up when he sets out to convince others not to read me (in a supposed context of being a fan, or shall we say former fan).

But I have a Christmas gift for markh: You no longer have to read my books. You have my permission, my blessing, not to. Let me take it a step farther, in the spirit of giving: don’t read my books. I don’t care to have my words running around in your head where you can scramble them. We are not a good fit, markh.

For the record – at Amazon, Come Spy with Me has an average of 4.1 out of 5 stars, both Live Fast, Spy Hard and To Live and Spy in Berlin an average of 4.4 out of 5 stars.

But right now No Time To Spy has an average based only on markh’s negative review. Stunting the sales of the omnibus could easily lead to Matt and me not being able to write another John Sand. Which seems to be markh’s goal.

By the way, Amazon now has the paperback edition at $15.99 (I have not seen a copy yet).

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Paperback Warrior, a truly great site for fans of pulp fiction at its best, posted a nice array of Quarry covers recently, and said lovely things about the series. They also provided a link to their various smart reviews of a number of the novels published by Hard Case Crime.

Here’s an interesting piece on movie novelizations (I get a mention).

This is a wonderful article about the little-known comic strip, Mr. Oswald, which incorporates my thoughts of this lost gem.

Happy Holidays, everyone.

M.A.C.

John Sand, Jimmy Leighton, Mike Nesmith and Christmas Music

My concern for your welfare knows no bounds. Hence, I am helping you with your Christmas shopping by pointing out a couple of possibilities for last-minute gift-giving (or post-Christmas use of Amazon gift cards). Later on this page I will talk about some Christmas CDs you might wish to consider. But first….

E-Book:
E-Book:
Trade Paperback:

The three John Sand spy novels, collected in an omnibus titled No Time to Spy, will be out tomorrow (Dec. 15, 2121) on Kindle. It’s a mere $5.99. A print version will follow, probably before the end of the year.

Get it here.

The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton is on sale on Kindle for a ridiculous $3.99. The trade paperback, with a cool Faye Dalton cover, is available now for $8.99, also a steal. You can order right here.

Dave and I did an interview about The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton for The Dave Thomas Appreciation Page on Facebook. Emily Elizabeth conducted it. Here it is:

For those who do not know much about the book, can you give a brief summary to your followers here at Dave Thomas Appreciation?

MAX: It’s a contemporary hybrid of a science-fiction novel and a crime story. Jimmy Leighton is a smalltime thief who stumbles into a quantum experiment and gets thrust into one version of his life after another – various paths he might have taken but didn’t. Part of what sends him cycling through his many lives is getting shot, and throughout all of his trips he is in a coma in the hospital in the initial timeline. There two police detectives are trying to solve the mystery of who shot Jimmy Leighton – they are a mismatched pair, a veteran Black widower and a virtual rookie who is female and gay. How they come together as a team is a story in itself.

DAVE: Okay, Max has summed it up pretty well. Anything I would add to that would be redundant and boring.

There’s no denying that the concept of Jimmy Leighton is impressively unique, and that is quite the rarity these days in an endless cycle of regurgitated remakes and done-to-the-death storylines, so having a novel like this is beyond refreshing and is something we could all really benefit from, more frequently, as an audience. How did you initially develop the idea for the story?

MAX: I’ll defer to Dave on that, except to say that he had more than the basic idea – he had a story treatment and two or three chapters. That was our beginning and as both of us have experience in the world of crime fiction – me as a novelist primarily, and Dave working on Blacklist and Bones – we developed the secondary story about who-shot-Jimmy-Leighton.

DAVE: Okay, so here’s what happened. Initially, I came up with The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton as an interdimensional television show – I’ve always been interested in time travel and other dimensions, and I’ve had more than one idea in this arena. However, when I researched the physics behind a theoretical move to another dimension, I came up with Princeton Physicist Hugh Everett III who introduced a concept in 1957 that became known as the Many Worlds Interpretation. What Everett said was that all the outcomes of every choice exist – even if they are not realized. For example, you come to an intersection and can turn right or left. If you turn right and get home safely, that’s your reality. But if you had turned left, you might’ve been in car accident and there would’ve been consequences to that. Everett believed that the right turn – the road not taken – created a universe where all the consequences of that righthand turn would tumble out, creating other choices and other consequences that ultimately created a different reality or universe. To me, the idea that there might be other universes where our lives are different, sometimes not dramatically different and other times very different, was intriguing. So, I worked this into a story about a little thief from South Boston who sticks his nose into a quantum physics experiment as a way in. Then I created some other characters and worked it up into a pitch for a television show. Well, it didn’t sell. So, I decided to write it as a book, something I’d never done but I’m always up for a new challenge. Well, I wrote three chapters. And then, in characteristic Dave Thomas style, I moved on to another better-paying project. I’m old-fashioned and I like to get paid for my work. So The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton just kind of sat there for a year or two until I met Max. Now Max is an accomplished novelist and I was excited to hear what he had to say about this idea. Was it a novel or just a failed TV pitch? He read it, liked it, and said, in his opinion, it could be a novel. But then he went on to say he’d be willing to get me a book agent, a publisher or – what he’d rather do is write it with me. Well, that was all I needed to hear. I mean, the guy has written more than 100 novels and I had written…well, none! So, we started to talk and, very soon, Max helped me realize that what I’d come up with was not a novel at all but merely a layer for a novel. Working with Max made The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton into a book. We added the two investigators, Neer and Farr, and the concept that Jimmy had been shot when he broke into the physicist’s lab – that became a mystery layer of the story that grounded the whole sci-fi concept. And what was a particular surprise to me, was that the idea of Jimmy getting shot also helped make the physics behind the book make more sense. Because, according to Everett, the only way to cross the barrier from one dimension to another was to commit “quantum suicide.” Well, we weren’t going to do that because we wanted Jimmy to be able to come back at the end of the book to the dimension where he started and resolve the story. But getting shot and hovering in a coma, halfway between life and death – now that gave Jimmy an entrance to other versions of his life that he couldn’t control. Okay, I know, I know, this is much more of the mechanics of our writing that anyone needs or wants to know. But this is an example of how the collaboration made this book greater than my original concept for it. The sum of the parts, right?

What would you say was your favorite thing about working with each other?

MAX: Dave challenges everything – makes me reach for something new or different, not just the path of least resistance. Also, we share a lot of interests, and it’s always fun when we realize we have something other enthusiasm in common.

DAVE: I think I answered that in the previous question. But maybe I could add that I learned a lot of technical stuff working with Max – things that a writer needs to know when he moves from one type of writing which, in my case was television, to another form – namely, the novel. Max knows novels and he was my teacher in this collaboration. There were just so many technical things about writing a novel that I needed to know that I didn’t know. It’s funny, I went all the way through university to the Masters Degree in English literature, taking apart the works of famous writers like Conrad, Vonnegut and Faulkner, writing essays on style and structure but that does not teach you how to write a novel. To do that you need someone like Max, someone who has spent years sitting in front of a typewriter, banging out thousands and thousands of words, learning all the tricks by doing. It’s the old saying – “there are those who write and those who teach about writing.” To me, the best way to learn anything is by working with someone who actually does it for a living.

If Jimmy Leighton were to ever be adapted into a film or television series, is there any role, either on or offscreen, that you would like to take in it?

MAX: I’d love to collaborate on a screenplay of it or TV series adaptation with Dave, who is a terrific screenwriter. I think he should play Dr. Goldman but he doesn’t agree…but he has to play some role.

DAVE: I have no interest in acting in an adaption of Jimmy Leighton or anything else for that matter. Acting is for young people who really want to do it and I am not young anymore. Personally, I think I look terrible on camera. I just plain don’t like looking at my face on the screen. On the other hand, I love telling stories. And I can do that without showing my old face. I would be happy to write a screenplay or teleplay with Max – especially since we would be on my home turf there and maybe I could be as valuable to him as he was to me in the world of novel writing.

Being an avid longtime fan of Dave’s work, I have noticed a slight similarity between this story and what is easily my favorite project of his, which is an amazing 1980s Showtime television film titled The Incredible Time Travels of Henry Osgood. The film centers around Dave’s character, a history professor displeased with modern life, who finds himself thrown firsthand into a number of various historical periods and events after being hit by a car. In what ways do you feel these two stories, and their respective titular characters, could be juxtaposed against each other?

MAX: My working relationship with Dave grew out of being an SCTV fan in general and a Dave Thomas fan in particular. I have a copy of Henry Osgood and knew there was a resonance between the two stories. As we got to know each other, it soon became obvious that we were both interested in a certain kind of fantasy story with a real-life aspect – Here Comes Mr. Jordan, A Christmas Carol, Groundhog Day. I’d always wanted to do that kind of story and Dave made it possible for me to realize that.

DAVE: When I first went to Disneyland, my favorite ride was not the most elaborate rides like Pirates of the Caribbean or the haunted House. It was the Peter Pan ride where you get in a rickety little cart and roll into Wendy’s bedroom and then the window opens and out you go, flying over the city of London and off to Never Never Land. That’s my favorite type of story – where the writer opens a window in the real world and beacons the reader to take a trip with him – out the window to some other reality where the rules are different and strange. I love stories like that. So, of course, whenever I get a chance to write them, those are the sorts of stories I love to tell.

Imagining for a second that the multiverse is, in fact, real, do you believe there are any versions of Dave Thomas and Max Collins out there who are living particularly interesting lives?

MAX: I often think about the paths not taken – both in terms of the right and wrong choices I’ve made, but also luck…even fate. Sometimes it seems like Dave and I were fated to do this project together. We have an incredible number of things in common.

DAVE: I absolutely believe there are better versions of me out there in the multiverse. And worse versions too – because I have dreamt about them. Ugggh! It’s pretty scary. So yes, I believe in alternate universes. And I believe in ideas. That’s one thing little kids don’t understand when they learn that Santa Claus isn’t real. No need to cry kids because no version of a real Santa will ever be as powerful as the idea of Santa. We all have a picture of him in our minds’ eyes, fat and jovial with a perfect beard, a real one, and a twinkle in his eye that says he knows who’s been naughty or nice. He’s perfect and will live forever.

Finally, with the holidays coming up: is there any chance of autographed copies becoming available? I can’t think of a better gift!

MAX: Because the book is only available through Amazon, we haven’t figured out a way to do that. We haven’t even met in person! It’s all been phone and Zoom calls…a lot of them. During the Covid lockdown, we spoke pretty much every day.

DAVE: Sorry… maybe ask Santa for it. But if it doesn’t come then don’t get all dramatic and sad. After all, it’s just a stupid signature. The real gift is the book. And it’s only $8.99 on Amazon ($3.99 for Kindle). Happy Holidays to all.

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Here are some of my favorite Christmas albums available on CD, a physical media that is quickly approaching eight-track status. This is not a “best Christmas Albums of All Time” list – just what Barb and I enjoy.

I tend toward secular Christmas music, because the non-religious aspect of the holiday is my preference. My parents, who did so much positive in my life (as you may recall from previous posts), made me despise church and particularly recoil at most Christmas religious music. This has to do with my father being the minister of music at a Methodist church and throughout my childhood (aided and abetted by my mother) ruining a wonderful holiday of gift-giving and greed by (a) making me go to a midnight Christmas Eve service every year and (b) taking me away from my gifts for a week of travel (starting by car after that midnight Eve service) to both sets of grandparents to eat up my Christmas vacation.

So I lean toward Santa Claus and chestnuts roasting with a minimum of Jesus and Silent Night (although that’s a lovely song).

1. DEAN MARTIN – “Making Spirits Bright.” This is the ultimate cool, laid-back Christmas CD, and “Silent Night” is the only exception of the “Let It Snow” vibe (and it’s a very nice version at that). “Christmas with the Rat Pack” is pretty good, too, but take your Dean straight, if you can.

2. DIANA KRALL – “Christmas Songs.” This is fairly new and a softly jazzy wonderful compendium of all the usual suspects. She has a smoky voice and whimsical approach that reminds me of Julie London while being very much her own artist.

3. PHIL SPECTOR – “A Christmas Gift for You.” Sure, he was a murderer, but he rounded up the likes of Darlene Love, Ronnie & and the Ronnettes and the Crystals to wish you a merry Christmas. Just because he spent his last years behind walls doesn’t mean we can’t dig his wall of sound.

4. THE BEACH BOYS – “The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album.” One of Brian Wilson’s early masterpieces. My band used to do “Little Saint Nick” and let me tell you, doing Beach Boys material is hard. Sounds so simple and is so darn complex. Bask in those harmonies while sipping hot chocolate by the fire. Do it now!

5. BOBBY DARIN – “The 25th Day of December.” Darin’s presence on this list will come as no surprise, but except for “Christmas Auld Lang Syne” (a single release not on the original album) no Brill Building pop is on this at all, and no American songbook classics like Dino’s album is rife with either. It’s all religious stuff, but is one of Darin’s best albums, beautifully sung with a lot of rocking spirituals, in particular “Child of God.”

6. SOUTH PARK – “Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics.” If I included a murderer, why are you surprised by the presence of a talking poo? Or maybe you aren’t. We spend Christmas in Hell and along the way hear the best version of “Oh Holy Night” ever.

7. LET IT SNOW! – a cocktail lounge collection of Christmas tunes. There are a bunch of these anthologies out there and you probably only need one. This is as good as any.

8. THE BRIAN SETZER ORCHESTRA – “Christmas Rocks!” This is a “best of,” but really any one of Setzer’s CD’s will do. You probably don’t need more than one.

9. ELLA FITZGERALD – “Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas.” One of the best secular, swinging Christmas albums ever made. And no religion at all. Bliss!

AND FINALLY…

10. THE FAB FOUR – “Hark!” The best Beatles tribute band of all time collects its two Christmas albums (one of which had songs in an early Beatles style, the other in later, psychedelic Beatles mode) on one disc with two bonus cuts. This is a dead-on Beatles imitation, hilarious at times in its witty restructuring of Christmas classics into ghosts of Beatle songs past. For years I gave many copies of the original releases to friends and particularly bandmates over the years. This really is the great Beatles Christmas album the Beatles never made. Get it here.

There’s also a Monkees Christmas CD (“Christmas Party”), which I’ve only listened to a couple of times so far, but it’s very good. I’ll be spinning it more often now that the great Mike Nesmith has passed. Raise a glass of spiked egg nogg to the Wool Cap.

I really loved the Monkees TV show, and their albums, which I looked forward to almost as much as a new Beatles record. My first band, the Daybreakers, played many Monkees songs, and so over the years has Crusin’. Crusin’s was honored in 1992 to be asked to contribute to the Monkees tribute CD, Here No Evil. The CD was the brainchild of our great one-time guitar player, Rob Gal, and our track, “Little Bit Me, Little Bit You” – produced by the late Paul Thomas (miss you, buddy) – was singled out in the reviews. Nesmith was a wonderful songwriter, signer and comic actor, and he appears to have come to positive terms with his Monkees tenure and fame.

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This great review of Three for the Money, the Jack Kamen EC crime story collection, is complimentary about my introduction. The Christmas spirit has finally brought Fantagraphics and me together….

M.A.C.

No Time to Spy

E-Book:

Next week – Wednesday December 15, to be exact – No Time to Spy will go on sale at Amazon (it’s up for pre-sale now). It will likely be labeled The John Sand Box, although there’s a possibility it might say The John Sand Trilogy (this has been under discussion at Wolfpack, our publisher…although we will soon be moving to Wolfpack’s Rough Edges Press imprint under the auspices of the great James Reasoner).

At the moment, No Time to Spy is listed only as a Kindle title, but a print edition will be available soon. We’ll announce that here. The Kindle price is $5.99, which for all three Sand novels is less than two bucks a book. Such a deal. (Don’t know the print edition price yet.)

The nature of the Sand novels makes an omnibus collection like this ideal, as the books work well as one big novel. Truthfully, they would work even better with a fourth book that Matt and I have in mind, but that’s in the hands of readers like you. For those of you who are interested enough in my work to pay attention to these blog/updates, but haven’t tried John Sand yet, now’s the time. If you read on Kindle, get busy. If you prefer print, stay tuned.

These books – despite what a few knucklehead reviewers on Amazon have said (you know – the “I’m a big fan of Max Allan Collins but his books suck” contingent) – these are not in any way spoofs. They are rather tough and violently actionful in the manner of the Fleming originals and the films (all but certain Roger Moore entries). They are not serious John Le Carre exercises, but take place in that world of ‘60s spies where Bond, Harry Palmer, Napoleon Solo (first season), John Drake and Matt Helm (books only) lived. This is the world Austin Powers made fun of.

I realize a good number of you are Old School readers. You not only like physical media, you like to browse in actual bookstores. But I have to ask your patience and, frankly, your help because my markets today are only partly served by the likes of Barnes & Noble and BAM!, no matter how much money I spend at both and the few independent bookstores I run across as an Iowan in Covidville. Two of my primary markets are e-book driven – Wolfpack and Neo-Text – and both serve the print market only through Amazon. Nothing I can do about that – I go where I’m wanted.

So don’t expect to find John Sand or Fancy Anders or Jimmy Leighton on the shelves of traditional bookstores. Ain’t gonna happen, at least not for a while. Take what’s left of my future in your hot little hands and help Jeff Bezos send William Shanter even further into outer space.

Captain Kirk and I implore you.

* * *

Matt Clemens and I live about thirty miles apart. I’m in Muscatine, Iowa, and he’s in Davenport, Iowa. We have written around 30 novels together, and he worked on all four of my indie features. I talk with him on the phone frequently and did so throughout the Covid lockdown, during which we wrote two of the John Sand books. But today, when he drove to Muscatine to bring me some books, was the first we’ve been in the same room together for almost two years.

It was fun. We talked about mystery writer stuff and explored possibilities for a fourth John Sand novel, while the family dog, Toaster – a demented Blue Heeler (is there any other kind?) – barked and then whimpered and finally rolled submissively on her back for Matt.

No one had been in our house except the others in our lockdown bubble – Nate and his missus and their two young ‘uns – since March 2020. Toaster is crazy as it is, but the presence of Matthew – not a small man – absolutely drove her past the brink and into insanity…a watchdog delirious with joy thanks to a human she knew well but hadn’t seen in ages.

Relationships on the phone and zoom work – they really do. But being in the same room as a friend and talking and interacting and looking at each other…it’s a part of being human that I’d missed more than I realized.

We did something we rarely did at the end of the day, Matt and me – we shook hands.

“Let’s write a book together next year,” he said

“Let’s,” I said.

* * *

Last week and through the weekend – with Jim Traylor’s counsel – I revised Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction for editor Otto Penzler at Mysterious Press. I delivered it today. I have also completed the 14-page synopsis of The Big Bundle, after spending many hours reading research, looking for the story part of the word history.

I think I found it, and I’m excited to be starting what will surely be one of the last few Heller novels, meaning it needs to be a really good one.

My very next project, which I will begin writing on the day this update appears, is my draft – working from Barb’s – of Antiques Foe. The pun, for those of you paying attention, is “faux/foe.” I really enjoy working on these.

* * *

Here is a Dave Thomas interview about our book The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton.

About half-way through this podcast, the Evil Genius (Dave Slusher) talks about really liking my books but doesn’t think they’re great – they don’t show much “art.” At the beginning of my career, the New York Times mystery critic said: “Collins has an artless style that conceals a great deal of art.” So there, Evil Genius. But thanks.

Finally, we posted a link to this Ron Fortier review of Skim Deep before, but it’s such a lovely one, here it is again in case you missed it (picked up by ESO Network).

M.A.C.

Gilbert Gottfried, Get Back and Sondheim

I haven’t heard much of it yet, but my appearance with Dave Thomas on Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast with Frank Santopadre – in support of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton – is available now. Check out the podcast web site here.

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The Beatles: Get Back, the new three-part documentary streaming on Disney Plus, may be destined for as much controversy as the original Let It Be (1970), which at the time Ringo Starr described (rightly) as “joyless.” The director of that previous documentary, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, is revealed as a vapid, unimaginative baby who substitutes a cigar for a rattle.

Already reviews have called the nearly eight-hour documentary both “aimless” and “riveting,” and it is admittedly as exhausting as it is exhaustive. But only the most casual of Beatles fans would not be engaged and moved by spending unfiltered time with these four young musicians who were – and are – so pivotal to worldwide popular culture.

Peter Jackson is a master filmmaker – this is the guy who made the great Meet the Feebles and Dead Alive, after all – and his storytelling via cutting and choice of image is as purposeful as it might seem random. He uses reaction shots – culled not necessarily from what is happening at the moment – for glue and to underline character, a technique that might seem dishonest but is vital to making something like this flow and achieve coherence.

The most basic aspect of Get Back is its immediacy – John Lennon and George Harrison are alive, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are young men, and the right-now-of-it is startling. It doesn’t take long to realize these are real people, interacting in flawed, personal ways, and anyone who has been in a band will recognize at once the conflicts and alliances within this world of four humans.

These aren’t just any four humans, of course, although their Liverpool-lad humanity comes through – these are consequential humans. Laugh if you will, but this is something like having behind-the-scenes footage of the making of the Constitution, with Jefferson and Franklin on camera.

Perhaps the most fascinating and startling aspect is watching songs that have become a familiar part of our lives created before our eyes and ears. McCartney and Lennon struggle to find the right lyrics, Paul looking for something natural, Lennon something surrealistic – Ringo at a piano playing just the opening of “Octopus’s Garden” and Harrison leaning in and helping him take it further…all very casual.

Primarily it’s a character study although it’s in the context of ticking-clock suspense – Ringo has a film start coming up and the band has only a few weeks to write the new album and perform it live for a TV special. A lot of compromises and rescheduling accompanies the band’s apparent inability to do much more than screw around in the enormous movie studio they’ve been burdened with. But they get down to work (although a lot of warming up and goofing off follows) with the goal shifting but staying essentially similar. The documentary aspect of the TV special evolves into a feature film, but the pay-off – where to hold their first live performance in three years – remains elusive. Lindsay-Hogg has spectacularly bad ideas about where that might be shot – he is a one-man reminder of how dead-on This Is Spinal Tap was.

The doc shows a band in free fall. They have reached a point where all of them – even Ringo – need to go off on their own. The real, largely unspoken question is whether or not breaking off for solo albums and individual projects can stay in the context of the Beatles – can they be individuals and group members at the same time. This is the issue they haven’t faced.

In Part Three, Harrison – who quits the band in Part One, which becomes a major dramatic turning point – rather timidly suggests that maybe since he only gets a couple of songs per album he might want to do a whole album of his own. Lennon reacts favorably, but with a bit of surprise, as if that possibility had never occurred to him.

In Part One, McCartney tries hard to be the leader, to get things organized, and throughout he’s focused – really, obsessed – with having a goal, expressed as the documentary paying off in some way (likely a live concert). Lennon seems rather passive-aggressive – he’s not a problem, just less than enthusiastic and showing up late, with Yoko Ono sitting close beside him. While she is not disruptive, her presence changes the dynamic. Harrison quitting brings McCartney and Lennon together, in an effort to coax George back into the band, which (obviously) they do. By Part Three, McCartney swaps roles with Lennon, becoming vaguely passive-aggressive, often off by himself developing melodies and lyrics – his own engine now, not the band’s.

Still, Lennon and McCartney are working together, smiling, laughing, creating. You see, right before you, their spark. Their magic. And you understand why Harrison feels left out. Strangely, they are always accepting of each other’s music but rarely offer a compliment. Harrison comes in with several now-familiar songs, wonderful things, that receive nods and little smiles, but not much else.

Ringo, perhaps realizing the trouble he’s caused with his looming film start, says very little – he just does his job. Now and then that wonderful smile flashes, but mostly he seems melancholy, as if he alone knows the Magical Mystery Tour is nearly over.

And it’s almost frustrating, if fascinating, to hear such now-familiar songs as “Get Back,” “I Dig a Pony,” “The Long and Winding Road,” and “Two of Us,” refusing to come together. Even when an actual song emerges, they rarely get a take that satisfies them or longtime producer George Martin, a quietly looming presence. When the idea of a rooftop performance as the pay-off comes up, the shaggy shape these songs are in is almost frightening.

And then the Beatles are on that rooftop and their performance is tight, dazzling, classic – definitive versions that made it onto the Let It Be album. And Lennon and McCartney are smiling at each other, grinning. Ringo smiles, too; even the reluctant, remote, jealous Harrison, is having fun. When they play “One After 909” – a formative Lennon/McCartney composition dating back as early as 1957 – their sense of the journey they’ve been on is palpable.

And joyous.

But it’s also the very definition of bittersweet – there they are, alive and well and playing their hearts out. We try not to linger on what we know that they don’t – death by gunfire, lung (and breast) cancer – and revel in their living presence.

Their undying presence.

* * *

When someone dies at 91, I suppose you can’t call it a tragedy. But losing Stephen Sondheim is a loss nonetheless. For many years he was somewhat off my radar – Company, A Little Night Music and Sunday in the Park With George seemed (from a distance) arty, the kind of thing New Yorkers get excited about…and I admit I am still not a fan of Sunday in the Park with George, which has an unsympathetic protagonist and a weak second act.

I got on board the Sondheim train by way of Sweeney Todd, thanks to a laserdisc of the Broadway production. I was (as the British say) gobsmacked, the tuneful darkness of it hitting me in the same spot that had turned me into a Bobby Darin fan at age 10, thanks to “Mack the Knife.” I found a laserdisc of Into the Woods and loved it, too – fairy tale fun in the first act, something Grimm in the second.

In 2001, with son Nate along, we witnessed a wonderful, intimate production of Pacific Overtures at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. This was the first time we’d seen a live, professional performance of a Sondheim musical, one of his best shows. At the same theater in 2007, we took in Passion with SNL’s Ana Gasteyer (so wonderful in the film version of the musical of Reefer Madness); a much undervalued show with a James M. Cain feel.

In 2003, Barb and I saw Bounce, Sondheim’s last produced musical, in Chicago (it was also known as Wise Guys, Gold!, and Road Show). It was a troubled show that never quite came together despite seemingly endless rewrites; but it was an opportunity to see a new Sondheim musical. The hilarious Richard Kind starred.

The only time we saw a Sondheim show on Broadway was a revival of Into the Woods in 2002 starring Vanessa Williams that was unfortunately dumbed down for tourists (like us?). The film version is good, but not a patch on the Broadway production (available on DVD and Blu-ray); same is true of Sweeney Todd – an interesting Tim Burton take on the material, but the original with Angela Lansbury can’t be beat (also on DVD and Blu-ray).

I came to realize I’d been a Sondheim fan long before Sweeney Todd – I just didn’t know it. But he was the co-lyricist of two musicals I liked very much – West Side Story and Gypsy – and he had written the music and lyrics for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

Sondheim appeals to the writer in me for his attention to language and character; the musician in me admires the way he does so while still coming up with memorable melodies. Some say he wasn’t a good man with a melody, but I’ve had too many Sondheim ear-worms for that to be true.

No question he’s on my short list of Broadway musical composers with Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, Lerner & Lowe, Frank Loesser, and Newley & Briccuse (Briccuse recently passed as well).

* * *

We also saw an excellent TCM bio: Dean Martin: King of Cool directed by Tom Donahue. A star-studded (if somewhat alarmingly elderly) group of celebrities reminisce about Martin, who seems to have been something of an enigma even to those closest to him.

It’s a lovely piece, a little hard on Jerry Lewis, though Jerry probably has it coming – still, I loved seeing him and Dean together. Martin was an extremely shrewd, instinctive performer who knew his weaknesses and his strengths and could play off both. He was a singer in the Sinatra/Crosby mold until Jerry Lewis turned him into a straight man, and Martin was instantly one of the best. When he and Lewis broke off, he became a movie star, landing a straight role in The Young Lions – astonishing everyone with his ease in front of the camera…as if he hadn’t just starred in a blockbuster sixteen Martin & Lewis films.

When he needed a new nightclub persona, he crafted the well-known slightly inebriated version of himself, using Joe E. Lewis as a model. Reportedly his on-stage glass was filled with apple juice.

He resisted Sinatra’s insistent carousing, preferring to watch westerns in his hotel room. He relished his family life (though remained somewhat distant) and probably avoided extended social interaction with Hollywood royalty knowing his uneducated Steubenville, Ohio, background wasn’t up to it. He played a lot of golf and made his TV series accommodate his schedule and whims.

It’s sad to have to watch his decline, leavened by his truce with Lewis, but scarred by the loss of his son. The filmmakers, interviewed after the doc by TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz, make an interesting observation. Figures in popular culture like Martin – and the Beatles and Stephen Sondheim – are human beings who decline and eventually die like the rest of us. But once they are gone, they snap back into place at their peak – their best – and John Wayne becomes the star of Rio Bravo and The Searchers and not a frail shell of himself, dying of cancer as he receives an honor. In their prime again.

They live on in the way we want them to. The Beatles’ music has already lasted over half a decade. Sondheim’s musicals will be presented as long as there are stages. Dean Martin will charm and serenade us, just as he and Jerry are still able to crack us up.

But I am at an age when I find myself tearing up at the damnedest things.

Like four lads from Liverpool playing “One After 909″ on a rooftop while clueless bobbies try to shut the music down.

* * *

Titan Books celebrates 40 years, and my Mike Hammer editor Andrew Sumner says nice things! You’ll have to scroll down, but on the trip pause when you see an interesting book, even if I didn’t write it.

Finally, there’s a good review of Quarry’s Vote here, if you scroll down; too bad the reviewer expected Quarry and me to be “woke” thirty-six years ago (I got knocked down a “star” for that!).

M.A.C.

Processing Spillane and Heller

I should probably dispense with asking you to buy and then Amazon-review both Fancy Anders Goes to War and The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton (co-written by the great Dave Thomas). I won’t even remind you what wonderful Christmas gifts they would make.

I just have too much class for that.

Instead, I’ll talk about process this week. Who doesn’t love process? A few weeks ago I touched on the challenges and difficulties of Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction, co-written with James L. Traylor. We are waiting with anticipation for the editorial notes to come back, which will require tweaking but I hope nothing major, as I am very proud of my draft, and Jim likes it, too.

What surprised me was reading all the material about Mickey I’d gathered going back to my junior high days – I literally used the scrapbook I kept, because it had various articles and reviews pasted in among my carbons of indignant letters to anti-Spillane reviewers and my cartoony portraits of Mickey. What I hadn’t anticipated was the picture all of that material would paint when, for the first time, I read it all at once…not just in dribs and drabs as articles and such first appeared.

I feel like I put together pieces of the Spillane puzzle that had eluded me, despite my close personal relationship with the man for the last 25 years of his life. Many assumptions I’d made – and had cockily presented as fact in various pieces and introductions about Mickey and his work over the recent years – proved short-sighted…not wrong exactly, but lacking nuance.

For example, I no longer think his conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses had anything much to do with the near decade-long respite he took from novel writing. I do think his style shifted, and the violence and sex were both more restrained; but not absent. Re-reading The Deep recently, I saw how he used the threat of impending violence to create a story about a tough hero who really only kills once, and then in self-defense. In The Girl Hunters, Hammer kills nary a soul, though he does trick the “evil one” (as Traylor puts it) into self-destruction.

This probably had as much to do with his attempt to develop as a writer and to respond through his work to the incredibly unfair and even vicious attacks upon him throughout the 1950s. Other than perhaps Elvis Presley, no figure in popular culture had ever seen so much success and, simultaneously, so much condemnation. But the bio will, for the first time, reveal the major reason he stopped writing novels at his popular peak.

Writing about Eliot Ness with Brad Schwartz was a similar experience for me. So often Ness had been presented as a glory hound when the research showed he was primarily responding to pressure from above to get positive press. Additionally, things routinely dismissed by the Ness naysayers – including events reported in his autobiographical The Untouchables (mostly ghosted by sportswriter Oscar Fraley) – turned out to have really happened. It shouldn’t have been surprising to learn that Eliot Ness was actually Eliot Ness, but it was.

The Big Bundle (Cover Sneak Peak)

And now, for the first time in several years, I am digging into the research for the upcoming Nathan Heller novel, The Big Bundle (for Hard Case Crime). The case I’m dealing with – the Bobby Greenlease kidnapping of 1953 – is not as famous as most of those I’ve examined; it was at the time, but today it seems mostly forgotten. What gives it the needed household-name-crime aspect that a Heller novel requires is a sinister connection to Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters. It is, in fact, the first of two novels about Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy, although this first one focuses primarily on the Greenlease case.

The Heller process is an odd one. First I have to select the true crime that seems appropriate for Nate’s attention (and mine, and yours). Second, I have to familiarize myself enough with the crime to write a proposal to be submitted to an editor/publisher, who must first sign on before I start serious work. Once we’re at that stage, I have to dig into the research, where the proposal was just a superficial look at the case. The approach has always been to look at the subject as if I were preparing to write the definitive non-fiction treatment of the case and then write a private eye novel instead.

A real problem with the proposal stage is that I am only guessing what the book will be about. The in-depth research (you will not be surprised, many of you, that I am in touch with George Hagenauer right now) is what reveals the book to me. And it always surprises me.

Here’s a small example. In True Detective, in what is essentially the origin of Nate Heller, Heller sells out to the Chicago Outfit to get promoted from uniform to plainclothes – to become a detective. He fingers the fall guy (who is playing along) to get somebody blamed and put away for the publicity-attracting murder of reporter Jake Lingle. The willing patsy, very minor in all of this but a seminal part of Heller’s story, is a real-life low-level mob guy named Leo Vincent Brothers.

So I’m researching The Big Bundle yesterday. For reasons I won’t go into right now, a taxi cab company run by a St. Louis racketeer named Joe Costello is instrumental in the story. I went in familiar with Costello in, again, only a superficial way – his name came up in the preliminary research and got him on my radar. So now, reading a book called A Grave For Bobby by James Deakin, I learn that Joe Costello’s partner in the taxi cab company…wait for it…was Leo Vincent Brothers.

This kind of thing always sits me on my ass. This tiny fact isn’t key to the story – it’s just an odd resonance, and a reminder that Heller’s life is just one long story, not really a succession of novels. Another name turned up yesterday, a Chicago thug with ties to the JFK assassination.

It would help if I had a steel-trap mind. But I don’t. I didn’t in my thirties and I really, really don’t in my seventies. So such discoveries send me scrambling back into the research.

In the meantime, I am looking for a way to insert Nate Heller into this narrative in a meaningful, credible way.

Wish me luck.

* * *

Two brief Blu-ray recommendations.

Jack Irish Season 3 is out from Acorn. It’s the final season of this series (there are actually five seasons, but the first two were movie-length episodes) and it’s a four-hour movie, essentially – one story, wrapping up the series in a smart, thoughtful way. I will go so far as to say it’s one of the best wrap-ups of a series, certainly one of the most satisfying, I’ve ever seen.

Guy Pearce plays a solid modern version of a private eye in this Australian neo-noir with all the surviving regulars back. Three years have passed since the preceding series and the passage of time and the need to learn, grow and move on is the central theme.

Great series.

Speaking of great, Eddie Muller has delivered one of the best Blu-rays of the year in the Flicker Alley presentation of The Beast Must Die (La Bestia Debe Morir), a 1952 Argentinian noir based on the Nicholas Blake novel, The Beast Must Die. Blake was really Cecil Day-Lewis, a UK poet laureate who is also the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

While it’s a bit pricey, the blu-ray is essential for noir enthusiasts, and if you spring for it, be sure to watch Muller’s introduction, which provides context and more, including how-to-watch Spanish-language melodrama of this period, i.e., the acting tends not to be subtle.

You can get it directly from Flicker Alley here.

* * *

Check out this lovely review of Fancy Anders Goes to War.

Here’s a Ms. Tree: The Cold Dish preview with info.

Also here.

I did a Mike Hammer interview for what, uh, appears to be an interesting magazine….

M.A.C.

Ms. Tree #3, Some Shameless Begging & Two Great Movies

Paperback:
E-Book:

The third Ms. Tree collection is out today from Titan. It goes back to the beginning, including Ms. Tree’s first black-and-white origin tale from Eclipse Monthly, and continues on with the full color Eclipse issues that follow. Read about it here.

The latest book giveaway is now over and ten copies each of Fancy Anders Goes to War and The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton are in the mail to the winners. Thanks to everyone who participated in this last MAC giveaway of 2021.

For those of you who are considering picking up copies of either Fancy or Jimmy – and I hope you will try them both – here’s a gentle reminder: you won’t find them in a brick-and-mortar store. These are, for now at least, exclusively available on Amazon.

Reasonably priced, I should add: Fancy is $2.99 on Kindle and $6.99 as a physical book; Jimmy is $3.99 on Kindle and a mere $8.99 as a physical book. Both are nice-looking books, too, with lovely Fay Dalton covers. Right now Fancy is sitting at Amazon at 7 reviews (and 24 ratings) with a 4.4 average. Jimmy has a mere three ratings and two reviews, although the rating is five stars.

I’m a little flummoxed by the lack-luster number of ratings for Jimmy, particularly after Dave Thomas and I have done so many podcasts and online interviews in support of it. A possible problem is that the interviewers (understandably) use the opportunity to talk to Dave about SCTV.

Anyway, I can use your help on both of these, as NeoText is a new and unconventional company, with its emphasis on e-books and developing properties that have movie and TV potential. So if you’ve read and liked either or both of these novels, please at least stop by Amazon and provide a rating, and better yet a review, however brief. If you like my work, NeoText provides a venue that seems particularly nurturing.

Wolfpack is similarly a very positive venue for me. They have some fun things coming where the John Sand series by Matt Clemens and me is concerned, and are going to be a big part of the 75th anniversary of Mike Hammer with a new (non-Hammer) novel by me from a Spillane screenplay and a collection of Mickey’s three middle-grade (kid) novels, including one previously unpublished. And there may be a collection of his crime novellas as well.

Yes, I know I harp on it. But buying these NeoText and Wolfpack books, and rating/reviewing them, will greatly impact how much – and whether – I can continue to bring you my brand of crime/mystery entertainment, which many of you are nice enough to say you enjoy.

* * *

Something else I frequently harp on (this will not be a harangue, I promise) are reviewers and readers who complain about my detailed descriptions of clothing and settings – and descriptive passages in general. The peculiar thing about such complaints is that I am often complimented on my fiction being lean and fast-paced, which seems at odds with this other view.

Here’s the thing: I see myself as creating films on paper. I don’t mean, necessarily, that I’m trying to create something that can become a movie, although that’s fine with me – I can always use the money. I simply consider what I do to mirror filmmaking – and this view has become more pronounced since my time working as an indie filmmaker.

The obvious parallel might seem to be “director,” and that holds up in the sense that a film director (good ones, anyway) pull everything together, both before, during and after production. As Stephen King said (I paraphrase), “Movies are the least efficient way to tell a story known to man. Also the coolest.”

I don’t see myself as the director of a novel, however, but as the everything of a novel – wardrobe, lighting, location, casting, acting, and oh yes script. This relates to my obsession with controlling the narrative and to make the reader not an equal collaborator in the process. Some fiction writers desire a major level of collaboration from readers. That’s fine – perfectly okay. But my goal is to give readers – much as filmgoers at a movie – a shared experience. For them to “see” the same novel that I did.

Obviously that’s impossible – readers are by definition collaborators. They have to be. But, as I’ve said, sometimes my play (moving from film to theater in my tortured analogy) is performed on Broadway and sometimes at the Three Mile Island Community Playhouse.

This is, improbably, leading up to a brief discussion of two of my favorite movies – two terrific movies that I watched over the weekend because I had purchased new 4K Blu-rays of them: The Sting (1973) and (my favorite film) Vertigo (1958).

What The Sting and Vertigo have in common is Edith Head, costume designer. The costumes in both films are carefully designed to reflect the characters who wear them – no, not just “carefully,” but “brilliantly.” The Sting makes that point overtly as the complicated ruse the con men stage is essentially a play they mount, right down to costumes and characterizations (and props and sets). The production designer on The Sting used only a few real locations (in Chicago and Los Angeles) and instead mostly utilized the Universal backlot where the look could be controlled. The music, wrong by several decades but absolutely perfect, was used as mood-setting connective tissue under mostly silent scenes, often with establishing shots – much as descriptive opening paragraphs in novels function.

In Vertigo’s pre-production, Kim Novak – about to deliver a great performance that idiot critics in the ‘50s couldn’t discern – was upset about having to wear gray, pale make-up and such an near-platinum hair color. She didn’t understand that her director – Alfred Hitchcock – wanted to make a ghost out of her, a dreamy presence emerging from San Francisco fog. Edith Head went to Hitch with a list of Kim’s preferred colors, and Hitch said, “She may wear any color she likes as long as it’s gray.”

The director also saw to it that the color green – the other color associated with Novak’s Madeline persona – be used throughout the film, often subtly. At times this is in Novak’s wardrobe, and even the color of her car. But also in an inquest’s dreary setting, where a few touches of green intrude significantly. In the scenes in Midge’s studio, where Scotty goes for comfort and friendly mothering, the many items representing the inhabitant’s artistic interests include a ghostly green mask of a beautiful woman, facing away from the room. It’s just a touch. You can watch the film five times and not notice it. But it’s there.

Now, I don’t have music to underscore things like Hitchcock does – I can mention songs playing in the background of a scene and I suppose that’s as close as I can come; lucky Hitch had Bernard Herrmann to create the single greatest film score of all time. And Hitchcock could choose Saul Bass for the opening credit sequence, whereas only rarely have I had a say in my book covers. Even a powerful director like Hitch couldn’t control exactly what Bass and Herrmann came up with, of course. But Hitchcock knew who he was choosing – knew what he was after.

Hitchcock was controlling. I am no Hitchcock, but I am just as controlling. I believe that wardrobe reveals character; so does where that character lives. Colors invoked are important. So is weather, no matter what Elmore Leonard thought. The things I choose to describe about setting are not random. They intend to create mood, among a dozen other things.

I could talk about Vertigo for hours and some day I may write about it in depth, much as I have Kiss Me Deadly, which is my second favorite film. (Others, as you may recall, include Chinatown, Gun Crazy and Phantom of the Paradise.)

This is not to say that in watching a movie we all have the same, exact experience. But we are exposed to the same data, and the way that data is presented limits the ways it can be interpreted.

* * *

Sad but interesting story about Cinemax with many Quarry references….

Dave Thomas and I talk about The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton here.

M.A.C.

Spillane, Soho & Jimmy Leighton

The last book giveaway of the year – our biggest – is still underway – we have three copies left. If you want either The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton by Dave Thomas and me, and Fancy Anders Goes to War with Fay Dalton illustrating my novella, you still have a shot.

As usual, write me at macphilms@hotmail.com and provide your snail-mail address (even if you’ve won before) and your preference between the two books (if you don’t want a specific title, say so please). You pledge to write a review for Amazon – where both books are exclusively available – unless you hate what you read and don’t want to.

Amazon reviews and ratings are always important, but with these NeoText titles – unavailable in brick-and-mortar bookstores, and issued too late for the trade reviewers – they are crucial. If you like one or both of these books, please leave a review (and it can be short, a line or two). You can even rate them without posting reviews.

There are a bunch of links below to interviews Dave Thomas and I did together, but first you may wish to check out these links to sample chapters from The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton.

And at Crime Reads.

* * *

If you’ve been following these updates of late, you know that I have been deferring somewhat to the serialized chapters of my literary memoir in progress, A Life in Crime at the NeoText site. The first ten chapters have appeared and now the memoir goes into sleep mode. I will post more of these when new books come out that can use some background (and a push).

The plan was two-fold – the chapters allowed me to promote both Jimmy and Fancy, and – as I wrote the chapters well in advance – provide me time to work on the Spillane biography. I have completed that, or will very soon – my co-author Jim Traylor is going over the manuscript now.

It’s a big book and I hope will be perceived as a major one – it’s over 100,000 words, the complete life of Frank Morrison “Mickey” Spillane with all of his novels discussed, as well as the film and TV adaptations. The bio itself is 85,000 words, the remaining 15,000 (“The Spillane Files”) consisting of bibliographic material and odds and ends…sort of deleted scenes, like little essays about Spillane and Ayn Rand, the gangster named Mickey Spillane, and the possibility Mickey wrote as “Frank Morris” for the pulps.

With luck, the book will be out from Mysterious Press in about a year as part of the 75th anniversary of Mike Hammer celebration.

This one really is years in the making. Just short of a decade and a half ago, Jim Traylor spent weeks in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, digging through Spillane’s letters and other papers. Over the intervening years he interviewed numerous Spillane friends and family – obviously, Mickey’s contemporaries were getting up there and Jim spoke with any number of them who are now gone. He did several passes on the manuscript over the years. We interrupted the work on the bigger book to do Mickey Spillane On Screen for McFarland in 2012. We’ve worked hard not to repeat ourselves, having done One Lonely Knight: Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer decades ago.

While a lot of critical ground is covered in the book, I took the approach of making a linear story out of Mickey’s life, which was a colorful one to say the least. I gathered material I had collected on Spillane – magazines, newspaper articles, books – since I was in junior high, and my office floor looked like I was expecting the film crew from Hoarders to arrive any minute.

I considered suggesting the title The Mystery of Mickey Spillane as I began to realize that all of his disparate material provided puzzle pieces that could be assembled into the picture of a man. I knew the man in his later years, but I never met the young or even middle-aged Spillane. Many revelations emerged in the intense three-month process of writing the final draft.

Immodestly I will say I think Jim and I have written a major book on the most interesting figure in mystery fiction. In a year or so, you’ll be able to see if you agree.

* * *

Barb and I, regular filmmgoers (usually once-a-week) for many, many years, have gone out to the movies only rarely since Covid hit. Even though we are now triple-vaxxed, we are still careful – for one thing, our six year-old grandson Sam has asthma and Barb has been sitting with him and his three year-old sister in the afternoons while son Nate and their mother Abby work from home.

Barb is, of course, an amazing human being. She writes in the morning and then afternoons plays with those kids Monday through Thursday at my son and his wife’s house half-a-block up the street, and then we entertain the two kids Friday afternoons here. Sam and I generally watch a 3-D movie together.

Things are changing as Sam’s sister Lucy is now in Day Care, and Sam is going to get his Covid shot this afternoon. In a matter of weeks, he’ll be fully vaccinated and we can return to something more like normal. Or anyway the new normal.

Barb and I have only attended a handful of movies in a theater over these last vaccinated months – I believe Wrath of Man, Black Widow, No Time to Die and now Last Night in Soho are the only cinematic excursions we’ve made. We tend to go at off-times – yesterday, for example, we went to a 5:10 pm show. Only three other people were in the theater.

That didn’t surprise me, really, because few people seem to be attending Last Night in Soho, and let me tell you (as Bob Hope used to say) it’s their loss.

I might have waited until this one was streaming if my Ms. Tree co-creator Terry Beatty hadn’t written me to say Last Night in Soho was “the best Brian DePalma movie Brian DePalma never made.” Now, Terry and I were at one time stone DePalma freaks, based upon Sisters, Obsession, Blow Out and especially Phantom of the Paradise. Most early and mid-period DePalma rated high with the Collins/Beatty team.

I lagged, and I think Terry did too (but I can’t speak for him), when the likes of Snake Eyes and Mission to Mars came along. But Terry’s description of Last Night in Soho resonated – I knew I had to see it in a theater.

Also, the writer/director Edgar Wright is sizing up as a major filmmaker. We’re talking Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Baby Driver. And I think Last Night in Soho may be his best work yet, though it’s difficult to discuss without spoiling it, because it takes a number of surprising and yet satisfying turns, delighting here, disturbing there.

Here’s a little bit of plot for you. A shy young woman – beautifully played by Thomasin McKenzie – from the sticks gets accepted into a fashion school in London; she has an affinity for tuneful 1960s music – the soundtrack swims in the stuff – and when the realities of modern Soho disappoint, she finds herself dreaming or fantasizing or possibly even time traveling to the area in the mid-sixties, where she begins to identify with what seems to be a fantasy projection of herself played by the dizzyingly charismatic Anna Taylor-Joy of Queen’s Gambit fame. There are strong hints that this Alice through the looking glass has had mental problems in the past, and we know that her mother was a sensitive, troubled soul who took her own life.

I loved No Time to Die, but it pales next to the thrill of seeing the young woman at the heart of this tale walk into a Soho landscape where a gigantic looming marquee for Thunderball glows in the night like a neon memory. That moment alone is worth seeing Last Night in Soho on a big screen. In a theater.

I’m not sure this movie is for everyone. It helps to have a feel for ‘60s music (anyone who considers what’s been happening for the past twenty years in music, at least in mainstream popular music, may be bewildered by things like an actual melody attached to accessible poetic lyrics). And you have to be willing to take the ride, a ride that doesn’t always go where you expect it to (what an effing pleasure)!

A lot of movies try to create the feeling of a dream, and this one accomplishes that, including the shifts in time and place and the feeling of being at the center of a dream and watching it at the same time. And yet you sense there’s a grounded story underneath all the questions being raised and the moods being bumped up against each other. But you have to be patient.

Not a movie for stupid people. That’s why you’ll like it.

* * *

Dave Thomas and I have been getting some nice attention for The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton.

Here Dave and I are on Sci-Fi Talk.

Here’s a wide-ranging, long Jimmy-centric interview with me at Word Balloons.

Here’s Dave on a Canadian news program, starting with his Bob Hope impression and winding up with Jimmy Leighton!

Finally, here’s a great print interview with Dave that really lets you know what Jimmy Leighton is about and talks about how the collaboration came to be.

M.A.C.

Hey Kids – The Last and Biggest Book Giveaway of 2021!

This is the last book giveaway of the year – ten copies of Fancy Anders Goes to War and ten copies of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton. Write me at macphilms@hotmail.com with your order of preference. You pledge to write a review at Amazon for these – I specify Amazon because both books are exclusive with Amazon on Kindle and (for now at least) as physical media…you know, books.

If you hate the book, you are released from your pledge to review it, though of course you may anyway. This is a USA only book giveaway. Be sure (IMPORTANT) to include your snail-mail address, even if you’ve won previously.

Here, by the way, is a link to NeoText and their announcement of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton, where you can also buy it.

Anybody out there who reads and likes either of these books, your Amazon reviews are vital this time around. As I mentioned last week, neither book went out to the publishing “trades” – Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal and Booklist. The reason is boring, so try not to let your eyes glaze over: NeoText is an e-book publisher, and fairly late in the game I convinced them (they are good people) to do print versions as well. These are Print-On-Demand books (and they look great). But “late in the game” means we weren’t able to get them to the trade reviewers on time.

Some of the Internet reviewers and a few newsstand magazines will get copies, though. But obviously it’s vital that my fans (both of you) review these books, preferably favorably, and get the word out.

Dave Thomas and I are doing our best to let the world know about Jimmy Leighton. We recorded a two-part Gilbert Gottfried podcast last week, which should “drop” (God I hate that expression) soon. We have done other podcasts together and separately, and some online interviews, too. Some links will follow at the end of this update.

Dave and I have become good friends, which I can hardly believe, stone SCTV freak that I am. He is a great guy, warm and funny but also with a genuine streak of Bill Needle (SCTV fans will understand). While we met a couple of times (unmemorably for Dave) before, during the writing of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton we did not. The plan had been for one of us to travel to the home/locale of the other, before we dug in to the writing – to plot the book, get a synopsis together, in person.

Then Covid came along.

So The Many Lives of Jimmy Lives became a Covid book – developed by Zoom and daily telephone calls (more than once a day, often). Dave did the first pass of each chapter, but called me frequently during the writing – he would read me what he’d written so far, I’d give notes, and we’d kick around where the chapter might go from there. Dave gets bored with just executing the synopsis, so the story became fluid in an interesting and positive way. I have never worked this way, and it was a glimpse into how SCTV and TV writers’ rooms work.

Dave had a bad health scare along the way – not Covid-related, other than the anxiety caused by having to deal with a health crisis when hospitals were overflowing with Covid cases – at a point where we had the first five chapters and a synopsis ready. We had already decided that we would do just that much before taking it out to market.

With Dave in the hospital, quite frankly fighting for his life, I set about to sell our book. I tried a couple of venues where I’ve had some success and got the kind of frustrating responses that longtime pros are used to – glowing enthusiasm and delight leading up to “not right for our list” as the punchline.

I was not prepared for that, though should have been. It is always difficult to sell a genre hybrid, and Jimmy Leighton was exactly that – half contemporary science fiction, half gritty crime novel. I brought my agent on board to try Canadian publishers, because Dave is a national treasure up there – a genuine superstar, as Bob and Doug are among the few Canadian icons. We got nowhere.

My agent was about to take it to other American publishers (only two had seen it) when I mentioned the project to my editor at NeoText, where I had just delivered Fancy Anders Goes to War. He was eager to see the chapters and proposal. The sale came quickly.

E-Book:
Trade Paperback:

Fancy Anders was set up to be published as three novellas, and each – although designed to add up to one book – was a stand-alone. We had brought the great Fay Dalton aboard to do elaborate illustrations for the Fancy novellas, so to give her time to accomplish that, we set up a program whereby the publication of the three Fancy novellas would be staggered over six months at least.

Initially we were going to publish Jimmy Leighton the same way. But first Dave – then I – became concerned that the three sections of Jimmy didn’t each stand alone in the way Fancy did. And we had early on abandoned the idea of illustrations for the book, other than the cover art. So – again – fairly late in the game, we lobbied for NeoText to publish Jimmy as a single book. The novel had been written that way and it began to make sense following that path, not the Fancy one.

It’s cost us reviews, which is (as I’ve indicated) where you come in.

I know I harp on this a lot. But the nature of the beast these days is that you nice people who actually still read books need to support the authors you like with reviews online, particularly at Amazon.

I irritated some readers when I complained about self-professed fans of mine who would (in my view) attack novels of mine that didn’t suit what they wanted from me. On artistic grounds, my hopping around from here to there has a lot to do with me staying fresh and also pursuing various interests, which takes me various places, obviously. But on practical grounds, I write a lot to stay in business and bad reviews from people who only like some of my work, and go out of their way to complain about what they don’t like, costs me money. Worse, it can cost me venues.

This is true for all of us telling stories in the very old-fashioned prose fiction way. Support the authors you like. Don’t just write reviews of my stuff, but theirs, too (I’m fine with me being at the top of your list, though). Even a couple of sentient sentences will do, but longer expressions of delight are good also (very Jerry Lewis cadence there)…even balanced, well-reasoned opinions are encouraged. Those numbers – how many reviews and even just star ratings have been logged – are key for the success of a book, and for an author to continue producing.

Novelists are an endangered species, like the spotted owl. Keep us healthy and fed, would you? Spotted owl is delicious, by the way.

* * *

I’ve had some wonderful comments on my ten-part literary memoir, A Life in Crime. I hope to write a few more entries over time, and eventually collect them into a book. Among the things I did not discuss at length in the series are my adventures in indie filmmaking, comics/graphic novel writing, the Spillane novels (Caleb York deserves a chapter of his own), and a bunch of other stuff.

The serialization of A Life in Crime allowed me to focus on the Spillane biography, which I completed my draft of over the weekend. I still have the lengthy “Spillane Files” appendix to work on, although most of that was already put together by Jim Traylor, who has been working on this project literally since Mickey’s passing in 2006.

This will absolutely be the definitive book on Mickey Spillane – the story of his life, and the story of his life’s work. We hope to send it to our publisher, Mysterious Press, this month.

* * *

I was disappointed in Halloween Kills. The same writing/directing team who did the much superior Halloween reboot stumbled here, sacrificing a political allegory about Jan. 6 and the divisiveness in America to a humorless and unpleasant gore fest. I understand this is the second of a trilogy and I liked the first film enough to give the third one a try.

Barb and I watched Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, which is flawed but very entertaining and underrated. Halloween Kills could have benefitted from this much unloved non-sequel’s strong but fleeting gore, and heavy-handed but effective satire.

In the Halloween spirit, I showed Nate The Final Girls, the 2015 horror comedy that has a group of current teens getting stuck inside an ‘80s slasher movie. It’s somewhat little known but is well-worth checking out, if you are at all a fan of the Halloween/Friday the 13th genre.

* * *

Here’s a great Fan Base interview with Dave Thomas on our novel, The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton.

Check out the Dave Thomas Appreciation Page at Facebook.

Finally, here’s the Word Balloon podcast with Dave about the book (and his SCTV adventures).

M.A.C.

Jimmy Leighton Lives!

E-Book:
Trade Paperback:

The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton by Dave Thomas and me goes on sale today in both Kindle and physical book form. It’s quite reasonably priced – on sale at $3.99 for the e-book and $8.99 for the “real” book.

As I am still working on the Spillane biography, I am again making the Jimmy Leighton/Dave Thomas entry in my literary memoir, A Life in Crime, the major piece this time around. Link to it here.

For reasons not entirely clear – I believe the technical term is “screw up” – the physical book went on sale a couple of weeks early. Because of that I’ve had some nice e-mails from people praising the book – completely unbiased types like Terry Beatty – and I’m starting to feel a warm fuzzy glow about it.

Now I will get down on my figurative knees and beg (can’t pull that off easily with my literal knees these days): if you read and like this book, please give it an Amazon rating and write at least a brief review. We’re starting to get some nice media attention – Dave and I are recording Gilbert Gottfried’s podcast this evening – but the book will almost certainly be ignored by the mainstream publishing trades (Publisher’s Weekly and so on). We did not make the necessary three- to six-month lead time to get review copies to them. (See explanation of technical term above.)

So, more than ever we need your reviews. The physical book is only available at Amazon – not in bookstores and not even at the Barnes & Noble site, at least not yet. And the e-book is strictly for Kindle. I hope to do a book giveaway soon to prime the review pump, but don’t have copies in hand yet.

This book – I mentioned this last week – is not a novella, like Fancy Anders Goes to War. It’s a 90,000-word novel, a contemporary crime novel/s-f hybrid. We had originally signed up with Neo Text to publish it in three novella-length parts. But – and here is where Dave and I did our part to help screw things up – at the last minute we decided we preferred it to be published in a single volume.

I really love The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton. It’s a type of story I’ve long wanted to tell – in the vein of It’s a Wonderful Life, Ground Hog Day, Here Comes Mr. Jordan and A Christmas Carol. The closest I’ve come previously is the novella “A Wreath for Marley.” If you generally like my work, I would be astonished if you didn’t like this. In fact, I guarantee that will you like – stopping short of the “your money back” part.

* * *

Dune is the first new movie we’ve streamed at home that Barb and I kinda wish we’d seen in a theater. I almost like the wacky David Lynch version of this material, but found it mostly silly. I was surprised to like this serious take on the s-f classic so much; Barb liked it, too. Even in an age where we take CGI for granted, this one is visually stunning, transporting you to a world unlike our own (except for the politics).

It’s not called Dune, actually – it’s Dune and then, in the kind of fine print usually reserved for contracts they don’t want you to really read, Part One. Lynch had squeezed the whole book into a couple of hours and change, which is partly why it’s such a rough ride (inherently quirky, Dune hardly needed David Lynch to make it more so).

Be forewarned: the new and improved Dunecomes out of the gate slow, or anyway leisurely. There’s a lot to process and time is spent grounding the viewer. Lynch did an endless opening narration that had your head spinning before the film really started.

* * *

I’ll make a Halloween recommendation.

I had never seen writer/director Larry Cohen’s A Return to Salem’s Lot(1987). At the time, the barely released, sort of sequel to the Salem’s Lot mini-series (Cohen did a script for that but it was rejected) was savaged by most critics. But Cohen is consistent about only one thing in his filmmaking: he doesn’t care what you think. This is his version of Our Town but with vampires.

It has one of the oddest and in my view coolest casts ever, starting with Michael Moriarty, who combines sincerity and confusion in a unique mix, his seriousness as an actor relieved by a puckish sense of humor. Playing rather ancient vampires are (get ready) Evelyn Keyes (from Here Comes Mr. Jordan!) and June Havoc (“Baby June,” Gypsy’s sister!), with Andrew Duggan (Bourbon Street Beat) as the folksy town patriarch. Playing a sort of senior-citizen sideick to Moriarty is Samuel Fuller – you heard me! The great director, cigar in his mouth, charges into the last third of the movie and just takes over; it’s an incredible, fearless performance. Also featured are lots of blood, gnarly special events and some of the least convincing rubber monster masks ever committed to film. It’s the kind of film that just skips narrative steps and plants exposition in the mouths of characters to apply spackle over your questions. When it bothers to.

I couldn’t have had a better time.

* * *

This is a rather wonderful dual interview with Dave Thomas and me that ran in the Edmonton Journal, conducted by the sublimely named Fish Griwkowsky.

Here’s one of those announcement type posts about Jimmy Leighton, with a great look at Fay Dalton’s wonderful cover art.

M.A.C.

Collaboration and the Greatest Songs

A great collection of Jack Kamen-drawn EC crime stories, Three for the Money, has just been published by Fantagraphics, and I wrote the intro for it. You will like this. Buy it here.

This week the major event of this update is a link to the second-to-the-last (for now) installment of my literary memoir, A Life In Crime, which this time talks about collaboration with an emphasis on the story behind my ongoing partnership with Matthew V. Clemens.

For reasons I don’t understand, the print version of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton by Dave Thomas and me is already on sale at Amazon although the Kindle version won’t be available till Oct. 26. So all of you Baby Boomer and other physical media types can order it right now.

I think Dave and I will likely be doing some podcasts and dual interviews on blogs as such – and Dave has already done Entertainment Tonight Canada, so other bigtime appearances may be in the works…sometimes with Dave alone, since I never appeared on SCTV or teamed with Rick Moranis. Anyway, heads up, and I’ll do my best to let you know about such things and stuff right here.

* * *

Channeling Bob and Doug, the topic this week is Rolling Stone, eh, and why I feel out of step.

It’s not just a feeling – I am out of step. I have continued to subscribe to Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly in a sad old-man attempt to know what’s going on in popular culture. But I suspect those magazines are out of touch themselves, perhaps with reality.

Let’s look at the October 2021 issue of Rolling Stone, shall we?

The cover is of Dave Grohl, and I know who he is and I like his music. But buried in the upper lefthand corner is a small: CHARLIE WATTS 1941 – 2021. Now when the death of the drummer in the second-most-important rock band of all time, in a magazine in part named after that band, gets pushed into the corner for a musician alive and available for a subsequent cover, I have to question somebody’s sanity and, for once, not my own.

Never mind.

An article on James Bond includes the following phrase: “The movies barely had time to get going before they inspired brilliant parodies like James Coburn’s Our Man Flint and Dean Martin’s The Silencers.” That must be “brilliant” in the British sense, like how was your Macdonald’s lunch? “Brilliant!”

Let’s move on to the topic of the issue: THE GREATEST SONGS OF ALL TIME.

Now first let me express an opinion that I don’t consider at all controversial – there is a difference between a song and a recording. This list appears to be about the “greatest” recorded songs “of all time.” So we’re off to a rocky start. By the way, there’s nothing by Cole Porter or Frank Loesser or Rodgers & Hammerstein or Rodgers & Hart or Stephen Sondheim on this list…but never mind.

Number 1 is “Respect” by Aretha Franklin. Okay, great record. But few of us have ever hummed “Respect,” which makes it less than the greatest song of all time. Still, not a crazy, absurd choice.

But Number 2 is “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy. A real toe tapper; just can’t get that melody out of my head, can you? Now what I’m about to say probably is controversial: no rap or hip hop recording is a “song.” It is a performance and it can be art. It can be valid and it can achieve excellence. But can it be a song? No. Yet predictably there are plenty of these on this list. A list that has “Be My Baby” at 22 and “God Only Knows” at 11.

There are wonderful songs here – like (at 72) “Yesterday.” Before you call me racist because of what I say about “Fight the Power,” let me point out that “What’d I Say” by Ray Charles is (drum roll please) number 80, and “Let’s Stay Together” by Al Green is at 84. “In My Life” is at 98. A really great Aretha Franklin song is at 90 – “You Make Me feel Like a Natural Woman” (written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin – actual songwriters).

And while Charlie Watts didn’t get the cover, Rolling Stone is self-indulgent enough to rate “Like a Rolling Stone” at 4, which is at least a goddamn song.

Tons of good stuff on the list, though. Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” is number 3. But “Get Your Freak On” is 8. “Imagine” is 19 and “Satisfaction” has to wait till 31. Oh, good – Del Shannon’s “Runaway” is at 25…

…no, it’s not Del Shannon, it’s something by Kanye West.

If Public Enemy is number 2, then how is “Walk on By” by Dionne Warrick number 51? Hold it, there’s “One” by Three Dog Night! Great! Oh…it’s the “One” by U2.

Okay. I guess.

I need to chill out. I need to be feeling those “Good Vibrations.” At 53. 42 “greatest songs” below “Hey Ya!” by Outkast.

Look, I know these “greatest” and “best of” lists are all bullshit. But this is insulting, revisionist bullshit, from people whose sense of history is maybe last Tuesday, proving all such lists that don’t include a single song by the Zombies are invalid. Ditto for Weezer. Bobby Darin. The Association. Blondie. Elvis Costello.

Over to you.

* * *

Finally, here’s another Fancy Anders Goes to War (and more) interview by the very cool Comic Book Couples Counseling.

M.A.C.