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

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

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

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

And at Crime Reads.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here Dave and I are on Sci-Fi Talk.

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

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

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

M.A.C.

Tags: Interviews, Mickey Spillane, Movie Reviews, Podcasts, The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton