LADY, GO DIE!, last year’s Mike Hammer, has been nominated for the Scribe Award presented by the International Association of Media and Tie-in Writers. As you may recall, KISS HER GOODBYE won this award last year.
It’s a tough category this year, with science-fiction/fantasy and mystery bundled together, and more submissions in a single category than ever before in the organization’s history. Mystery and other “general” fiction will be broken back out into their own category next year. It may be a cliche to say it’s an honor just to be nominated, but with competition like this, it’s the truth.
Here is the organization’s press release, which anyone out there is welcome to cut and paste into their own blog or web site.
The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers is pleased to announce the Scribe Award nominees for 2013.
Acknowledging excellence in this very specific skill, IAMTW’s Scribe Awards deal exclusively with licensed works that tie in with other media such as television, movies, gaming, or comic books. They include original works set in established universes, and adaptations of stories
that have appeared in other formats and cross all genres. Tie-in works run the gamut from westerns to mysteries to procedurals, from science fiction to fantasy to horror, from action and adventure to superheroes. Gunsmoke, Murder She Wrote, CSI, Star Trek, Star Wars, Shadowrun, Resident Evil, James Bond, Iron Man – these represent just a few.
The Scribe Awards are presented at ComicCon San Diego.
IAMTW congratulates the following nominees:
ORIGINAL NOVEL
Darksiders: The Abomination Vault Ari Marmell
Pathfinder: City of the Fallen Sky Tim Pratt
Mike Hammer: Lady, Go Die! Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins
Star Trek: The Persistence of Memory David Mack
Star Trek: Rings of Time Greg Cox
Tannhäuser: Rising Sun, Falling Shadows Robert Jeschonek
Dungeons and Dragons Online: Skein of Shadows Marsheila Rockwell
ADAPTED NOVEL
Poptropica Astroknights Island Tracey West
Clockwork Angels Kevin Anderson
Batman: The Dark Knight Legend Stacia Deutsch
Batman: The Dark Knight Rises Greg Cox
AUDIO
Dark Shadows: Dress Me in Dark Dreams Marty Ross
Dark Shadows: The Eternal Actress Nev Fountain
Doctor Who Companion Chronicles: Project Nirvana Cavan Scott/Mark Wright
My draft of ANTIQUES A GO GO will be completed this week. I have been “in the bunker” (as we say around here), working for two weeks with only one day off. I had intended to take a day off this weekend, but we ran into a plot hole that needed patching, which had a domino effect that Barb and I had to chase through the entire manuscript. The good news is that it improved the book, specifically its mystery aspect.
Barb’s work on the novel has been stellar, from providing a very good 200-page-plus rough draft to packets of information on every New York/New Jersey aspect of the story (it takes place at a comic con in Manhattan with a detour to New Jersey and a strangely familiar strip joint called the Badda-Boom). Taking Brandy and Mother out of Serenity has been tricky and frankly hard, but I think it’s going to be rewarding.
With any luck, the book will go go to our editor in New York around Thursday – assuming our final read-through doesn’t reveal another nasty plot hole that will send the Barbara Allan road crew out with shovels and hot asphalt.
Barb and I did take time off to see 42, the Jackie Robinson bio-pic (we can’t stay away from our new local theater). We almost didn’t go because the previews made us feel like we already knew the story, and that every beat of it was going to be predictable. Well, the latter was sort of true, but the execution of the film, the sharp dialogue, the strong characterization, and the effective acting (Harrison Ford does well in his first character role as pioneering baseball owner Branch Rickey) make this one you should see. There is a majestic score that works too hard at telling us what to feel, but that may be designed to take the edge of the harshness of what Robinson and his wife were put through. The period detail is excellent (although there is the occasional dialogue slip – “We’re on the same page” is not a late ‘40s expression). Small carps. Big rewards. Don’t skip this one.
The Quarry Cinemax pilot continues to get widespread Net coverage, but I won’t bother you with links to any of it, because it’s all been covered before.
But here’s a really nice, actually wonderful review of SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT.
And a cool SEDUCTION review at the wonderfully named Trash Mutant.
Yet another SEDUCTION review here.
Here’s a belated A KILLING IN COMICS review, a tad on the patronizing side but okay.
And here’s a brief but very nice tribute to Mickey Spillane.
M.A.C.
Tags: A Killing In Comics, Antiques A Go Go, Awards, Jack and Maggie Starr, Kiss Her Goodbye, Lady Go Die, Mike Hammer, Movie Reviews, Reviews, Seduction of the Innocent book, Spillane, Trash 'n' Treasures
Still in a holding pattern, awaiting the group release of all your new stuff (why does it always happen that way – nothing for almost a year, and then a gang of books all at once? I’ve always wondered …).
Anyhow, I did get to see 42 this past weekend, and to use the cliche, we’re “on the same page” with this one.
Because I still retain my vast fund of baseball lore (well, half-vast, anyway), I went with one eye set to spot anything that Brian Helgeland got wrong, at least on the historical level.
Helgeland didn’t include a bibliography in the credits, but I’d read enough of the histories and memoirs by various of the participants to be able to spot where he did much of his research.
As an example, the scene where Leo Durocher reads out the Dodgers in the hotel kitchen comes almost verbatim from Durocher’s autobiography – and I’ll say here in passing that Chris Meloni surprised me pleasantly as Leo (has there ever a biopic spin-off?).
On the other hand, there was John McGinley as Red Barber: he had the voice OK, but he was all wrong physically – Barber was a small, fiery man.
The detail work was pretty good – wonks like me would find little to quibble about (Branch Rickey and Burt Shotton, friends since the turn of the century, called each other “Rick” and “Barney”, and that’s pretty much all I was able to spot wrong).
(And I got that info from Harold Parrott’s book, which had to been one of Helgeland’s other sources , and I’m really laying it on thick here, aren’t I?)
I know that I should be sending this to Roger Ebert’s newly reconfigured site, which is set up now to take comments on reviews.
Theoretically.
But the new site uses DISQUS for its comments, and that system I just can’t get to work properly – or improperly, for that matter.
Putting it another way, DISQUS suqs.
Excuse this last; I had to share this (or dump it, if you will) on someone, and you’re the one who brought up 42.
Best of luck with the Scribe award, and come back soon to C&S (or anywhere in Chicago, comes to that).
It’s a really good movie and I agree about Durocher. I liked McGinley because (as scripted anyway) he caught the wacky poetry that could just flow out of the mouths of the great sportscasters of that era. I’ve made it clear here I’m no sports fan, but I do have a weakness for sports movies and TV (FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS remains in my upper echelon of series), and it’s surprising how much I know about baseball in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, since I spent my childhood saying I hated it. But keep in mind I also collected baseball cards…because the other alternative was marbles. Barb and I discussed that the sports stars of that mid-20th Century period, particularly baseball stars, got into the popular culture and the mass awareness in a way that no longer exists.
We can add on to your point about sports stars and the “popular culture” – by simply noting that there wasn’t anywhere nearly as much of that then as now.
Go back to the time periods where you set your novels: the ’20s, the ’30s, the ’40s, the, ’50s.
The farther back we go, the harder it was to become famous.
Black-and-white photos in the papers.
A scratchy voice on the radio.
A newsreel at the local theater once a week.
In those times, fame was a long time in coming, and had to be worked on and polished.
There was also the matter of being local: you started out in your home town, and if you were lucky, your fame would spread maybe statewide, than regional, and if you were really good, coast-to-coast – and it never happened “overnight”.
About baseball cards: that’s one of the places where I learned reading – and also geography (the various cities where the teams played) – and also integration (my first year was 1955, and there were so many black faces on those cards, as big and smiling as as the white ones – no difference at all that 5-year-old me could tell).
Do you ever wonder what the past events you write about would have been like if the 24/7 news cycle had been in existence in those days?
How would Capone or Dillinger (or for that matter Eliot Ness) have fared on Cable News?
How would the Lindbergh kidnaping been handled on the Internet?
Just thinking about these things is giving me a headache, so I’ll give it up for now.
Back with more later (he threatened).
Max, congratulations on the nomination. My feelings about Mike Hammer have been very mixed, but you have helped me to understand his popularity and accept it, even though I don’t always like him that much…
… which is why when I read LADY, GO DIE!, I was surprised with just how much I loved the book. It was tough and gritty, with plenty of fun action and some terrific characters. I particularly liked Big Steve, and was cheering Mike all the way through his battles with the corrupt cops. When I did my year-end review of the “new” books I read in 2012, I ended up putting it in the very top tier. So all in all, in my opinion the nomination is very well deserved!