Max Allan Collins's Blog, page 4

We All Have It Coming

Today’s update/blog will be very stream of consciousness.

I am writing it on March 3, 2025, my 77th birthday. My father died on his 78th birthday, so I sense the clock ticking. Loudly. Memories are flooding in like the water of the terribly tepid bath I took this morning. My memory is selective – I have few vivid memories, rather many more sketchy ones. Ask Terry Beatty, my longtime collaborator, who has had to put up with my smear of a memory more than most. My wife Barb is probably relieved she doesn’t have to hear more about what little I remember.

This will be about loss. The list of key players in the drama of my life who’ve already had a final curtain call is a long one. Bruce Peters, the greatest rock ‘n’ roll showman I ever had the honor and difficulty of appearing with. Paul Thomas, my closest friend in the many years of playing rock ‘n’ roll. Michael Cornelison, the actor who was at times a troubled soul but usually a smart, positive one who starred in four of my indie movies and narrated my two documentaries. There are others, too many others; but these three stand out.

I am going to give myself a present. I rarely talk politics here. It’s a combination of respecting the opinions of others and cravenly not wanting to lose any readers. But I am allowing myself the following little joke:

President Donald Trump and V.P. J.D. Vance prepare to welcome President Zelensky

If this offends you deeply, we are so on opposite pages that you are invited never to read me again. I have, on several occasions, requested that disgruntled readers not put my words into their brain, even temporarily. I hate to see you go but don’t let the screen door (you know the rest).

Before I start rambling on this and that, I will pause to say how much I love my wife Barb and what an incredible partner in every phase of my adult life she has been – beautiful, smart, funny, and supportive. When I was in the hospital in 2016 for open-heart surgery, for two-and-a-half weeks, she was there every day. The follow-up surgery a year later, she was there. Every procedure that followed, she was there. She also is excellent at putting me in my place.

Plus she gave me my son Nate, who gave me my grandson Sam and granddaughter Lucy, all three gifts that keep on giving.

Well, that’s out of the way, so let’s talk about Larry Coven.

Larry passed away recently. I met him under unusual circumstances. Barb and I loved Second City in Chicago, the great improv comedy theater where we once saw the cast that largely became that of SCTV. Larry was in the strongest cast I ever saw at Second City, including that storied Canadian one. He shared the stage with George Wendt, Tim Kazurinsky, Mary Gross, Jim Belushi and Danny Breen, all of whom went on to later fame in movies and television, from Cheers to Saturday Night Live and many movie and national TV appearances.

At one of these performances, Barb and I were in Chicago for an early comics convention at the Congress Hotel…I think it was still the Pick-Congress then. To my astonishment, Larry Coven was there. He turned out to be a book and comics dealer, and was a little wary of me because my Second City enthusiasm was on the psychotic side.

But we hit it off and stayed in touch – not regularly though more than just an acquaintance sort of thing. He was amused by my Spillane enthusiasm but respected my right to have it. I asked him, in 1995, to take a small role for me in my Mommy sequel, Mommy’s Day. He appeared as an ominous doctor who gave Patty McCormack as Mommy a dose of something to curtail her homicidal tendencies. This appearance was a generous one, but so was Larry’s delivering the legendary Del Close to me for another role in the film.

Close turned out to be a book enthusiast and a (I can’t believe this even today) fan of mine. Whenever a true Chicagoan endorsed Nate Heller, that was a big deal to me. Del took the role in Mommy’s Day in part because Mickey Spillane was in it and Del wanted to meet this very famous writer and get his Spillane books signed.

Larry took on a much bigger role in my little indie Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market, playing the upbeat clerk whose quiet evening was disrupted by armed robbers. He brought an improvisational touch to the proceedings (“We have some fine Hostess products”) and true professionalism. He had appeared in several other films and on lots of TV. His presence in the cast, which otherwise included mostly inexperienced or local actors, set a high standard and encouraged good performances around him.

If you haven’t seen Real Time: Siege at Lucas Market (and there are enthusiasts of that odd little production), it was my first but not last attempt to get a movie made on spit and chewing gum. Our budget was $10,000. I presented it as a found-footage movie, but it was really tightly scripted, with room for Larry to work a little magic. It came to be after the success of the two Mommy movies was scuttled by a “friend” who was also my producer, and who stole most of the money.

This led to my two documentaries, and the $10,000 production of Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life (with Mike Cornelison, who had considerable Hollywood success for about a decade, appearing on Hill Street Blues, World’s Greatest American Hero and helming three pilot movies, among much else, including a memorable role in Albert Brooks’ Lost in America). Two more recent movies of mine have also been micro-budget affairs (Blue Christmas, also a ten-grand wonder, and the slightly higher budgeted Death By Fruitcake). It was tough getting through both of them without Mike Cornelison in the mix.

Larry would call me whenever I had a novel out – which is often! – and requested that he might send me books of mine to sign, one for himself and another batch for his customers (he was a book dealer, remember). What a bright, funny presence he was. Hearing from him was always a joy. I was lucky to have known him.

Another passing is less personal but has a resonance I’ll share with you (and, yes, I’ve written about this before).

The film Bonnie and Clyde was extraordinarily influential on me. It re-sparked my interest in Prohibition-era crime, initially created by the Untouchables TV series. All of this, plus my Dick Tracy interest, led me down the path to writing historical crime fiction, notably True Detective, currently getting a new lease on life thanks to director Rob Burnett’s True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, the fully immersive audio drama written by me.

Bonnie and Clyde was, and is, a great movie. But I was particularly taken, as were so many others, by an unknown actor’s portrayal of Clyde’s brother Buck. As much as I loved virtually every element of director Arthur Penn’s film, it was Gene Hackman’s performance as Buck that really stole the show for me. The real-life Buck died by police gunfire in my home state of Iowa, and a famous photo of the crime scene, including the bloodied Buck, was recreated in the film.

As I’ve said here and elsewhere before, my father was no huge movie buff. Max Allan Collins, Sr., was a gifted musician but his movie interest was negligible, and he seemed only to put up with my mother’s keen interest in movies, and his son’s. Dad was a sports fan and I was a disappointment in my preference for going to movie matinees on the weekend and not watching sports with him.

But at my urging he went with me to Bonnie and Clyde, which at that point I’d seen half a dozen times. When the Iowa-set scene with the recreation of Buck’s bloody death came on the screen, he was visibly shaken. An ex-WW 2-era Naval veteran, Dad had never reacted to a movie in this fashion, even one as bloody as Bonnie and Clyde. I asked him afterward why it had affected him so, and he reported that his father (my grandfather) had driven him to the bloody crime scene (not far from their Grand Junction, Iowa, home) to witness the aftermath of what a life in crime could bring. The bloody garments were strewn around in the sort of grove where the gun battle had taken place, as was a bullet-pocked car or two. Dad would have been a young boy when he saw this, but he hadn’t thought of it in years till Arthur Penn put it on screen. That Buck Barrow had been brought to life, and then to die, so effectively, so memorably, had an impact.

Hackman was always a favorite actor of mine, but I couldn’t see him without thinking of Buck Barrow and my youngster-age father. I realize that Hackman’s death, at least as I write this, is shrouded in mystery and unfortunate circumstances. But as Clint Eastwood said in The Unforgiven, a movie with an Oscar-winning performance by Gene Hackman, “We all have it coming, kid.”

At 77 I am very aware that the end is coming for all of us. Some are lucky enough, and hard-working enough, to leave behind them a legacy of work, if not one of the magnitude of movies and novels that Gene Hackman did. And all of us who love great acting are lucky to have been on the planet when Hackman was around.

I should leave it at that, but I can’t help but comment that Barb and I watched, this past weekend, a Hackman film, Bite the Bullet, a terrific, under-appreciated movie that co-stars James Coburn. Seeing those two working together is a master class in film acting.

What I love about this pairing is how Hackman is an actor who learned to be a movie star, and Coburn is a movie star who leaned to be an actor.

I’m glad I was around to see them both.

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If you’re wondering what I want for my birthday, it’s for you to go to truenoir.co and order True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak.

M.A.C.

Another Giveaway – Free Ms. Tree!

We had a nice response to our book giveaway last week, especially considering The Last Quarry is a reprint (albeit a nice, bigger physically – and content-wise – edition, including as it does two Quarry short stories).

So why not do another giveaway this week?

Paperback:
E-Book:

I’m not sure I’ve ever done a giveaway on any of the Ms. Tree archival volumes. I haven’t been sent anything more than a few author’s comp copies of any of ‘em, and the books are rather weighty – you might say heavy, and I’m not talking about the stories.

But this time around I got a nice box of comps and I’m going to offer copies to the first ten of you people blessed enough with sublime taste to request one. This is the final of six volumes of MS. TREE, Fallen Tree, and like all of the preceding volumes from Titan and Hard Case Crime, it’s a beauty. The covers are strong and evocative by various artists, and all of Terry Beatty’s great covers are present in cover galleries spread out across the books.

As usual, contact me at macphilms@hotmail.com, and (this is a must) include in your e-mail your snail-mail address. This is USA only, I’m afraid. You agree to write a review at Amazon and/or Barnes and Noble, and/or any comics-oriented web site. Mystery fiction web sites count, too. If you hate the book, you are released from the obligation of writing a review.

This particular volume features a number of stories where Terry was assisted by cartoonist Gary Kato, who is (I am embarrassed to say) an unsung hero of (particularly the later) Ms. Tree tales. Working out of Honolulu, often in tandem with the talented Ron Fortier on the lively comic book Mr. Jigsaw (among others), Gary continues to draw comics in a career that includes working on Elfquest and children’s books (the Barry Baskerville series) and the recent The Eternal Sword: A Tale of Arthur. He has also illustrated children’s books by Fortier and others, and his collaborators include Barbara Doran.

Gary is a big part of how we were able to keep Ms. Tree going as long as we did. It became necessary for Terry to take on Gary’s assistance when deadlines crushed us, in part because we had other projects come along that could, frankly, keep “starving artists” an expression and not a reality.

And I must salute my friend Terry Beatty, whose talent I’ve believed in from the start and who has proven me right on various non-Collins projects, including becoming the primary inker (and occasional penciller) of DC Comics’ “animated-style” Batman comics, and of course his work on the famous syndicated strips The Phantom and Rex Morgan, MD (he also writes the latter).

When you sit down with one of these archival volumes, you frankly have no idea how difficult it was to keep the ship from taking on water over our nearly decade and a half, sometimes staying barely afloat. The independent comics market exploded in those years, but we were writing the only mystery/crime title out there, pretty much, and we watched sales figures through squinted eyes and with our breaths held. Without Dean Mullaney, Dave Sim, Deni Loubert and Mike Gold we would never have made our record-breaking run.

I must also single out Titan’s Nick Landau and Vivian Cheung (with an assist from Andrew Sumner) for staying after Terry and me to collect this material. Nick, Vivian and I took many breakfast meetings at San Diego Comic Con over the years, discussing collecting Ms. Tree in this format (as well as continuing the Mike Hammer novels). Archival volumes like these – and Terry had to do a lot of work on them, as our materials were not always in good shape – were always a dream of mine, and I think of my collaborator. But we could hardly have imagined what a lovely job Titan would make of it.

Terry and I probably missed the boat a bit, not taking advantage of the Road to Perdition buzz that would have boosted the sales of such archival Ms. Tree volumes. But as I’ve mentioned here before, we had hoped to launch the series with a new Ms. Tree graphic novel. That never happened and is unlikely at this point ever to happen.

I had a pretty good idea for what the graphic novel would be, but I’m not sure doing one would have been a good idea. Ms. Tree – who inspired a layout in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine – was very much of her time, an ‘80s/’90s phenomenon. Toward the end of the run (in the early ‘90s), a reader dinged me for having Ms. Tree use a key in a hotel room door. Didn’t I know hotels only used key cards now? Well, I suppose on some level I did know. But just as Ms. Tree was a throwback to the 1950s world of Mickey Spillane, I was in co-creating the Ms. Tree feature of a different era myself.

When I was in college in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, my great instructor Richard Yates sent my novel Bait Money to agent Knox Burger, who had a storied career as a Collier’s magazine editor and (more pertinently) the editor at Gold Medal Books, where among other things he encouraged John D. MacDonald to stop writing one-offs and create a series character (Travis McGee, anyone?). Burger took me on as a client, but a bit grudgingly, writing to Yates, “I’m afraid young Collins is a blacksmith in an automotive age.”

I’m afraid I still am.

And yet somehow I’ve managed to find a way to write about characters in novels, comics, and even films, who resonate with the child of the 1950s in me – the kid who scrounged used book stores for copies of the forbidden EC comics, who watched George Reeves as Superman loving every (sometimes silly) second of it, and who somehow – unbelievably – got to write Dick Tracy after Chester Gould’s retirement, and Mike Hammer after Mickey Spillane’s passing.

That would seem more than enough. But I’m a greedy cuss (get to my age you start using words like “cuss”) and am currently luxuriating in seeing – well, hearing – my own Nate Heller brought to life from my scripts in the immersive audio drama, True Noir, thanks to director Robert Meyer Burnett and star Michael Rosenbaum.

The moral of all this? Even if you are talented and hardworking, and I immodestly think I am those things, you are nothing without collaborators who are also talented and hardworking. Like Terry Beatty. Like Gary Kato. Like Rob Burnett.

* * *

Here’s an article on the best 7 performances in comic book movies – it’s Paul Newman in Road to Perdition.

M.A.C.

Quarry! Spillane! John Sand! True Noir!

It’s been some time since we did a book giveaway, so let’s make up for that lost time with the new trade paperback edition of The Last Quarry.

Back in the early days of Hard Case Crime, their books were published in the old-fashioned mass-market paperback form. When HCC moved to Titan as their home publisher, the format was changed to a somewhat larger trade edition. The Last Quarry was intended to conclude a series that was pretty much defunct after its four mid-‘70s books at Berkley and one book at Foul Play Press.

As I’ve reported here before, The Last Quarry was an unexpected success (I am always surprised when something of mine moves from cult favorite to actual success). This initiated a still in-progress revival of the series including an award-winning short film (“A Matter of Principal”), a feature I co-wrote (The Last Lullaby, from The Last Quarry), and a one-season Cinemax TV series, as well as many more series entries plus a graphic novel.

This has now led to new trade-size editions of The First Quarry (September 2025), Quarry in the Middle (pub date as yet unannounced), and The Last Quarry (April 2025). The latter book will include two short stories, “Guest Services” and “Quarry’s Luck” (previously collected in Quarry’s Greatest Hits, the only Quarry volume not reprinted by HCC). This new edition of The Last Quarry also has an essay by me charting the development of Quarry, including his unexpected revival. And what a Robert McGinnis cover it has!

And what of the giveaway? The deal is this: you agree to write an Amazon and or Barnes & Noble review in exchange for the receipt of a copy; you are released from this obligation if you don’t like the book. You have to wait till the pub date to do an Amazon review (Barnes & Noble reviews are also fine). Ten copies are available. USA only. E-mail me at macphilms@hotmail.com to enter – IMPORTANT: include your snail-mailing address, even if you’ve won before.

These do go fast.

Now, there are all kinds of flavors of Amazon-type reviews. Some are a sentence or two or three, and some are actual mini-essays. If you do something on The Last Quarry of the latter nature, you can send it to me (and Amazon!) and I’ll share it here.

I am hopeful we’ll have another book giveaway here very soon, if I can lay hands on some extra advance copies of the final Mike Hammer novel, Baby, It’s Murder, which comes out March 4, the day after my 77th birthday.

Is it really the last Mike Hammer novel? Truthfully, I have a couple of brief openings by Mickey that may become short stories, or even novels, if the much-promised Mike Hammer movie happens. I would also probably go after the movie novelization of that, again…if it happens. I also have a Mike Danger novel that Mickey did a complete draft of, which I hope to revise into a Hammer one. Due to the science fiction nature of the Danger novel, it was not included in the batch of titles from Titan that complete the official canon.

I also have a science-fiction/horror-tinged complete screenplay Mickey did, which I could turn into a novel, and would frankly like to do so. Unfortunately, the horror novel The Menace (from another unproduced Spillane screenplay) that I wrote for Wolfpack hasn’t earned enough sales to command a follow-up.

Speaking of Wolfpack, all three of the John Sand novels that Matt Clemens and I wrote, including our short story collection Murderlized (which includes a John Sand short story), are on sale as an e-book collection of all four books for a mere 99-cents.

I feel the John Sand novels are among my least known and least read books, and hope any of you who have been on the fence about them take advantage of this incredible price. For the uninitiated, John Sand (in the world of these novels, set in the ‘60s) is the real-life spy who Ian Fleming based James Bond upon. I think this represents some of the best Collins/Clemens collaborations. Matt, of course, was the co-author of all my CSI novels.

Buy the John Sand collection on e-book right here.

And while we’re at it, here is a link to the three Spillane titles I did for Wolfpack. These are Mickey’s final YA novel (edited and introduced by me), The Shrinking Island; Stand Up and Die (a Collins-edited collection of Spillane novellas, including a Mike Hammer I co-wrote); and the aforementioned The Menace, co-written by me from an unproduced Spillane screenplay.

Paperback:
E-Book:
E-Book: * * *

Listen (and that’s the operative word here), I could not be prouder of True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, my ten-episode immersive-audio adaptation of the first Nate Heller novel, True Detective. Director Robert Meyer Burnett has done an incredible job with an incredible cast. Michael Rosenbaum makes an ideal Nate Heller. The seventh episode has either just dropped or is about to.

With my longtime crony Phil Dingeldein behind the camera, we have been doing a series of video commentaries about each episode.

Please don’t watch these till you’ve signed on for the audio series at truenoir.co. If you’ve read True Detective you can probably understand what I’m talking about. But you should really listen to each episode of True Noir, then check in with the appropriate one of these after each one. Nonetheless, here are episodes three, four, and five.

Chapter Three:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncwysQ3kIDY

Chapter Four:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKvSPEOd4J0

Chapter Five:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plz_PAPPqac

M.A.C.

Video Interviews and Ruminations of AI Replacing Me

Blue Christmas will be available on Tubi (free, but probably with commercials) starting March 10. I realize it’s not the Christmas season right now, but March is my birthday month, so help celebrate by watching our little mostly-well-reviewed “chamber piece” on Tubi.

* * *

This week is a hodgepodge of videos, starting with (in my biased opinion) a particularly good interview by Andrew Sumner of Titan Books with yrs truly, talking about the forthcoming final Mike Hammer novel (Baby, It’s Murder), the new Ms. Tree archival edition (the final of six), my Sam Spade sequel The Return of the Maltese Falcon (due out Jan. 2026), and much more.

Here is the great Michael Rosenbaum (Nathan Heller in True Noir) seeing the promo poster of our immersive ten-part adapation of True Detective for the first time.

For the heartiest souls among you – or those desperate to fill the empty hours – here is my three-hour-plus (!) appearance on Rob Burnett’s (and Dieter Bastion’s) Let’s Get Physical Media. I am prettier (marginally) in real life.

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Here, from stalwart reviewer (and fiction writer) Ron Fortier is a review of the latest Quarry novel.

QUARRY’S RETURN
By Max Allan Collins
Hard Case Crime
213 pgs

One has to wonder at the twists and turns of fate when a writer of the baby-boomer generation (post World War II for you youngsters) is still writing about a hired gun well into his seventies. That’s Quarry, one of three series Collins whipped up a long…long…long time ago. That it is still around, never mind getting better like aged bourbon, is no small literary feat. Our best guess as to why; two things. One, Collins is such a damn good writer and two, his loyal readers know it and aren’t going anywhere.

In his last novel featuring his Quarry tale, Collins introduced his Vietnam veteran protagonist to the adult daughter he’d never known. After an awkward start, filial emotions rose to the surface when they were forced to save each other’s lives from some very bad people. In this follow up tale, Quarry learns Susan, his crime-writer daughter, has disappeared while doing research on a serial killer. This he learns from an old lover-colleague, a beautiful Japanese gal named Lu; his equal in death-dealing. The two of them make Bonnie and Clyde look like Hansel and Gretel.

It becomes obvious that Susan has run afoul of the very fiend behind the so-called Cheerleader Murders she is investigating. Unless Quarry and Lu can find her quickly, Susan will become the killer’s fourth victim. Collins weaves a fast-paced tale as his wonderfully mature couple question and shoot their way through a twisted puzzle, each well aware that the stamina and zeal of their youth exist only in melancholy backward glances.

Quarry’s Return continues the quality of this series offering up both the drama and action we’ve come to expect from a master storyteller now at the height of his craft. Oh, if only more writers weren’t afraid of growing old.* * *

What does A.I. think of me?

My buddy Rob Burnett asked ChatGPT to roast me, and this is what he got:

Max Allan Collins? Oh, you mean the guy who spends his days trying to convince people he wrote Road to Perdition before the movie made it cool? The man has more tie-in novels under his belt than original ideas. If there’s a movie, TV show, or video game with a plot, chances are he’s already turned it into a book before you even realized it existed.

Don’t get me wrong, the guy knows his way around a crime story, but let’s be honest – his bibliography reads like the novelization section at a Blockbuster in 1999. He’s basically the literary version of that friend who just retells movie plots but insists they’re adding depth.

And let’s talk about

Road to Perdition. Everyone remembers the film – you know, Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Sam Mendes’ stunning cinematography? But Collins? He’s like that one guy in the back of a concert yelling, “I wrote the original song, man!” while everyone’s there for the band that made it famous.

Look, he’s a workhorse, I’ll give him that, but maybe if he spent a little less time cashing in on other people’s intellectual properties, he’d be known as more than “that dude who did all the licensed tie-ins.”

That chatGPT request was for a roast of me as author of Road to Perdition. This one left Road to Perdition out of the search request.

Alright, let’s talk about Max Allan Collins – the guy who never met a tie-in novel he didn’t like. This man has churned out more franchise cash grabs than Hollywood itself, and somehow, he still wants us to believe he’s a “hard-boiled” crime writer. Yeah, sure, buddy – nothing screams noir like novelizing CSI episodes.

Collins has spent his career clinging to Mickey Spillane’s coattails so hard that he’s practically a ghostwriter for a ghost. The guy inherited unfinished Mike Hammer manuscripts like some kind of pulp fiction trust fund baby and has been playing Weekend at Bernie’s with Spillane’s legacy ever since. And let’s not forget Road to Perdition — a graphic novel that somehow got a brilliant film adaptation that made people think he’s on the same level as classic crime writers. Spoiler: He’s not.

Is he prolific? Absolutely. But so is a fax machine. If crime fiction had a direct-to-video section, Collins would be its king.

Next Rob asked ChatGPT to praise me. Here’s what he got:

Max Allan Collins is one of the most prolific and versatile crime writers of his generation, seamlessly blending historical research, sharp storytelling, and a deep love for the noir tradition. His Road to Perdition graphic novel became an Oscar-winning film, proving his talent for crafting compelling narratives with rich emotional depth.

Collins’ dedication to the hard-boiled genre extends beyond his own work – he’s kept the legacy of Mickey Spillane alive by completing unfinished Mike Hammer manuscripts with remarkable authenticity. His Nathan Heller series is a masterclass in historical crime fiction, blending real-life mysteries with gripping detective work.

Beyond novels, Collins has left his mark across multiple mediums – comics, television tie-ins, and even film – demonstrating a storytelling range few can match. Whether he’s penning a hard-hitting detective tale or a media tie-in, he brings professionalism and an unmistakable voice to everything he touches.

Next Rob, at my request, asked about “Barbara Allan.”

Here’s the roast:

Barbara Allan – aka the dynamic duo of Barbara and Max Allan Collins – has mastered the fine art of writing cozy mysteries that are as outrageous as a yard sale gone horribly wrong. The Trash ‘n’ Treasures series? More like Clutter ‘n’ Chaos! The books are packed with enough quirky characters, eccentric antiques, and over-the-top antics to make even the most dedicated cozy mystery reader question their life choices.

The mother-daughter sleuthing team, Brandy and Vivian, are basically the literary equivalent of Lucy and Ethel if they were trapped in an endless loop of small-town mayhem and garage-sale drama. Vivian, in particular, is a force of nature – a character so hilariously unhinged that she could probably solve crimes just by talking the suspects into confessing out of sheer exhaustion.

And let’s not forget the narrative style – breaking the fourth wall, footnotes, and asides that sometimes make you feel like you’ve stumbled into a mystery novel with an identity crisis. Is it a whodunit? A stand-up comedy routine? A fever dream about hoarding? Who knows!

But despite all the chaos, you have to give Barbara Allan credit – somehow, these books keep readers coming back for more. Maybe it’s the humor, maybe it’s the charm, or maybe it’s just the literary equivalent of watching a reality show where you can’t look away. Either way, the Trash ‘n’ Treasures series is a wild ride, whether you love it or love to roll your eyes at it.

That’s the roast, but Barb and I both pretty much agree with it and find it oddly complimentary. I guess it goes to show there’s less negative stuff about Barbara Allan out there on the Internet for chatGPT to draw upon.

Here’s the Barbara Allan praise from chatGPT:

Barbara Allan is a talented and acclaimed author, best known for her delightful and witty “Trash ‘n’ Treasures” mystery series. The writing duo behind the pseudonym – Barbara and Max Allan Collins – crafts engaging, humorous, and cleverly plotted cozy mysteries that keep readers entertained while delivering sharp social observations. Their knack for blending humor, crime, and quirky characters makes their work a standout in the genre.

Allan’s ability to create compelling narratives with charmingly eccentric protagonists, particularly Brandy Borne and her mother, Vivian, showcases a keen sense of humor and an impressive storytelling skill. The lighthearted yet intriguing mysteries, often infused with a touch of satire, offer a refreshing take on the cozy mystery genre. Fans appreciate the dynamic character relationships, lively dialogue, and the seamless way the authors weave suspense with humor.

Barbara Allan’s contributions to the mystery genre continue to be celebrated by devoted readers who eagerly anticipate each new installment. Whether you’re a longtime fan or a newcomer, her books are sure to entertain and delight!

Besides giving Barb and me (and Rob) a giddy good laugh over all of this, what to make of it? To me it shows that AI can give you anything but something of actual substance, coming from a real-life human being with human experiences to draw upon. It also hints at the nature of reviews and criticism – that the same work can engender wildly different takes (although Barbara Allan seems pretty popular with everybody!).

I am of the opinion that AI will never be able to truly approximate someone’s writing (say, ask chatGPT to write a Mike Hammer novel by Mickey Spillane) when it’s (no matter how sophisticated) a soulless summary of things actual humans have thought and felt. This is related to “garbage in, garbage out,” but AI won’t draw upon garbage, or even churn garbage out. It can cobble something together from the works of a writer based only on existing work, not new work informed by human experience.

Not only are the words borrowed, so are the attitudes that shaped those words. Nor is it likely (to my way of thinking anyway) that AI will ever be able to write a “new” Max Allan Collins book (for example) because it will not be able to deal with the growth and shifts and, yes, decline of a creative person.

Or, as chatGPT had to say on this subject:

AI can be an excellent tool for assisting writers, offering suggestions, or even generating basic plot ideas, but it lacks the deeper emotional, cultural, and philosophical grounding that human creativity provides.

Fiction writing isn’t just about stringing words together – it’s about creating meaning, evoking emotions, and offering unique perspectives, all of which are rooted in the lived experience of being human. AI can simulate creativity, but it can’t be creative in the same way a human can.

Finally, I asked chatGPT to create an approximately 1000-word example of my fiction writing. Here it is:

I leaned back in my chair, the smoke from my cigarette curling up toward the ceiling. The office was dim, the only light coming from the streetlamp outside casting long shadows across the room. It was the kind of night that made you question your choices, the kind of night that made you wonder if the world was as clean as it seemed.

The door creaked open, and she stepped in – a dame with legs that went on forever and a look that could melt steel. She had that air about her, the kind that said she was trouble, but the kind you couldn’t resist.

“Mr. Heller?” she asked, her voice a melody that didn’t quite match the storm in her eyes.

“That’s me,” I said, motioning to the chair across from my desk. “Have a seat.”

She hesitated for a moment, then sat down, crossing her legs. I noticed the faint tremor in her hands as she placed them on her lap.

“What’s the trouble?” I asked, leaning forward.

She took a deep breath, her eyes darting around the room as if searching for something. “I need your help,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “My husband is missing.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Missing? Or just not where you want him to be?”

M.A.C.

An Impact-ful Noir, James Stewart, and…More

I don’t generally review physical media (that is, Blu-rays) here, but this one, from VCI (who – full disclosure – distributed Blue Christmas) is a worthwhile exception. The movie I’m talking about is a fairly well-regarded noir that I’d never seen: Impact (1949), with Brian Donlevy (perhaps best-known for starring in Preston Sturges’ The Great McGinty (1940) and playing Quatermass in two mid-‘50s Hammer adaptations of the British TV serials).

What made me pop this disc into my Blu-ray player the very day said disc arrived, however, was the presence of the two female leads – Helen Walker and Ella Raines. Walker starred with Fred MacMurray in Murder, She Says (1945), that greatest of comedy noir, and had a memorable femme fatale role in the original Nightmare Alley (1947) (accept no substitutes). Raines was a noir favorite (Phantom Lady, 1944) and also a favorite leading lady of John Wayne’s (Tall in the Saddle, 1944). Both women were strikingly, somewhat unconventionally beautiful.

Helen Walker

Both actresses, despite varied careers, are probably most associated with their film noir work. Walker in particular played a number of femme fatales, while Raines was more often the “good girl” in the mix, and that’s the case in Impact.

And, in Impact, it’s the two women who make the most, well, impact. Donlevy is quite good, and his performance has more colors than was his usual practice – he’s made to go more places, and he goes there in an understated but typically powerful way. He was not usually the leading man, and even playing Quatermass, for example, comes across as a character actor. In any event, a man with a lot of walls that are difficult to look behind.

In Impact, he plays a rather ruthless leader in the automotive industry, casually running roughshod over his board of directors. But at home, in his insanely large and lavish apartment, he is a love-struck pushover to his beautiful, charming wife, Walker in a tricky role. What seems like a textbook happy marriage, if dominated by the female, soon reveals itself with Donlevy as the cuckold targeted by Walker for homicide.

I don’t want to ruin the many twists and turns – one of them involves the great Anna Mae Wong in her second-to-last big-screen performance – but structurally this is like nothing else in the noir (or any) catalogue. It was shot by iconic cinematographer Ernest Laszlo (Kiss Me Deadly, 1955). And it begins as a noir out of the Double Indemnity (1944) play book, if largely from the targeted victim’s POV, playing as a bigger-budget Detour for about the first third.

Then the second act finds a wandering Donlevy (after fate or maybe God gives him a pass on being a murder victim) winding up in what seems to be an Andy Hardy movie, minus manic Mickey Rooney. This is where Ella Raines comes in as a war widow running her late husband’s gas station. The whole mood is wholesome small-town after the harrowing noir first act, cross-cutting with the efforts of Walker back in the big city to dodge the Columbo-like efforts of an unlikely elderly police detective who is inexplicably the very British Charles Coburn (he refers to an impending retirement to justify all this).

Primarily, though act two is chiefly about good old-fashioned small-town American goodness, which redeems Donlevy, despite the Carville-like setting presented just short of cloyingly and with the shadow of big city nastiness hanging over all this normal niceness. There’s a level of Christianity under this section – traditional be-merciful, do-unto-your-neighbor-as-you would-have-them-do-to-you variety. Yup, this is the middle act of a film noir and it works.

Then there’s the third act, of what is an exceptionally long (almost two-hour) noir, where Donlevy does the right thing and comes forward back in Big Town to reveal he’s still alive and that his wife, now facing murder charges, didn’t get the job done. Somehow (beautiful plotting here) this lands him in the pokey facing a murder rap of his own. The third act is sort of a Columbo-tinged 1950s Perry Mason episode.

All this from journeyman director Arthur Lubin, best known for directing Abbott and Costello and Francis the Talking Mule!
It’s the damnedest thing I ever saw, and I loved it.

Here is a very good article on Ella Raines with an interview with her daughter.

Here is an in-depth look at the Hollywood rise and the tragic fall of Helen Walker.

I also watched the Criterion 4K release Winchester 73 (1950), one of the five great westerns James Stewart starred in that Anthony Mann directed. Mann would go on to be a specialist in grand-scale historical epics (The Fall of the Roman Empire, 1964) but came out of Poverty Row films noir, like T-Men (1947) and Raw Deal (1948). The latter films connect well with the noir-ish Stewart westerns.

Stewart is my favorite actor of his era, probably of any era. No one starred in more great films – and I mean great films – than Jimmy Stewart…from his Frank Capra classics to Philadelphia Story (1940), Harvey (1950), Rear Window (1954, Vertigo (1958), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Other gems were sprinkled here and there – Bell, Book and Candle (1958) a particular favorite of mine – but with the Anthony Mann-directed westerns a major part of Stewart’s incredible cinematic legacy.

No other actor has a list to rival James Stewart’s. He wasn’t always good – when the material was spotty, he could be hammy, as in the J. Edgar Hoover valentine, The FBI Story (1959) or if were miscast, as in The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), or was trying to elevate weak material (Thunder Bay, 1953, also Mann).

I mention all this because Winchester 73 is a revenge story, and Stewart displays his dark side, his eyes gleaming as he starts to strangle Dan Duryea. This is the side of Stewart first displayed in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), the disturbing boiling over of his frustrations in the final quarter of that film. And it comes to a stunning head in Vertigo, which is my favorite film. Number two on my favorites list (right before Chinatown) is Kiss Me Deadly, which brings us to Mickey Spillane.
Are you surprised? Doesn’t almost everything I write about here come back around to Mickey?

Here’s why it does this time: Winchester 73, and several other Stewart/Mann westerns, are revenge tales, and most of the great post-war films among Stewart’s best depict a hero who is touched by madness and rage. The actor who came back changed, even damaged, from war service is not unlike the PTSD-ridden Mike Hammer of those five early Spillane novels. Or for that matter the WW 2 vets who made Spillane the best-selling post-war mystery writer.

Everybody talks about Spillane (when they talk about him at all these days) in terms of sex and violence; but it is the rage, the thirst for revenge, that really drives Mike Hammer in the first five novels, and that is the same engine in Winchester 73, Vertigo and other stellar Stewart (post-war) performances. Interestingly, with the possible exception of The Glenn Miller Story, most of Stewart’s positive salutes to America and the military are minor, even boring things – Thunder Bay, Strategic Air Command (1955), The FBI Story.

Even in Winchester 73, it’s clear Stewart is a (Civil) war veteran come home changed and traumatized. Circling back to Impact, Donlevy is likely a war veteran and his love interest lost her husband in the war. So many of these noirs, so many melodrama movies of the late forties into the early ‘60s, are impacted by the Second World War – the sacrifices and heroism but also the horrors.

I was born in 1948, and I grew up hearing – often in an indirect, undramatic, even nostalgic fashion – stories and indications of that war from my father and other male (and female) relatives. Gen Z has no memory of even this second-hand experience, and the Greatest Generation is mostly gone now – so why should we expect Gen Z to remember something they never experienced?

This brings me, inevitably, to my own work. We are a month away from the final Mike Hammer novel, Baby, It’s Murder, becoming available. You can order it from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or wherever you like to buy books right now. And True Noir, my ten-episode adaptation of the first Nate Heller novel, True Detective, directed by the fantastic Robert Meyer Burnett, is also available for order now (it’s in progress – the first five episodes are available and the rest will drop on a weekly basis).

So from Mike Hammer we go to Nate Heller, the detective of mine who is involved in real historical crimes and mysteries. Those of you (and this includes me) who were not alive in the early ‘30s can experience it through this immersive audio drama…and from my books, which cover most of the rest of the 20th Century.

I advise sampling some of Jimmy Stewart’s best movies, to any of you Gen Z saplings out there, as not a bad move.

M.A.C.

More Thoughts on Collaboration

Recently I discussed the benefits of collaboration in broad strokes – that working with another writer on a story or novel can create a synergy that turns two plus two into five. This requires a meeting of the minds and a compatibility between two creative forces that doesn’t always happen. It’s a kind of marriage. You gotta gell.

I’ve been very lucky in this regard with the likes of Terry Beatty, Dave Thomas and Matt Clemens, among a few others.

Collaboration on a film set is a much different animal. The social element is something I find refreshing, as someone who has worked in a solitary fashion for many years. Actors and film crews bring their considerable talents to bear in helping me mount a production from a script of mine – they often improve upon that script. I would say they usually do.

Alisabeth Von Presley and Paula Sands at the premiere of Death by Fruitcake in which they appear as Brandy and Vivian Borne, shown with Sushi. Watch for it late this year!

Phil Dingeldein and Chad Bishop are key players in my (apparently) ongoing return to indie filmmaking. Robert Meyer Burnett has worked closely with me as he directs my script for True Noir, our immersive ten-chapter audio adaptation of True Detective (episode five just dropped!). That project is very film-like as an experience – making an elaborate, large-cast “movie for the mind.”

I’m sure the need to create something in collaboration with others has a lot to do with why I stayed involved with playing in my bands the Daybreakers, Crusin’ and Seduction of the Innocent. Frustrations and head-butting ensues, yes, but the sum total is worthwhile and, frankly, fun.

What I neglected to talk about, in regard to writing fiction with a collaborator, is how the process works. Frankly, it can work several ways – more than several. But my process is usually that the plot and themes are mostly worked out in advance, and the other writer takes a pass at a chapter (or short story), or a complete draft, and I take the second pass, basically working as a supremely intrusive editor (the kind of person I hate when I’m writing on my own – copy editors have often been subject of my displeasure…so there’s an irony here).

My longest and arguably most successful collaboration has been with Barb, my wife of a hundred years or so. The most infuriating thing about Barb to other writers is when they learn she grew up having no interest whatsoever in becoming a writer. That dream held by so many was nothing she ever experienced.

Basically, she put a toe into the water at my request when Terry Beatty and I needed help on the back-up feature (“Mike Mist”) in the Ms. Tree comic books. Initially she wrote scripts and later, to save Terry two pages of art per issue, short stories. What they used to call “filler” in Golden Age and Silver Age comic books.

She was almost irritatingly good at it. I was a tad surprised, but not really, because she had been my in-house editor from the start and displayed an innate feel for storytelling. Her inspirations were the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series (particularly episodes based on Roald Dahl short stories) and Nancy Drew novels. She was not an avid reader (although she is a big reader of non-fiction now, particularly biographies).

I have said before that if I had been a brain surgeon, Barb would have become one, too, just picking it up being around me. That certainly seems to be the case with fiction writing.

Her process, whether she’s writing with me or on a solo project (she did many short stories alone before we began working on the Trash ‘n’ Treasures Antiques series together) is slow and steady. Fastidious. She is a long distance runner and I am a sprinter. I write quickly and revise as I go, having been working at fiction writing since junior high; she works and re-works her draft before turning it over to me.

Our process is discussing and loosely plotting a novel together, often over a dining-out meal or a car trip, and usually we come up with a title (sometimes she comes up with it, sometimes I do, but we have to agree it’s a good one). Then she sets out alone and works for six months or so on a somewhat short (250 – 275-page) draft.

She then turns her draft over to me, and I take under a month on my draft, generally, and expand the novel to 300 to 325 pages. These are double-spaced pages. She reads my chapters as I go, gives notes, finds typos, and I make the corrections and revisions before I start the next chapter. She rarely gives me a bad time about changes and expansions I make, claiming to be sick of the book by the time she hands it over to me. She gives me remarkable freedom in my rewrite, mostly just making sure I am not doing damage to the plot, because I don’t read her entire manuscript before starting my revision.

That may seem counter-intuitive, because you would think I’d want to read the thing before starting to revise it. But that doesn’t work for me. Back when I did read Barb’s draft first, I would start rewriting it in my head, immediately, making notes and getting bogged down. I do better just digging in. Also, because we plotted it so long before, I seldom remember who the murderer is. So that means, as I do my draft, I’m in the dark with the reader, which is a good thing. If I can guess who did it too early, we have some carpentry to do.

Barb and Max Allan Collins at the Death by Fruitcake premiere with Sushi. Their Antiques series come to life!

Collaborations work a lot of ways. This is our process. I don’t recommend it as a method, because every writer and every writing team must find their own method, their own process. It may work for you, it may not. Our way accommodates Barb’s pace and my pace, which are (as I’ve said) radically different.

It does work for us. I’m very proud of the Antiques novels, and my contribution to them, although Barb is very much the lead writer. The Trash ‘n’ Treasures series has more entries than any other series of mine – it has enjoyed the longest run with some of the best reviews any project I’m associated with has ever received.

I think it’s fair to say that Barb couldn’t do these books alone and neither could I. Either of us could write an entry in the series, but neither of us could write an entry as good as our team could do. It is indeed synergy.

What’s the secret? First, we each respect the other writer. Second, we stay of each other’s way. I don’t look over her shoulder while she’s writing her draft, and she gives me all the room I need to write mine.

Also, her office is on the first floor of our house, and mine is on the second.

M.A.C.

Ms. Tree Gets Her Due

Paperback:
E-Book:
Paperback:
E-Book:

At the Reading Is Fun, Not Mental website, “TL” wrote this terrific Ms. Tree – Heroine Withdrawal review, the fifth of the six Ms. Tree collections from Titan.

Ms. Tree – Heroine Withdrawal (The Fifth Ms. Tree Graphic Novel)

I can never get enough of Ms. Tree. Ever since I picked up that first issue of Ms. Tree’s Thrilling Detective Adventures (which I still love that title, even though I’m aware Ms. Tree’s creators do not – for me, it gave the book a pulp feel, which I think fit the character nicely), I’ve been hooked, and I was devastated when the series eventually ended after years at Eclipse, then Aardvark-Vanheim, then Renegade Press, and finally DC Comics. So, when Titan announced it would be collecting and reprinting the entire run, I was super-excited – sure, I had all the individual issues; but now I would have easy access to reading the stories again and again and again without having to dig through my comic boxes, unseal the bags, and pull out issue after issue to read them. Even though the collections are not telling the stories in order (they reprinted the ten DC issues first, then went back to the beginning to start with the Eclipse issues, before moving on to the AV and Renegade issues – and even those have been told somewhat out of order, collecting them by story relevance and not chronologically), I have absolutely loved curling up in my recliner and walking down memory lane with Ms. Tree, Dan, Effie, and the rest of the gang…

Ms. Tree: Heroine Withdrawal collects issues 18-27 and 29-31 (with the title having officially switched fully to Renegade Press by issue 19). These are some of my favorite issues, as they deal with Ms. Tree’s final confrontation with Dominic Muerta and the aftermath – as well as a two-part story that dealt with the topical issue of abortion. This is some of Max Allan Collins’ best writing in the series, as they give the readers a real sense of why Ms. Tree is who she is and why the world (well, her fictional world, anyway) needs a Ms. Tree in it. It’s also extremely character driving, as most of the series is anyway – but these issues in particular give readers a greater understanding of not just Ms. Tree, but also many of the supporting characters. Plus, we get our introduction to Dominique Muerta (gotta love Collins’ play on names in this series), who turns out to be a wonderful frenemy for our favorite gun-toting crime-fighter!

“Muerta Means Death,” the four-issue story that runs through issues 18, 19, 20, and 21, provides readers with a very satisfying conclusion to Ms. Tree’s vendetta against the man who had her husband killed. The title has a double meaning, since the word “muerta” is actually the Spanish word for “dead,” and at the same time, it refers to the fact that Dominic Muerta is a killer, and if you cross him, you die. I suppose it could also have a third meaning, since in the story, we learn Muerta has cancer and is on his death bed – and when Dan Green comes back to work (with a hook in place of the hand he lost in the explosion set by Muerta’s men in a previous story), he’s all set to take revenge on Muerta. It all gets confusing when Dan goes to Muerta’s house prepared to kill him – and when Ms. Tree and the police get there, they find Dan just waking up in the same room where Muerta and his nurse are both dead! Dan swears he did not do it, and Ms. Tree sets about proving his innocence. The story takes a few surprising twists, with the final one giving Ms. Tree the satisfaction she has been seeking – definitely a great read, and for astute readers (who have become accustomed to Collins’ playing with names), Muerta’s attorney, Dimitri A. Dopler, should give you a huge clue as to one of the biggest secrets in this story!

Following this big payoff, Collins gives readers a few shorter stories – the first being “Right to Die,” which addresses the issue of abortion and readers find out that Ms. Tree had an abortion when she was younger, an act she regrets now that Mike Tree is dead, and the only child she could have had with him is gone. The story addresses the issue without straying into preaching which side of the issue is “right” – instead, the story focuses on how various people deal with abortion and the doctors who perform the procedures. It has a sad ending, and let’s just say there are no real winners in this one – especially for Ms. Tree, as her actions in this story have serious repercussions…

Leading into the next two-parter, “Prisoner Cell Block Hell,” in which Ms. Tree does time in a women’s prison (with all the standard stereotypes you’d expect to see), and Ms. Tree has to face someone coming after her – after all, as the saying goes, the past always has a way of catching back up to you. After unveiling some very corrupt prison guards, Ms. Tree then gets transferred to a psychiatric facility in the two-part “Heroine Withdrawal.” For those who remember the very first Ms. Tree story in her own comic (after her origin in Eclipse Magazine), Ms. Tree has a reason to be wary of psychiatrists – and for good reason!. Only this time around, she manages to reveal the unscrupulous actions of a nurse and orderly, as well as a high-powered politician! And she makes a new friend who may or may not have been taken by aliens (let’s just say Collins leaves it up to the reader to decide at the end of the story…)

This collection concludes with the three-issue tale, “The Other Cheek,” which introduces us to a newly reformed Ms. Tree who has completed her psychiatric care and has decided to walk away from all of the violence, not even carrying a gun any more. This, of course, forces all of those who work with her – including Effie! – to step up their game, because when it comes to Ms. Tree, danger is never far away. It’s not until her stepson, Mike (named after his father), is kidnapped that Ms. Tree realizes she has no choice, and she throws off the new persona and steps back into the shoes she was made to fill – that of a female vigilante who fights for justice, and always wins! One thing I thought was a great choice for Beatty in this story (and I don’t know if it was his idea, or if Collins told him to do it), but I loved the fact that “reformed” Ms. Tree dressed so much differently – even wearing flower-print dresses! But when she goes back to her old self to rescue Mike, she once again dons that blue overcoat that give her such distinctive style! It makes for a nice visual aid to her change in character back and forth.

With only one more collection go to complete the reproduction of the entire run of Ms. Tree, I hope the sales on these collections have been such that Collins and Beatty will consider telling some more stories. With all of the controversies in the news today, they would literally have a plethora of topics to pick from to create some great tales! And who knows? Maybe they could even age the characters, so that Mike (her stepson) could be old enough to work along side her – what a story that would be! Any way you say it, we definitely need MORE MS. TREE!!!!!!

Rating: 10 old-fashioned dynamite bombs out of 10 for some truly dynamite story-telling, masterful twists and surprises, and some of the best artwork you will ever see in a comic! What more could you want?

When I read a review like this, two things come to mind: how wonderful! And, “Where were people like you when we were doing this title in the ‘80s and ‘90s”?

Terry Beatty and I began Ms. Tree as what we thought of as an exercise in coherence. Comic-book art was getting very complex and even impenetrable, and I wanted to return to the EC-style Johnny Craig school (derived from classic comic strips, chiefly by Milton Caniff) and Terry was wholeheartedly on board.

We’d been invited by Dean Mullaney to be part of his Eclipse magazine, which had a lot of top comics creators contributing new potential series. Also included in the mix were Terry and me. While Terry and I had done several projects together, we were only in this heady company because Dean was a Dick Tracy fan and I’d attracted some nice attention in the field when I took over the writing of that strip from creator Chester Gould in December 1977.

My basic concept was “Velda and Mike Hammer finally get married, and Hammer gets murdered on their wedding night and Velda takes over the PI agency…and seeks revenge.” I believe I pitched it off the top of my head when the surprise phone-call invitation came from Dean.

Another surprising thing happened after that: we were the dark-horse hit of the magazine and got spun off into our own comic book. Thanks to Dean, and later Dave Sim, Deni Loubert and Mike Gold, we continued through four publishers, ultimately DC. We had several movie options, and I did a little indie film, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market, based on a Ms. Tree prose story of mine, although we were in the midst of a movie option at the time and I had to change Ms. Tree’s name. But the character Brinke Stevens played was as close, to date, of Ms. Tree coming to life on screen. Brinke did a great job on our $10,000 (!) movie, which got national distribution (okay, Troma, but that counts).

The glowing review I share here does not reflect the critical response to Ms. Tree back in the day. A lot of folks, including some who liked our comic book series, thought we were crazy doing a crime/mystery comic book in a super-hero world. We probably were, but between me writing Dick Tracy (at the time) and my mystery novels, it made sense to us.

We did get our share of nice notices – we wouldn’t have survived so long if we hadn’t – but we were singled out for withering criticism from some, particularly the Fantagraphics crowd. That got nasty and rather acid on both sides, because Terry and I were both stupid enough to take Gary Groth and company on. It was a no-win situation, and a study of what a suicide note it is to respond to criticism. (Doing so is something I try desperately to avoid, but I still occasionally, misguidedly do. I should not. I hope at this age and stage I have finally learned that lesson.)

Terry Beatty and Max Allan Collins at San Diego Comic Con 1982 (with Cat Yronwode; photo by Alan Light)

Terry and I were a team for a long time. We did Wild Dog as a mini-series followed by a serialized run in Action Comics and one fat little one-shot. We put together a Johnny Dynamite mini-series (collected as a graphic novel) for Dark Horse. And finally I brought Terry into the Road to Perdition fold with the DC graphic novel, Return to Perdition.

During our team-up time, Terry and I had many failed projects, most of them having to do with pitching comic strips to my then-bosses at the Chicago Tribune Syndicate. Our “Comics Page” that we self-syndicated to weekly shoppers was a good idea whose time never came (it ran a struggling year or so).

We also pitched a retro version of Batman to DC that was rejected but (somewhat ironically) was close to what would soon be done on Batman: The Animated Series. I say somewhat ironically because Terry went on be one of the Eisner Award-winning artists on the comic book series inspired by that show. I also worked on Batman, too, mostly a disastrous year-long experience on the monthly comic, although my work on the syndicated comic strip (I was forced off by the Chicago Tribune Syndicate after the first story) and the graphic novel Batman: Child of Dreams (from Kia Asimiya’s manga) were better received by readers and, well, me.

Still, that Terry and I were both on Batman but never together is another unfortunate irony. We did get do Wild Dog for DC, which generated a character featured on the Arrow TV show (which I never bothered to watch) (and had to complain to get paid).

Another irony is that Terry and I both wound up doing something apart that we’d long tried to do together. When Dick Tracy artist Rick Fletcher passed away, I tried to get the Tribune syndicate to use Terry as my artist. They turned him down, despite samples that pleased me very much. And we suggested, and submitted samples (initially well-received), for a reboot of the Little Orphan Annie comic strip, taking advantage of the Broadway show’s success. We were ultimately turned down, but the great Leonard Starr was enlisted to do the re-boot we’d suggested.

So when “TL” above suggests Terry and I should do more Ms. Tree, the irony (there’s that word again) is that Terry is now too busy as he’s a successful writer/artist in the syndicated comic strip field. After a run on The Phantom Sunday page, Terry moved over to handling the Rex Morgan, MD, comic strip, where he has done and is doing a fine job.

Prior to that we’d kicked around reviving Ms. Tree. It was what held up the Titan archival reprint series of the original comics – we wanted to launch that reprint series with a new graphic novel. But that never came together, although I did some preliminary work.

The silver lining here is that Titan – thank you Nick Landau and Vivian Cheung – has collected the more-or-less complete Ms. Tree in six beautifully produced volumes, in all their color and two-color glory (a long run of Ms. Tree employed one color in various shades, to create a noir feel…and save money). I say “more or less” because a few odds-and-ends haven’t been gathered in these books, and those leftovers weren’t sufficient for another volume to be produced.

I haven’t talked about it here, at least not very much, but getting the complete run gathered in archival volumes, with Terry very much supervising, has been a goal I’ve long hoped Ms. Tree could reach. Terry and I put a great deal of hard work and love for the genre into Ms. Tree, for over a decade, and now it exists in more enduring format.

I will add that someone recently wrote in to my pal Robert Meyer Burnett on his fine YouTube show, Robservations, that someone should do a graphic-novel version of our Nathan Heller audio series, True Noir (based on Heller’s debut, True Detective. The talent suggested for the job (not by Rob!) were current crime-comics favorites, like Ed Brubaker. Nothing against Ed, but I think I could put any interested publisher in touch the (wait for it) writer of a fairly well-regarded graphic novel, Road to Perdition.

M.A.C.

Completing “Completing Mickey Spillane”

Before I get into the topic of the day, let me express my concern and support for my friends in the Los Angeles area over the cataclysmic fires that have destroyed so much. My friend Robert Meyer Burnett, who at this writing is safe, has spoken eloquently on his YouTube channel (see his recent Observations) about the disaster and its impact. To me, and to many, Los Angeles is the capitol city of entertainment present and past, and thinking about not just the homes and businesses, but landmark structures, that have been lost is staggering, as are the terrible losses to the populace.

I wish I didn’t hate the phrase “our hearts and prayers go out” so much, since those words are just a reflexive go-to in so many situations; but I wish I had better words to replace them.

* * *

Last week I discussed collaboration here, but I did not mention the most unusual and important collaboration I’ve been half of.

I would think most people who stop by here are well-aware of my love for Mickey Spillane the man and Mickey Spillane the writer (he hated “author”).

It has been the greatest privilege, the high honor, of my career for Mickey to have entrusted me with completing various works-in-progress and novels-in-consideration of his to fruition. The thirteen Mike Hammer novels Mickey wrote have been expanded by fourteen more novels by Spillane/Collins. Seeing my name on a book jacket next to him remains something I can barely compute.

I’ve told this story many times, so I’ll keep it brief. Mickey, who was dying of pancreatic cancer, called me and asked me if I’d complete for him The Goliath Bone, designed to be his last Mike Hammer, should he not be able to do so. I of course said I would, if that became necessary. Shortly after, he instructed his wife Jane to conduct “a treasure hunt” in his three offices at his home in South Carolina and turn everything she found over to me.

That treasure hunt, a few days after Mickey’s funeral, was conducted not just by Jane but by Barb and me. Stacks of manuscript were assembled on the Spillane dining room table, and the three of us began to sort.

Among the manuscripts and other typescript and occasional hand-written material were half a dozen substantial Hammer manuscripts – eighty to one-hundred double-spaced pages each, as well as two non-Hammer novels well in progress, Dead Street and The Consummata (the sequel to his The Delta Factor). Additionally, the completed screenplay of The Saga of Caleb York, never produced, became a novel, The Legend of Caleb York, followed by five more York novels signed Spillane and Collins, the only books I shared with Mickey’s byline that he didn’t write some of, though they were drawn from material in the unproduced screenplay. I also turned his screenplay The Menace into a novel.

The play Encore for Murder – which appeared as a Stacy Keach full-cast audio drama – later performed in Owensboro, Kentucky; Clearwater Florida; and my home of Muscatine, Iowa – was based on a Spillane synopsis. I had planned to write a novel version but that never happened. Encore does exist, with Gary Sandy as Hammer, as a special feature on the Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane blu-ray and as a freestanding DVD. Gary played Hammer in the Owensboro and Clearwater productions, as well.

Another screenplay, The Green Woman, with a science-fiction/fantasy aspect, awaits novelization, if time and a market present themselves. A number of Spillane fragments, some fairly substantial, may one day serve for novels or short stories. But the demand will have to be there.

In Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction, the biography that James L. Traylor and I wrote about Mickey, we included supplementary material at the end of the book. My essay “Completing Mickey Spillane” discussed each of the Spillane/Collins Hammer novels and how I approached them in the writing.

Again, there were six substantial manuscripts, literally novels in progress. Then came a number of shorter but somewhat substantial fragments in varying shape, usually a chapter or two or three, and sometimes endings, and in some instances character and plot notes. The last three novels I wrote that were discussed in “Completing Mickey Spillane” came from (unproduced) synopses Mickey did for the Stacy Keach television series (Murder, My Love and Masquerade for Murder) and Kill Me, Darling was developed from several radio and television scripts (unproduced versions of the same otherwise unpublished story).

The remaining two Hammer novels, which had not been completed at the time Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction was published, are Dig Two Graves and Baby, It’s Murder, the former developed from a couple of chapters that appeared to be a few chapters into the story – Mickey’s beginning was not among his papers.

Hardcover:
E-Book:

Which brings us to the final Mike Hammer novel of the canon, Baby, It’s Murder, to be published on March 4, 2025 (a day before my 77th birthday). It derives from a two-chapter fragment in Mickey’s files. I made the story a flashback, as I needed…or at least wanted…to give the series some finality. Let’s just say the wraparound chapters (one fore, one aft) take place at a funeral.

Those of you who have followed these books, and have not dismissed them as “continuations,” as some have despite the actual Spillane content they include, I give my deepest thanks. If you haven’t read them, or read the first few and drifted away, I will say only that these are all books of which I am very proud. My greatest thanks goes to Mickey. And to Jane.

If you are interested in these books, I would suggest snagging them soon. The last few books have had fairly short print runs, and maybe half a dozen entries ago, Titan stopped publishing trade paperback reprints of the Spillane/Collins titles.

Are these the last Mike Hammer books? Or anyway the last Mike Hammer books that would contain real Spillane material? Possibly. At my age, how many projects I have ahead of me is unknown. I still have two Hammer fragments I did not complete…yet. They may become short stories, or they may become novels, if the long-promised Mike Hammer film from Skydance becomes a reality.

There is one manuscript waiting for a publisher (though I haven’t approached any as yet). Mickey wrote a draft of a Mike Danger science-fiction novel; my draft has never been completed. Mickey and I discussed the possibility that if the Miramax movie option didn’t come to fruition (and it’s long since passed) we might convert it into a Hammer.

Danger, of course, was Mickey’s original name for Hammer (when he was prepping to do it as a comic book in the late ‘40s). He and I revived it for a comic book company, Big Entertainment, where it had a three-year run (and scored a contract with the Weinsteins). The science fiction aspect of the story has Danger (now Hammer) being sent into the future. It’s a kind of Spillane take on the H.G. Wells Time Machine.

If I can find the right market, that one will be out there as a non-canonical Hammer. Mickey had an idea for a sequel, too, also with an s-f aspect.

If you want to know the many reasons for this famous, bestselling writer (never author!) leaving so many manuscripts unfinished, it’s all spelled out in Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction. For those you waiting for the trade paperback of that one, none is currently scheduled, though the book is staying in print.

One final fun fact: my grandmother’s maiden name was Spellman. And Spillane and Spellman are apparently different versions of the same name.

* * *

This week I recorded the rest of the True Noir “History Behind the Mystery” episodes. If you have signed up for True Noir, now’s the time: go to truenoir.co.

And here’s the second “History Behind the Mystery.”

* * *

Here’s an article on Tom Hanks and his “comic book movie” (Road to Perdition).

M.A.C.

Movies Vs. Books and Collaboration

I know I said I wouldn’t be talking about Blue Christmas again till next holiday season, but apparently I lied. My defense is that I hadn’t seen the nice review we got from one of my favorite magazines, Videoscope, written by editor Nancy Naglin herself. It’s on the stands now.

Nancy really seems to “get” our little movie, and it’s another of the overwhelmingly favorable reviews Blue Christmas has received, despite a handful of lumps of coal in our stocking. I should (or anyway will) mention that her observation of there being a sentimental aspect to the film is valid and whether that’s a bad or good thing reflects the way mileage can vary (as they say) among audience members. I like to think of it as “sentiment,” though, and not “sentimentality.”

I have a vivid memory of my late filmmaking friend Steve Henke commenting to the effect of, “Max does something wonderfully nasty overall and then ends with something sentimental and there’s nothing that can be done about it.”

Steve was a grizzled, gruff but fantastic collaborator who I once had to bail out of jail while a production was going. At risk of insulting his memory by getting sentimental, I will say his absence from the planet is one of the things that kept me from getting back into indie filmmaking for close to twenty years. Another collaborator I miss to a painful degree is actor Mike Cornelison, who starred in Mommy, Mommy’s Day, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market, and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life, and who narrated both Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop and Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane.

The recent (and not officially released as yet) Death By Fruitcake is the only movie I’ve made recently that did not include any veterans from those earlier indie days. With the exception of my close pal and collaborator Phil Dingeldein, who was d.p. on Blue Christmas, the same was true of that production. (A notable exception on Fruitcake is the great Paula Sands, who appeared as herself in Mommy’s Day and as Vivian Borne in Fruitcake.)

There’s a moment in Mommy when Mrs. Sterling, who’s been committing murders, is about to book it out of town with her daughter Jessica Ann when the little girl complains about having to leave all her friends behind. To which Mommy replies, “You’ll make wonderful new friends, dear.”

And that’s true of both Blue Christmas and Death By Fruitcake (and Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder), which added a wonderful new raft of collaborators to my life, with a special nod to the versatile d.p./editor/producer Chad Bishop.

Collaboration has been an important part of my professional writing career, although at the heart of that career was my desire to control my work, to be in charge. I feared – with justification – that my personality and approach made taking the tempting path to Hollywood unwise. I made the decision to stay put – in Iowa – and just write my stories.

Not that writing fiction for a living doesn’t come with interference, but it’s minimal compared to what happens in the world of movies and TV. Wrestling with an editor or copy editor now and then is nothing compared to the problems Hollywood presents – the way money controls your ability to tell a story, and the crap you have to put up with from those who provide that money; the way directors can rewrite and screw up a script; the many uncontrollable factors including miscasting and all the other slings and arrows of the craft; and most of all the difficulty of getting anything produced.

I watched one of the greatest mystery writers who ever lived, Donald E. Westlake, who won an Academy Award for the screenplay of The Grifters, write seemingly countless scripts that generated option money but ultimately went into a drawer.

Throughout even a moderately successful career like mine you are fairly sure that any novel you write, unless you really miss the mark, can find a publisher.

And yet.

Collaboration is something I instinctively seek out. For years I wrote strictly alone, but at the same time I was playing music in my rock ‘n’ roll bands The Daybreakers and Crusin’, which were overflowing with talented collaborators, a list too long to get into. We got into the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame with both bands, and had a national record that, however absurd, became something of a cult classic. Those years of musical collaboration – 1966 through 2024 – were concurrent with my fiction-writing career.

The loneliness of telling lies for fun and profit, as Lawrence Block put it, was further minimized by my collaborations on the Dick Tracy comic strip with Rick Fletcher and Dick Locher. Those collaborations had some ups and downs, but my long partnership with cartoonist Terry Beatty, co-creator of Ms. Tree and Wild Dog, among much else, proved particularly rewarding.

The same can be said of Matthew V. Clemens, with whom I wrote something like thirty novels, including (but not limited to) the bestseller Supreme Justice and its two sequels, plus our very successful series of CSI tie-in novels.

During the Covid lockdown I got the opportunity to collaborate with an SCTV favorite of mine, Dave Thomas, on a novel you may not have read (but should): The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton. This one seems little known but I’m really, really proud of it. It’s a crime thriller with a science-fiction slant.

Most recently I have collaborated with Robert Meyer Burnett on True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, the ten-episode fully immersive audio production based on the first Nate Heller novel, True Detective. Rob directed an incredible cast incredibly well and this is also something I’m proud of. We haven’t got a Nathan Heller movie yet – Road to Perdition came close – but what Rob has created from my script is as good an example of effective collaboration as I can think of.

If any collaboration stands out, however, it has to be the one with my wife Barbara Collins – numerous short stories, a novella, two novels, and the Antiques series (aka The Trash ‘n’ Treasures mysteries), which are heading into their twentieth installment…there are more novels in that series than either Nate Heller or Quarry. To witness my smart, beautiful wife develop into a terrific writer is something I have experienced with great pride, often sitting on the sidelines, impressed. (And later this year I hope you’ll see just how well our Brandy and Vivian Borne have been transferred to the screen.)

Filmmaking is a special sort of collaboration, however, and on the indie level you don’t have the Hollywood baggage. It’s always been like going to summer camp for me (and I loved going to summer camp). I am well-aware that my skills as a filmmaker fall far less of what I like to think of as my mastery of fiction-writing, or even my years of playing rock ‘n’ roll for fun and money.

Being a competent film director, much less a good or great one, is one of the hardest trades that narrative storytelling can offer. I had no ambitions to be a film director – none. Never occurred to me. I wanted to write movies and have wonderful directors bring them to life. It’s happened now and then – Sam Mendes ain’t no slouch.

But mostly it doesn’t. Mostly scripts get written and wind up in a drawer, even if you’re Don Westlake…or Mickey Spillane, who had his heart broken by Hollywood and who died with several unproduced scripts among his papers (The Menace is a novel I fashioned from one of ‘em).

I became a director by necessity, when I had to take over Mommy after two weeks of a four-week shoot, which including reshooting much of what went before. When I completed the movie, worried that I hadn’t known what the hell I was doing, I binged on Alfred Hitchcock movies. Hitchcock is probably the greatest narrative storyteller in motion picture history. I kept watching those movies and being relieved when I saw Hitch doing things similar to what I had done (not talking about content here, but putting pieces of film together into an effective narrative – editing well, like in a novel but completely different).

I am well aware that I started too late to reach in film the level that my fiction-writing has, I think, achieved – writing fiction is a craft I started working at learning when I was in junior high and high school, sending novels to publishers who (thank God) kicked them back to me.

But I love movies as much as I love novels, in some ways more, and they ultimately yanked me in, like Michael Corleone in Godfather 3 (nobody seems to like that movie but everybody remembers that line, possibly second only to “An offer you can’t refuse” in the original film).

Filmmaking has an irresistible pull for me and many other sorry souls. Stephen King said it best, although I’m paraphrasing: “Movies are the most expensive, least efficient way of telling a story; but, unfortunately, also the coolest.”

Am I done with indie filmmaking? I’m still thinking, talking, hoping (Barb has had her fill). Several things are cooking, but the bigger ones probably need a director younger than me. If they stick to the script, I’ll be fine with that.

Which is the problem. My first produced script, The Expert, had a star who seemed to have read the script once and then tried to remember it, and a director who either walked off or was fired (I’ve never found out which) from the production late in the game. The Last Lullaby had a “co-writer” foisted on me who I never met and who rewrote my screenplay, though I did provide revisions that brought it back closer to what I had in mind. Still. I did one script for the Quarry series that got disassembled and spread between two episodes, stitched together like the Frankenstein Monster and about as attractive.

That kind of collaboration? I can do without.

And it’s why I made two micro-budget movies on my own terms.

* * *

Here’s a smart review of the sixth (and final) Titan collection of Ms. Tree.

This is a nice if brief YouTube piece on the writing of Road to Perdition, both graphic novel and film. It answers the question of who wrote which, but is unaware that a playwright friend of director Sam Mendes from the UK did an uncredited rewrite.

Here’s another piece on the film of Road to Perdition focusing on Tom Hanks (and somewhat on Daniel Craig).

The day this appears I will be working with Phil Dingedein at dphilms in Rock Island shooting the final episodes of History Behind the Mystery, each of which drops on YouTube in tandem with the episodes of True Noir.

M.A.C.

Happy 2025

This will be brief, but I want to acknowledge a few of the people who have made 2024 so rewarding for me.

First, Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime continues to give me and Nate Heller and Quarry a showcase for our wares.

Second, the whole group at Titan Books, including Nick Landau, Vivian Chung and Andrew Sumner – these three made the continuation of Mickey’s Mike Hammer novels, all based on material from Mick’s files, with Jane Spillane’s blessing, a reality, right up to the coming year’s Baby, It’s Murder. That whole bunch, with Charles Ardai added in, and my agent Dominick Abel, made my forthcoming Return of the Maltese Falcon (a year from now) possible.

Third, my producer on Death by Fruitcake, who also shot and edited the feature film, Chad Bishop. A one-stop-shopping moviemaker, Chad was also instrumental in getting Blue Christmas out there.

Fourth, the cast of Death by Fruitcake, every one of ‘em, but a special shout-out to our leads, Paula Sands, Alisabeth Von Presley and Rob Merritt. These three brought the principal players of the Antiques mystery series (by “Barbara Allan”) to credible, incredible life.

Fifth, the production manager and exec producer on Death by Fruitcake, who made the entire thing possible and even kept me alive – the love of my life, Barbara Collins.

Sixth, the incredible Robert Meyer Burnett and a phenomenal name cast for turning my script, based on True Detective, into the ten-part, immersive audio drama, True Noir: The Assassination of Mayor Cermak (available at truenoir.co). Big thanks also to producers Mike Bawden, Christine Sheeks and my longtime collaborator, Phil Dingeldein, who is directing and producing our History Behind the Mystery video series that accompanies each episode of True Noir.

Seventh, the members of my band Crusin’ (established 1974!) – Bill Anson, Scott Anson and Steve Kundel. We are now officially defunct, but you never know – a reunion could happen.

Eighth, my son Nathan who runs this website and posts these blog/Updates and does a fantastic job.

Ninth, thank you to everyone who reviewed Blue Christmas, even those of you (very much in the minority) who gave us bad reviews. All of you helped us get the word out that our little Christmas noir existed. Positive Amazon reviews still appreciated.

I know I have left people out. I did the best I could with my ancient brain. My apologies.

This year-end wrap-up ends a productive, exhausting 2024. A lot is coming up, including the last Mike Hammer novel and the 50th anniversary of Quarry, not to mention a certain Sam Spade book. We’ll be promoting Death By Fruitcake, entering a few film festivals and competitions, and we’re discussing a Quad Cities premiere with the Last Picture House in Davenport. I will be starting my draft of Antiques Round-up in January – Barb is wrapping her draft up now. And God willin’ and the crick don’t rise, we’ll be doing at least one more of the Antiques novels. A lot else is in discussion, but we’ll wait till 2025 to get deeper into any of that.

People always ask me one of two questions – are you still writing? The answer: Yes, nobody sends money to my house if I don’t. The other question is, why at your age are you working so hard on so many projects? Because at my age, the clock is not my friend.

But all of you are.

M.A.C.