Archive for November, 2009

Mike Hammer Under Cover

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

I’ve mentioned in previous updates how pleased I am with THE LITTLE DEATH, the MIKE HAMMER audio novel I wrote for producer Carl Amari, which Blackstone will be issuing momentarily (Amazon lists it as already in print, but I haven’t seen a copy yet).

As you may recall, I got to go to Chicago and watch Stacy Keach and a gifted cast (including Second City veteran Tim Kazurinsky) bring my script to audio life. This is the second volume of THE NEW ADVENTURES OF MIKE HAMMER, but I didn’t write the first (which was two short stories as opposed to one novel). I based it on material Mickey had prepared in the fifties for both a radio version and a television one; I had adapted this during Mickey’s lifetime into the short story “The Night I Died.” And about ten years ago, I had developed it as a screenplay for Mickey and his longtime partner, Jay Bernstein, for a TV or possible theatrical movie. But a film never happened.

Now it’s a reality, as an audio “movie,” and Carl and Stacy really hit the ball out of the park. Anybody with even the slightest interest in either Mickey’s work or mine will love this. Interestingly, it marks the first time Stacy has ever played Hammer in a piece directly derived from a Spillane story.

There was a nice response from my behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the cover of the forthcoming Spillane/Collins HAMMER novel, THE BIG BANG. So I thought you might enjoy seeing the several versions of the audio cover.

Here was the first try from Blackstone’s terrific art department:

The Little Death First Revision
Image copyright 2009, Blackstone Audio

I liked this pretty well, but Stacy Keach objected to using his image so directly. He felt it made this brand-new project look like some kind of re-release of his HAMMER material from several decades ago. Carl and I agreed, and so the artist at Blackstone listened to various suggestions from all of us. I sent along attachments of the early HAMMER paperbacks, which never really showed Hammer dead-on, creating a man of mystery.

The Little Death Second Revision
Image copyright 2009, Blackstone Audio

Everybody liked this better, but Stacy (and all of us) felt Hammer could use with a better-looking “babe.” Not that this model was unattractive, but Stacy wittily pointed out that she belonged on a Jane Austen cover, not Mickey Spillane. Also, a bearded, cigar-smoking Hammer was a no go—we asked that the mustache be kept (this is the Keach HAMMER, after all) and the cigar go away, Mike being strictly a Luckies kind of guy. The final version that the artist came up is terrific.

The Little Death Third Revision
Image copyright 2009, Blackstone Audio

We had a nice turn-out at Mystery Cat Books in Cedar Rapids, despite being up against an Iowa Hawkeyes game (tough competition in this part of the world). We dined with Ed and Carol Gorman and had a great time, as Ed and I tried to top each other’s publishing horror stories.

Work continues on the graphic novel RETURN TO PERDITION, and Terry Beatty has turned in his first, finished pages—and they are knockouts. I predict this will be our best work together, at least until next time.

Quarry continues to attract fine reviews. Rod Lott at Bookgasm used his knowledge of the Quarry novels to write a particularly insightful review of THE LAST LULLABY.

And another knowledgeable Quarry fan, crime novelist Tom Piccirilli, has a Quarry-centric interview up at his blog that you may get a kick out of.

Happy Thanksgiving! For those of you in Eastern Iowa, we’ll see you at Plamor Lanes on Saturday night for our first Crusin’ gig at this venue.

M.A.C.

Quarry Racking ‘Em Up

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

Barb and I are signing at Mystery Cat Books this Saturday (details above). We’ll have both QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE and ANTIQUES FLEE MARKET available, and many rare out-of-print M.A.C. items will be on hand, as well. It’s possible Ed Gorman may drop by, which provides a sighting opportunity second only to Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.

More wonderful reviews are coming in, some for QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE, others for the Quarry movie, The Last Lullaby.

Craig Clarke, long a booster of my work and a knowledgeable Quarry fan, provides a really smart, insightful review at his Somebody Dies website.

And writer Ron Fortier (he collaborates with Gary Kato on the fun comic Mr. Jigsaw — Gary assisted Terry Beatty on Ms. Tree back in the day) has provided another sharp-eyed review of The Last Lullaby.

And the Author Magazine website has posted a great review of QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE.

Battle Royale

Coming out this week from Viz is the novel BATTLE ROYALE, the wonderfully fried modern classic that was the basis of the cult film. The film is very well-known for one too controversial to ever get traditional American DVD distribution — high school kids on an island play Survivor with lethal weapons, winner take all. I wrote an introduction for this edition (tying it to the original Death Race 2000), and Nathan translated an afterword by Koushun Takami, the author of the novel, plus an interview with Kinji Fukasaku, the director of the film. (Nathan may be doing a major translation project for Viz very soon — stay tuned for a much more detailed announcement.)

We are seeing the paperback of ANTIQUES FLEE MARKET, with its festive new Christmas cover, displayed face-out at the big chain stores, sometimes in the mystery section, sometimes with Christmas-themed books. The perfect stocking stuffer. Barb continues to work on her draft of ANTIQUES KNOCK-OFF (ANTIQUES BIZARRE will be out in the Spring).

Matt Clemens and I have been working on the synopsis for the second novel in the series that begins with YOU CAN’T STOP ME. After a false start on a different idea, Matt and I (at Bouchercon in Indianapolis) pitched editor Michaela Hamilton of Kensington what we all think is a really strong, wild idea that she liked…and which I will not share with you here. I’ll say, though, that this series attempts to take the approach Matt and I developed for the CSI, BONES and CRIMINAL MINDS novels into something of our own that has an element of social satire (having to do largely with reality TV) that serial killer novels often lack.

People are constantly asking me about the film version of ROAD TO PURGATORY, and I can only say that it remains very much alive, and I hope to have news for you soon. In the meantime, I am working on the graphic novel conclusion to the saga, RETURN TO PERDITION, doing my best to stay out in front of artist Terry Beatty.

M.A.C.

Quarry Keeps Coming

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

The QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE reviews kept coming in. Here is a particularly insightful one, I think, from old pro Mel Odom’s excellent Bookhound site.

And here’s a great new review of the Quarry film, The Last Lullaby.

If you haven’t gone to www.thelastlullaby.com to buy your copy of the limited edition DVD, do so at once.

In the meantime, here’s a couple of upcoming events here in Eastern Iowa:

On Saturday, November 21, Barb and I will be doing a signing in support of the mass-market paperback reprint of ANTIQUES FLEE MARKET and the new Hard Case Crime title QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE at Mystery Cat Books in Cedar Rapids.

It’s a lovely used bookshop, cozy in the best sense with lots of first editions and cool collectible vintage paperbacks, and few bookstores have a better stock of my novels. The address is 112 32nd Street Drive, Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52402. 2 to 4 pm.

On Saturday, November 28, Crusin’ will be performing at the Bar (actually a nice little club) at PlaMor Lanes in Muscatine from 8 pm to midnight. 1411 Grandview Avenue, Muscatine, Iowa 52761

Nathan has been visiting for a week now and will go back to St. Louis tomorrow. He’s mostly been burrowed in working on translation jobs, but we’ve had some fun — notably Saturday night, taking in the live performance of the Broken Lizard comedy troupe at the lovely Englert Theater in downtown Iowa City. These are the hilarious guys responsible for the films SUPERTROOPERS, CLUB DREAD, BEERFEST and the upcoming SLAMMIN’ SALMON. They interspersed stand-up with sketch comedy and audience-participation improv, and had a typically drunk Iowa City college crowd in the palms of their hands. We met them afterward and they were friendly and easygoing, very approachable.

Nate and I also have been working our way through a five-film Criterion DVD boxed set of Japanese noir in preparation for my next Asian Cult Cinema column.

I am still recovering from the intensity of writing the Nathan Heller novel in record time, but did manage to get the research done for the next fifty pages or so of RETURN TO PERDITION.

M.A.C.

Quarry on a Roll

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Antiques Flee Market

Hey, don’t forget to pick up a copy of ANTIQUES FLEE MARKET out in paperback this week — by Barbara Allan (that’s Mr. and Mrs. Collins to you) — the winner of the Romantic Times Award for Best Humorous Mystery of the Year! Barb and I are so happy with the new, more whimsical cover-art approach Kensington has taken for this reprint, and for the forthcoming ANTIQUES BIZARRE.

The positive reviews for QUARRY IN THE MIDDLE continued last week, and I was honored to have Jeff Pierce at January Magazine (one of the best fiction news and review sites on the web) choose the book as his pick of the week.

Mostlyfiction provided a great review with a Collins reading list (a pretty good one, though omitting any movie and TV tie-ins, as well as a few random titles, like BUTCHER’S DOZEN and MURDER BY THE NUMBERS in the Eliot Ness series).

They also ran a Quarry-centric interview with me.

It’s really gratifying to have such web attention for Quarry, now that mainstream media sources for reviewing have dried up so dramatically. When THE LAST QUARRY came out, and DEAD STREET too for that matter, the books landed reviews (1, 2) in ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY. That seems a thing of the past, with EW’s book review section pared back. And of course lots of newspapers have dropped local reviewers in favor a handful of nationally distributed ones.

Quarry in the Middle

That makes web sites like the ones you’ve seen me link to recently vitally important for the future of books. Word of mouth is important, too.

A major reason I decided to write originals for Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime — as opposed to just letting him reprint the original Nolan and Quarry novels (my first Hard Case Crime book was TWO FOR THE MONEY, reprinting the first two Nolans, BAIT MONEY and BLOOD MONEY) — is that I wanted a new generation of readers to get to know my work. In reprint, I was honored to be among Westlake, Block, Erle Stanley Gardner and other masters of the medium; but I felt it was more important to be seen and read in the company of the new breed of noir writers, like Jason Starr and Christina Faust. By doing originals for Charles, I am part of the new wave, and not consigned to oldie-but-goodie programming.

I have not been terribly productive this past week. I am still decompressing from writing the new Heller, BYE BYE, BABY in under two months (not counting month upon month of research, of course — still a personal record, though). This week I will get back to RETURN TO PERDITION, the graphic novel finale of the PERDITION saga.

My son and your trusty webmaster Nate Collins is home for a visit, but he is spending a lot of his time working on two Japanese-to-English free-lance translation gigs that came in on top of each other, and he may also be doing some mystery stories in translation for a very famous American magazine. More on that later. In the meantime, when we are not working (Barb is writing her draft of ANTIQUES KNOCK-OFF), we’ll be having some fun, taking in movies (ASTRO BOY was lots of fun), watching/listening to DVDs with Riff Trax (TRANSFORMERS II was a riot but the length and stupidity of it wore us and the Riffers down), and going to see the great comedy group Broken Lizard next weekend. Nate and I watched the fun Sam Raimi horror film DRAG ME TO HELL over Halloween weekend, and Barb and I watched the excellent woven-anthology film TRICK ’R’ TREAT, which inexplicably was shelved by Warner Bros and went straight to video. Probably the best horror film of the last five years, and disheartening to think that studio execs found it less than worthy of wide release.

M.A.C.