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.
