The pub date for my new novel Quarry’s Reunion is on the horizon: Nov. 10. The terrific cover is by Paul Mann, who did Killing Quarry, The Big Bundle and Too Many Bullets.

My buddy Heath Holland of Cereal at Midnight will be talking with me for an hour this coming week in a presentation about the 50 years of Quarry. The new book will be discussed, of course, and the Dec. 10 release of The Last Lullaby (featuring the short “A Matter of Principal) on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber – the only Quarry feature film to date with a script co-written by me from my novel The Last Quarry.

Not sure when it will go up on YouTube, but it’ll be soon.

This terrific write-up from Crime Fiction Lover for Quarry’s Reunion is definitely worth a look.

Here’s a nice review of The Last Lullaby, even if the writer spells my middle name wrong and doesn’t understand that I wrote the source material and have top billing on the screenplay.

Last week I posted a picture of the Whites, Jackie and Mike. I gave no explanation because I thought it was self-explanatory; but I’ve been informed by several readers here that it wasn’t.

Jackie and Mike are what you’d call super fans, although what Barb and I call them are our friends, though they live a good distance away. Readers who regularly attend book signings (we rarely do those anymore) and get in touch with us we always consider friends, but the Whites really go the extra miles. Stephen Borer of St. Paul does, too – he often posts here and pops up at events – but he’ll be embarrassed by my mentioning it.

The Whites and Stephen are not alone and to any of you who have gone to a signing or a movie premiere of ours, we are grateful and, yes, thankful. Mickey Spillane used to say he didn’t have fans or readers, he had customers; but that was just a Spillane-ism. I saw how he often literally embraced a fan. He loved the people who enjoyed his fiction, and Barb and I feel the same way about people who tell us they like what we do.

Here’s a pic of Stephen.

Today at lunch a nice older lady told us her daughter always gave her the newest Antiques novel for her birthday – they’re both fans. Super!

That’s a good excuse to remind you that the new “Barbara Allan”-penned novel, Antiques Web, is now just out – available from Amazon in hardcover and on Kindle.

And it’s available on audio, too, from Skyboat, read delightfully by Gabrielle de Cuir.

Digital Audiobook: | | | |

Walter Koenig passed away last week.

Walter was a friend. Not a close friend, but for several years we were in frequent touch and thereafter occasionally.

I got to meet him when he was a guest of the Chicago Comic Con in 1973. I was asked to pick him up at O’Hare Airport and gladly did. Barb was with me. He was quiet but friendly and we hit it off.

Barb and I took him to our favorite Chicago restaurant, the now-defunct George Diamond’s Steakhouse, which was within easy walking distance of the hotel. Over a delightful dinner, Walter answered a lot of inside questions about Star Trek – Barb and I were both major fans – and I remember being amused at how he reported William’s Shatner’s use of dramatic pauses to summon dialogue he’d barely memorized.

It turned out Walter and I had some common interests. We were both writers, and my first mystery novels had just come out. He wasn’t featured on the new animated Star Trek series, but he had written an episode. We exchanged mail (back then, actual mail) about our writing projects; he had a novel in progress. He wrote several novels including graphic ones, which is not surprising because he was a comics fan, or at least comics fan adjacent.

I say that because he was a huge fan and collector of Big Little Books, the small fat books featuring comic strip characters (pages at left text, at right single comics images sans dialogue balloons). Very much a hardcore collector of these items, he was after several I owned. I don’t recall what they were, but I think one was a Little Orphan Annie. I traded them to him for a couple of signed Star Trek scripts, one of which I still have – his production script from an episode with his notes to himself.

After a few years our correspondence trailed off, but I occasionally ran into him at conventions. The last time, oddly, he stopped me to ask if I was mad at him. No! I insisted. Why do you ask? He said someone had told him I was angry with him.

I assured him I had never been anything but delighted with knowing him since the day we picked him up at the airport. I only wish I knew if he knew that Dreamworks had made a promotional Big Little Book out of Road to Perdition.

You were a good writer, a good actor and a good friend, Walter. Thanks for the trade.

Tags: Antiques Series, Antiques Web, Killing Quarry, Passings, Quarry, Quarry's Reunion, The Big Bundle, The Last Lullaby, Too Many Bullets, Trash 'n' Treasures