We’re officially in holiday season, now that it’s November and the holiday everybody actually prefers (Halloween) is over. So it’s time for me to remind you about my little Christmas movie, Blue Christmas.
A couple of things.
We’ve had many nice reviews and a few negative, even nasty ones. Some reviewers don’t know how to deal with a micro-budget movie shot in six days on one set; I get that. But the majority of reviewers know how meet a movie on its own terms, and a whole lot of ‘em have liked our little Maltese Falcon/A Christmas Carol mash-up.
Listen, I understand why a few Grinches complain that Blue Christmas looks like a community theater production caught on camera. A movie that cost $8000 to make just doesn’t pass muster with their refined tastes. I really do get it.
I can only counter with the many hours (days, weeks) my editor Chad T. Bishop and I (Chad played “Pa Stone” by the way, and well) toiled to turn our almost-a-week’s footage into a more or less coherent feature. We’re starting to get some reviews again, because (a) Christmas appears to be coming, and (b) we’re getting a second bite of the apple.
Why “b”? Well, the distribution of Blue Christmas last year came too late to really be on time for holiday consumption – in fact, we didn’t hit any streaming services till earlier this year. And our physical media distribution was limited.
Here’s some recent takes on Blue Christmas:
https://www.antimusic.com/reviews/24/blue-christmas/
https://www.cgomovies.co.uk/2024/10/12/blue-christmas-noir-holiday-film-blu-ray-release/
Now, where can you get a copy of the DVD or Blu-ray? I thought you’d never ask.
Probably the best price you’ll find is, not surprisingly, at Amazon – $7.49 for the DVD and $10.87 for the Blu-ray. If you have Prime and free shipping, it’s definitely the best option. I see both DVD and Blu-ray elsewhere cheaper but with stiff (like, $7.99) shipping prices.
Anyway, here is the Amazon link.
Blue Christmas (2024) can already be streamed on Tubi and The Roku Channel for free with ads, and is also available on Amazon Prime Video for a modest price. I sampled Tubi and they ran a handful of commercials up front, then ran the film without any interruption.
Another Blue catching some attention, and which strikes me as unlikely, is a nice review from Pulp, Crime and Mystery Books site about my first-published Mallory novel; it’s too nice not to share:
In this volume (a quick-reading 160 pages to be precise), Mallory has been shacked up with a young, slender blond named Sally and “there wasn’t a thing wrong with Sally that a new personality couldn’t have cured.” Indeed, “She was the sort of woman who uses her good looks as a form of blackmail when she’s in a good mood, and for revenge when she’s in a bad one.”
At Sally’s urging, Mallory gets involved in being a “Meals on Wheels” volunteer, delivering to the elderly once a week. Mallory, being a young, longish-haired, guy was not totally sold in doing public service for the elderly, thinks: “God forbid I’d be asked in to chat with one of the tottering old relics. Who in hell wanted to watch the decaying creatures gumming their food, saliva and masticated glop dribbling all over their hairy-warted chins? Yuck.” That is, until he meets them.
The plot centers around one fateful night when Mallory was making deliveries and sees a crew of people and two vehicles in front of an old woman’s house and they just didn’t seem right. Poking his nose into trouble is what makes a good story, but for Mallory it only gets him beat up and left unconscious along with the old woman’s body and what was left of her worldly possessions. The Sheriff, who has a personal dislike for Mallory on account of his anti-war activities some years back, tells Mallory to stay out of it and let the professionals resolve the matter, but Mallory can’t stay out of it and persons involved won’t let him stay out of it.
What follows is a good mystery story with Mallory, being an ordinary guy, not Mike Hammer or the like, getting bounced around by tough guys and femme fatales on his way to solving a murder that the officials just can’t get. The story is an easy, quick read – Shouldn’t take more than a few hours – and is filled with humor.
Mallory seems like a decent guy, even when he takes a trip down memory lane and gets re-involved with his high school sweetheart, the one who dumped him for the guy she is now married to. For Mallory, his return to Port City is a return to his roots. Many of the people he meets or interacts with were people he grew up with or were the parents of people he knew when he was a teenager.
It is highly recommended reading and should have appeal to quite a wide audience.
I still get requests from readers wanting another Mallory novel, and I always say (and mean it) that I have no interest in the character, because he was rather directly based on me.
Though Baby Blue was published first, the second one, No Cure for Death, was written first. Both novels were part of the Curtis Books debacle, where my first five Nolan novels and first two Mallorys were all sold to a company that got swallowed up by another. That second company kept promising to publish the books until enough time passed for the rights to revert.
And Nolan went to Pinnacle, for whom I wrote a sixth one, and Mallory went to Walker as my first hardcover publication.
No Cure for Death was written at the University of Iowa where my instructor – my mentor – Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road) had taken me under his wing. I had already written Bait Money, which was my attempt to do a crime novel in the Richard Stark manner, and now I was ready to go first-person. I didn’t think I’d be doing sequels to either, so both books were rather slavishly written as examples of forms I was trying to master, in the case of No Cure For Death the first-person private eye novel (even though Mallory wasn’t a private eye).
The first Mallory had a lot of stuff taken directly from my life. Mal was a veteran of the Vietnam/counter-culture years, a struggling mystery writer living in a small town (Port City) in a house trailer (before Jim Rockford). The tale took place when the Vietnam war was still raging, and several plot elements tied it to that specific time. For that reason – and because I considered the second book (The Baby Blue Rip-off) better, I submitted that first. After it sold to Walker, I submitted the second book, presented as a kind of flashback to ground it properly in time.
The third Mallory, Kill Your Darlings, found me – I mean, Mallory – at a Bouchercon, the annual mystery fan/writer convention. The book was almost rejected because my editor, Ruth Cavin – with whom I always had difficulties – thought Mallory suddenly was no longer a nice person. Well, that was because ten years had passed between the writing of Book Two and Book Three. I wasn’t as nice anymore, in case you haven’t figured that out.
The best of the Mallorys is A Shroud for Aquarius, which was based on the suicide of a friend of mine and, I think, dealt with my recent past in a worthwhile fashion. The next one, Nice Weekend for a Murder, was about a mystery weekend and showed Mallory continuing to evolve into a kind of junior Ellery Queen. And we already had a senior one.
I much preferred Quarry and Nate Heller and a few other protagonists to essentially writing about myself. Ironically, the most current Quarry – the one that will be out in late 2026, Quarry’s Reunion, is probably the book in that series most heavily drawing from my life. But still not so directly – I’ve never killed anybody, after all. As far as you know.
So it’s nice to see an obviously smart reader cotton to something of mine that I wrote in what is now my distant memory.
M.A.C.
I still turn to Mallory for a re-read once in a while as a change of pace. They are still very enjoyable!