The Friday, March 31 film premiere of Encore for Murder has been postponed due to inclement weather. The new date has tentatively been set for May 5, but we’ll make a proper post when we have more confirmed.
The Friday, March 31 film premiere of Encore for Murder has been postponed due to inclement weather. The new date has tentatively been set for May 5, but we’ll make a proper post when we have more confirmed.
We have ten copies to give away of the lovely new Hardcase Crime release, Mad Money, a combo of two Nolan novels, Spree and Mourn the Living. Spree is considered by many the best of the Nolan books, and Mourn the Living – his first appearance, written when I was but a lad of 19 or so – has never appeared as a mainstream paperback before.
We also have ten copies of Fancy Anders For the Boys. This is the second of the three Fancy Anders novellas. Fancy is a private eye working in Hollywood during World War Two; in this novella, she has gone undercover at the Hollywood Canteen on a murder investigation.
[All copies have been claimed! Thank you for your support, and see you next time! –Nate]
This is the last of the Hardcase Crime series of Nolan reprints (plus the new Skim Deep) and they have done an incredible job. Thank you, editor Charles Ardai.
Fancy Anders For the Boys is not available in stores. It was published as an e-book by Neo-Text and this is a (quite nice) Print-on-Demand. The Fay Dalton illos are in color on the e-book, and in black-and-white in the trade paperback.
For those of you within driving distance, here’ a reminder that Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder – the filmed version of our live Golden Age Radio production – will be presented this Friday (March 31) at the Muscatine Community College Black Box Theater. See the end of this update for details.
The night before is the Legends event in Muscatine, with Muscatine Community College honoring me. For those desperate for something to do this coming Thursday evening, here’s the details one last time.
If you’re not a superstar, even if you’ve had some successes and are moderately well-known, making a living as a writer of fiction has never been a picnic. Usually you have a choice between finding a day job and taking on work-for-hire that rarely includes royalties, much less artistic fulfillment.
If you’re somewhat up the literary ladder, that day job is going to be as a “creative writing” teacher at a college or university. But I recall vividly that the University of Iowa Writers Workshop – where I matriculated (and you know how painful that is) – turned down Donald E. Westlake’s application to teach there. The current well-intentioned TV series Lucky Hank, with the great Bob Odenkirk, shows what a soulless draining existence that life can be for a real writer.
But you really have only those two choices, unless you can marry a woman of wealth, and that’s the one attribute my wife did not bring along for the ride. The work-for-hire I’ve done means I’ve written several shelves of books that do not generate any income for me in my dotage.
For me the price has been to work hard – to be prolific – and the return has been both positive (I have indeed made a living) and negative (I am not taken seriously – I “crank books out,” you see). As I’ve reported here before, my first agent – of only two in a career that began in the late 1960s – took me on with the caveat that (as a writer of hardboiled fiction) I was “a blacksmith in an automotive age.” What the fuck am I now?
My markets have shrunk as a generation or two find me repellently politically incorrect and later ones are thoughtlessly dying out. I lost a major market apparently because a sarcastic throwaway joke in public was misinterpreted – perhaps humorlessly or worse willfully – as being my actual opinion. My dream job – a being able to complete Mickey Spillane’s unfinished novels – has largely been realized in a world where the Best-Selling Mystery Writer of the Twentieth Century elicits, “Never heard of him,” from a couple of generations.
It’s an uphill battle but (to mix metaphors) I am in the second half of my last act, so it’ll be over soon. All I have to do is hang on and, hopefully, feather my nest and add to my legacy.
Here’s an example of why I characterize the battle as uphill: a recent visit to the Barnes & Noble in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I have probably done a dozen book signings there (often in tandem with Barb, for our Antiques books) over the years. None during or after the Covid lockdown, but we’re not talking ancient history here. We also shop there probably once a month. This visit, like any writer, I checked my presence on the shelves…specifically, to see if my two recently published books were in stock – Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction (the biography written with James L. Traylor) and The Big Bundle (the new Nathan Heller novel).
Both books have been glowingly and widely reviewed, including starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly, the top trade magazine in the book field.
Neither was in stock. Spillane was in the system, but hadn’t been ordered. The Big Bundle did not seem to exist. Not in the computer, anyway. In fairness, I have seen copies of both books in other Barnes & Noble stores, including Davenport and Iowa City. But the book buyer at Cedar Rapids did not choose to even enter us in their computer base.
This is disheartening but it is the life of a writer if your name isn’t Stephen King or Harlan Coben. Now plenty of writers who aren’t named King or Coben have books in that Cedar Rapids bookstore. But few of them will be able to maintain that presence and are doomed to day jobs, possibly teaching others on college campuses how to join a profession that will never enable them eat regularly.
This is a problem that has been there throughout my entire career, but it is worse now. It is in part created by publishers and editors who do not nurture their authors, fail to promote them, fail to allow them to build a name and an audience. It is in part created by a lack of bookstores whose staffs are “book people,” who love and hand-sell books. This problem is acerbated by Amazon and other on-line booksellers who offer books cheaper, but who also tend to push a bestseller list that is preordained.
Nothing much can be done about this, but those of you who love books and prize authors can help by spreading the word about what you’ve read and liked (loved) on your blogs and by posting reviews (however brief) on Amazon and other sites.
I am able to keep going because of you. Yes, Don Westlake said, “A cult writer is seven readers short of the writer making a living,” but your support is what has kept me in the game all these years. And when I say, “Thank you,” I mean it from the bottom of my heart…even if I use a cliche to express it.
Not to put too fine a point on it, I hated John Wick 4.
Looking at Rotten Tomatoes, it would appear I’m in the minority. Most reviewers like it, most viewers like it. Even love it. So, once again, I’m out of step and probably just plain wrong.
Certainly the movie is well-made. Visually it is often – even consistently – stunning. The art direction is staggeringly beautiful. The action scenes are mind-bogglingly well-staged. The movie begins with a rousing action scene right out of the gate, capped off by a shock; and the movie has a very satisfying ending, both that of the climax and then another of the movie itself. It owes much to Mickey Spillane but I doubt many of those involved even know who Mickey was. But, like a Spillane novel, the film embraces revenge and harsh violence, begins and ends well…and of course Mickey once said, “Nobody reads a novel to get to the middle.”
And yet I hated it. Was almost glazed-over bored.
Start with Keanu Reeves, whose performance has me scratching my head. Is he a brilliant minimalist screen actor? Or just a charismatic lummox? His dialogue mostly consists of one word – “Yeah” – which he somehow turns into three syllables. He performs his martial arts stunts well, even if co-star Donnie Yen outshines him, and performs the John Woo-style shoot ‘em up stuff admirably. And he is the only actor in the piece (including Yen, who is essentially playing Zatoichi) who doesn’t ham it up.
But the dialogue is terrible – Dick and Jane rewriting the Marquis De Sade. The supporting actors caress the words they speak as if it’s Shakespeare, or maybe it’s that they are being paid ten grand a word, and are savoring that. Certainly Ian McShane and Laurence Fishbourne are almost giddy in their over-the-top performances, as if they can see the coins stacking up with every lousy line. The Asian actors alone seem to find the right tone. Bewilderingly bad is putty-faced Bill Skarsgård, so good as the evil clown in the It movies, coming across here like the young Matthew Broderick playing a James Bond villain.
That may be the best way to watch John Wick 4 – imagine Keanu is playing Ted from the Bill and Ted movies and Skarsgård is Ferris Bueller.
I liked the first John Wick (did they steal the “they shouldn’t have killed my dog?” bit from Hard Cash?). I have no memory of John Wick 2, but I think I liked it well enough. I remember thinking they had at least edged up on going too far with the action scenes in John Wick 3. Now in John Wick 4, the action scenes – well-staged but going on forever – become mind-numbing and uninvolving. This is the fantasy of a school shooter the night before the big day.
John Woo’s heroic bloodshed was wrapped up in a Douglas Sirk-style melodrama. What Mickey had was an avenger with a point to his crusade. John Wick just kills a whole lot of people and then…well, you’re going to see it anyway, aren’t you?
The Max Allan Collins Film Festival (in which throughout my birthday month I subject my wife to my favorite movies) continues with only two entries this time.
10. Phantom of the Paradise. Brian DePalma’s greatest film and a movie that wrestles with Vertigo, Chinatown and Kiss Me Deadly for the top spot in my Favorite Films list. Terry Beatty and I used to go to great lengths to see Phantom in theaters in those pre-VCR days. Hard for me to talk about this one because I love it so much – every actor, not just William Finley and Paul Williams and Jessica Harper, but also Gerrit Graham and George Memmoli and Archie Hahn (and the rest of the Juicy Fruits). I’ve sometimes had difficulty convincing people who dismiss Williams as an easy listening artist (which at times he was, but a brilliant one) that his score is the definitive rock opera. A unique blend of horror and satire, Phantom is a movie unlike any other even as it invokes everything from Psycho to The Cabinet of Caligari, from The Picture of Dorian Gray to Faust…and, well, The Phantom of the Opera.
11. Vertigo. Why am I as messed up as I am? Is it that I began reading reprints of the most violent era of Dick Tracy when I was six? That my mother read me Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs around the same time? Possibly. But also I was ten years old when I first saw Vertigo. You can only see Vertigo for the first time once. But the glory of it is you get to watch it for second time once, as well, and for me anyway that began a series of viewings that always reveal new depths and nuances. Look, it’s an outrageous plot. Like the best of Spillane, it’s a fever dream, but one that poses as a romantic one, when at its tragic heart it’s the story of a detective who can’t stop himself from detecting and a woman who can’t stop pretending to be the woman she (SPOILER ALERT) conspired to help kill. This – like Phantom of the Paradise – works on me every time. Every damn time I get caught up in it. Don’t tell me the story is preposterous because I don’t care. It’s melodrama, which is pretty much the only kind of story I am interested in and that moves me. It’s easy to get caught up in Stewart’s performance, which begins with him as his genial screen self and gradually, then dramatically, devolves into a dangerous obsessive. Instead, next time you watch it, take your eyes off Stewart and pay attention to how layered Novak’s performance is.
Here’s an article on Irish comic book characters, and Michael O’Sullivan of Road to Perdition is in first place!
Here is a positive and even erudite review of Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction.
Another positive Spillane bio review is here (after the Harper Lee one!).
Film Premiere Press Release
Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder was professionally shot during its one-time-only stage performance in Sept 2022. Premiere of the film is Friday, March 31, 2023 at 7:00 pm at Muscatine Community College Black Box Theatre in Muscatine, Iowa. Admittance is free. Collins wrote the graphic novel Road to Perdition on which the Academy Award-winning film was based, as well as the New York Times best-selling novel version of Saving Private Ryan. His Quarry mystery novels became a recent HBO Cinemax series and he has continued the famous Mike Hammer PI series working from the late author’s unfinished materials. Encore for Murder will be included on an upcoming Blu-ray release from VCI Home Entertainment as a bonus film with Collins’ documentary, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane. Spillane is widely considered the “king of pulp fiction” and became America’s best-selling post-WW II writer. The audience at the March 31 screening will be the first to see and hear about the newest venture Blue Christmas, written and directed by Collins and shot entirely in Muscatine, working with editor Chad Bishop and director of photography Phillip W. Dingeldein of dphilms in the Quad Cities. Collins and Dingeldein worked together on the Muscatine-lensed film Mommy (seen on Lifetime TV).
Encore for Murder was originally produced as a Fundraiser for the Muscatine Art Center. Actor Gary Sandy of WKRP in Cincinnati fame, who appeared as Mike Hammer in productions of Encore for Murder in Kentucky and Florida, reprised his acclaimed performance in the Iowa production. Dingeldein and Chad Bishop filmed the event, staged as a Golden Age of Radio production with scripts in hand but in costume, with an on-stage sound effects table, music and a big screen presentation of scene-setting slides.
Audience Q & A will be available after the film and news about Blue Christmas.
M.A.C.
The poster pictured here will give notice to anyone within driving distance of Muscatine, Iowa, the information needed to attend the theatrical premiere of the filmed version of Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder starring Gary Sandy as Mike Hammer.
It’s a Golden Age Radio presentation, the actors with scripts (sometimes) in hand, the costuming limited, the sound effects produced on stage (often to comic effect) with a foley table manned by the editor of the feature, Chad Bishop. The cast, other than Mr. Sandy, is local, though these are experienced theatrical veterans, many of whom have appeared in independent films. This production of Encore was presented only once, last September, as a benefit for the Muscatine Art Center.
We did record two dress rehearsals, and some footage from those was edited in (sometimes just the audio used), and what was a two-act play was edited into one continuous 90-minute production.
My goal was to produce a substantial bonus feature for a home video release (Blu-ray for sure and possibly DVD) of the expanded Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane documentary from 1999. My collaborator Phil Dingeldein shot and edited (and I wrote) enough new material to bring Mickey’s story up to the present, and expand the running time from 47 minutes to about an hour. (The Criterion special edit, for their disc of Kiss Me Deadly, runs about half an hour.) Though taking the doc up to 61 minutes made releasing it on its own a possibility, I felt adding Encore for Murder as an Added Value bonus would enhance the package. I also was proud of what we accomplished on what was essentially no budget (and some free help from Phil and dphilms, and Chad Bishop and Muscatine Community College). Even Gary Sandy donated his considerable services.
Gary, as you may know, played Hammer in Golden Age of Radio-style productions of Encore for Murder in Owensboro, Kentucky, and Clearwater, Florida. Encore was nominated in its original, somewhat longer incarnation for an Audie (Best Original Work) in 2011 with Stacy Keach and a full cast doing it for Blackstone Audio. We won Best Script in 2012 at the International Mystery Writers’ Festival in Owensboro, and in 2018 did a rather more elaborate production at the Ruth Eckard Hall’s Murray Theater in Clearwater, Florida.
The Muscatine production held its own in comparison, utilizing the approach of the Clearwater show, which included a large screen with scene-setting slides, costumes and music. The music we used came from Chris Christensen’s score for Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and Stan Purdy’s 1954 music for Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer Story.
The big news is that VCI Entertainment – who brought the Mommy double feature out on Blu-ray not long ago – will be distributing both the new version of the documentary and Encore for Murder (on one Blu-ray) and taking them out individually to the streaming services.
If you are considering coming to Muscatine for this event, we would recommend the Merrill Hotel, a lovely new facility right on the Mississippi.
The Max Allan Collins Film Festival that is screening my home (no guests invited) continues throughout my birthday month of March.
5. Murder He Says. This 1945 hillbilly take on The Old Dark House sub-genre is the best comedy Bob Hope never made…but Fred MacMurray did. Helen Walker (of the original and superior version of Nightmare Alley) is wonderful here as is Marjorie Main, very much a sociopathic Ma Kettle. In town police is.
6. Waiting for Guffman. The funniest of Chris Guest’s semi-improvised mockumentaries showcases SCTV superstars Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara, although everyone here is great….Christopher Guest, Parker Posey and Fred Willard tying for MVP. The Blu-ray has much more of local musical Red, White and Blaine, with numbers apparently cut not just for timing purposes but because they are too good.
7. Harvey. One of James Stewart’s three greatest performances (It’s a Wonderful Life and Vertigo being the others). He’s often been called a little too young for the role of Elwood P. Dowd but it works to the advantage of the film, as he comes across less a drunk (much less) and more a sweet person who stepped away from harsh reality into pleasant fantasy. On the other hand, the movie does not shy away from indicating that Harvey really exists and and how are you, Mr. Wilson?
8. Game Night. This 2018 film is the newest in my film festival so far, but it’s a gem. Hilarious with every performance spot on, and Jason Bateman at his very best. Jesse Plemons as the cop next door almost steals the picture anyway.
9. Leprechaun. Everything else this time around is a comedy, right? But then so is Leprechaun, and the special features documentary reveals that a second director/writer came in and did the really bloody gore stuff, which doesn’t harm this vastly underrated film much at all, because its absurdity fits right in. Did you expect us to watch anything else on St. Patrick’s Day? I just wish the sequels had stayed consistent with the original. We met Warrick Davis and he’s a great, great guy.
This terrific review of Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction includes an interview with me. A follow-up will soon cover Jim Traylor’s interview on our well-received book.
Wolfpack has the Eliot Ness “Cleveland quartet” at a reasonable price.
An interesting review of the Yoe Books Johnny Dynamite collection, edited and with contributions by Terry Beatty and me, is here.
If you missed it, here’s the info on the Muscatine Community College “Legends” tribute to, yeah, well, me. It takes place on March 30 (a Thursday evening) and the Encore for Murder screening is March 31.
Tickets here. They’re expensive but go to the college.
Trailers from Hell takes a long look at the current Blu-ray release of Mickey Spillane’s The Long Wait, with a commentary by me.
The Trailers from Hell essay is interesting if pretty patronizing, but trust me – The Long Wait is a terrific Spillane noir. Read about it (and order it) here.
For a look at a Long Wait clip, take a gander at this.
And yes, this time it’s Collider telling us about ten movies from comic books that you didn’t know yada yada yada. But, hey – we’re in fourth position.
M.A.C.
Fancy Anders For the Boys – the second of the three Fancy Anders novellas – is out now, available in trade paperback, e-book and on audio. Each has its advantages – the trade is an actual physical book (yay!) while the e-book includes the Fay Dalton illustrations in full color, whereas the trade paperback has black-and-white versions (the cover is obviously in color). The audio is fabulous – Barb and I have been listening to it in the car, and Skyboat has again done an exceptional job featuring sound effects, music and a wonderful Gabrielle De Cour narration. Having a skilled female narrator reading Fancy is just perfect.
Here’s where you can get the trade paperback, the e-book, and audio.
I really love these novellas, and hope one day to collect them in an oversize hardcover edition with all the Fay Dalton illos in full color…but for now this is how they exist (and will exist – we have one more to go). I intended this project to be a full-length mystery novel that would first appear as three standalone novellas (much as Dashiell Hammett did in The Dain Curse). I wrote all three during the Covid lockdown and the length of time between publication of each book reflects the time it takes Fay Dalton to do these great illustrations. Worth the wait!
A lot of love and research went into these, which were inspired to some degree by a desire to do an American variation on the Australian “Phryne Fisher” mysteries (the TV series – I’ve never read the novels). Ms. Tree began similarly, as an attempt to be the “answer” to the UK’s Modesty Blaise. Fancy is sort of a younger version of Michael Tree, definitely sharing some storytelling DNA; but she is definitely her own specific character, a spoiled rich girl with a spine. But I also have long wanted to do something that really drew upon my love for Golden Age Hollywood, and Los Angeles during World War II attracts me as a particularly rich period to write about.
In the first Fancy Anders novella, Fancy Anders Goes to War, she goes undercover at an aircraft plant as a war worker, a rivetter; in this one, she is undercover as a hostess at the Hollywood Canteen among Bette Davis and other Hollywood stars.
We only have three Amazon reviews so far, two of which are glowing, the other being rather puzzling in its negativity. After saying how great the first novella was, the reviewer complains about how short this one is – actually, it’s exactly the same length as the first book – and the reviewer complaints that Fancy manages to always be in the right place at the right time. Okay, I would suggest two things: first, any detective in a mystery who is in the wrong place at the right time isn’t going to accomplish much of anything; and just about all of the action takes place at the Hollywood Canteen, where Fancy is working undercover. Of course she’s in the right place at the right time.
Anyway, if you read (or listen to) Fancy Anders For the Boys, your Amazon review will be appreciated, unless you hate it. And Fancy Anders Goes to War is still very much available here, in trade paperback, e-book and on audio (another elaborate Skyboat production).
Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, the two young filmmakers who started making films at age 11 in their native Quad Cities, made it big by writing the smash hit A Quiet Place. They have since done a terrific little horror picture, Haunt, and now have a new science-fiction thriller, 65, hitting theaters – starring Adam Driver, no less.
These are two very nice and obviously talented guys and deserve their success. Barb and I, with my filmmaking associate Phil Dingeldein and his wife Shelley, were invited by the Woods and Beck team to attend a screening of 65 on March 11 in Davenport. They were kind enough to single Phil and me out, in the audience, as having been inspirations to them. Again, these are nice guys.
The really good part is how terrific their new film is. I’ve seen it get a few bad reviews and I frankly don’t understand it, unless petty jealousy is in play (and it frequently is). It’s an exciting ride with a great heart and I don’t know what more you can ask from a movie that already is giving you space ships and dinosaurs.
Barb and I have walked out on the last two movies we attended – both the new Antman movie (and we both like Paul Rudd) and Guy Ritchie’s latest film (and we both like Ritchie) after a painful half hour of each. 65 is 90 minutes that held us every one of those minutes.
Speaking of movies, March is my birthday month and here at the Collins abode we are commemorating it with a Max Allan Collins Film Festival, which is not a festival of Max Allan Collins films, but rather his (my) favorites. Here are the presentations thus far:
1. Chinatown. Probably the greatest private eye film ever made, not even excluding Kiss Me Deadly and The Maltese Falcon.
2. The Two Jakes. The criminally underappreciated sequel to Chinatown. Looks like it’s getting some reappraisals lately.
3. Here Comes Mr. Jordan. A fantasy film I’ve loved since childhood, featuring Robert Montgomery’s greatest performance.
4. American Graffitti. The film that gave me the idea to do a ‘50s/’60s nostalgia band, which became the you-can’t-kill-it-with-a-stick Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Association inductees, Crusin’. We saw this easily ten times in the theater, pre-home video.
More to come.
Here’s a short but sweet review from The Saturday Evening Post:
Here, speaking to Paul Davis, is the late great Elmore Leonard on Mickey Spillane.
And here is Paul Davis on Mickey and the Collins/Traylor biography on Spillane.
M.A.C.