Archive for the ‘Message from M.A.C.’ Category

Call a Spade a Spade

Tuesday, October 28th, 2025

The cover of my forthcoming (January 2026) novel, The Return of the Maltese Falcon, is turning up here and there online…so I’ll join in.

Return of the Maltese Falcon cover
Coming January 6!
Hardcover:
E-Book: Nook Kobo Google PLay Apple Books

And I’m pleased – frankly, thrilled – to share this Publisher’s Weekly advance review with you:

This stylish sequel to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon from MWA Grandmaster Collins (To Live and Spy in Berlin) picks up in December 1928, just days after the events of the previous novel. Rhea Gutman, daughter of late gangster Casper Gutman, asks PI Sam Spade to recover the eponymous, jewel-encrusted artifact. During the course of the investigation, Spade’s former lover, Iva Archer – who’s also the widow of his late investigative partner, Miles – demands a share of any profits from finding the falcon that might have gone to her husband, and drags Miles’s mob-connected brother into the picture to make sure she gets what she wants. When Wilmer Cook, Gutman’s vengeful former gunman, ambushes Spade, it’s clear he isn’t the only one hunting the falcon; Chicago gambler Dixie Monahan is after it, too. Then there’s British Museum curator Stewart Blackwood, who claims the museum legally owns the falcon after purchasing it from the original owner, General Kemidov. Navigating shifting allegiances and playing multiple sides, Spade races rival interests to claim the falcon for himself. Collins keeps the prose lean and sharp, true to Hammett’s style, and ushers the proceedings to a tidy conclusion. It’s a clever, well-executed tribute the hardboiled tradition. (Jan.)

I’ve discussed how I came to write this novel elsewhere, but – to recap briefly – I had long been keeping my eye on the status of the original Maltese Falcon, re: public domain status, and was proactive (as they say) about trying to be first in line to take advantage of that status.

I love The Maltese Falcon – it’s my favorite book – and have fantasized about writing a sequel for years. I was frustrated by there only being one Sam Spade novel, and was ecstatic in high school when I stumbled across a copy of a paperback called The Adventures of Sam Spade, which included Hammett’s only three short stories about the seminal private eye.

Now, I realize there were fictional P.I.’s before Sam Spade, notably Race Williams, the prototype for Mike Hammer (Daly was Mickey Spillane’s favorite writer as a kid). But Spade was the template – the whole private eye genre so many (me too) followed was there, from the secretary in love with her private eye boss to the cop friend, from the cop adversary to the menacing thug, from the femme fatale to the formidable crime boss. It was – and is – all there…a genre Hammett in effect invented, perfected, and almost immediately abandoned.

As a kid – maybe 10 or 11, and already in the sway of detectives Dick Tracy and Sherlock Holmes – I heard The Adventures of Sam Spade on the radio. I’m not sure how, as the timing is wrong – the series was a ‘40s and very early ‘50s phenomenon, and I was too young. Maybe a nostalgia broadcast of some kind. But somehow I have that (maybe false) memory.

Something that is not a false memory – yet makes almost as little sense – is my seeing and enjoying the Sam Spade comic strip that appeared sporadically in Sunday newspaper comics sections. This was an ad disguised as a comic strip from Wildroot Cream-Oil (who later placed Li’l Abner and Fearless Fosdick ad/comics in newspapers and magazines). These were usually beautifully drawn by comic-book genius Lou Fine.

Why I know about this strip, I’m not sure – because of Dashiell Hammett’s clash with Joe McCarthy over the former’s communist leanings (and Spade star Howard Duff being similarly tarnished), The Adventures of Sam Spade became The Adventures of Charlie Wild before sputtering out around 1951.

And I have no memory of Charlie Wild.

Yet somehow Spade got on my radar. This may be due to my obsession as a youth with comics, particularly newspaper comics, as I would snatch up any old comics sections or even pages I came across. This is vague in my memory, as I say, but I do remember both the Spade radio show and the Wild Root ad/comic Sunday page feature (which was, I think, also printed in comic books and I was always snatching up older comics when I ran across them).

It’s not the famous movie that got Spade on my kid radar. I didn’t see that until I was in junior high and caught up in the private eye fad on TV (Peter Gunn, 77 Sunset Strip), which led me into reading the book series that many of these shows were based on.

I haven’t listened to many of the Spade radio shows over the years, because once I read The Maltese Falcon, I realized those shows were spoofy versions of a very serious (in the best sense) fictional character and his world. The series did adapt some Hammett stories early on (not Spade ones, to my knowledge) and a Falcon sequel I’ve never heard, either. This series is interesting to me only in having ingrained Spade further into the pop culture.

The three Spade short stories, incidentally, were published in 1932 and are probably a result of the first Maltese Falcon film (1931) with Ricardo Cortez as Sam. This version is better than it’s cracked up to be, as it’s pre-Code and includes Brigid’s enforced striptease. Donald E. Westlake liked the first attempt and recommended it to me. He even had it screened at one of his Mohonk mystery weekends (I was the murderer in the game, by the way).

Nobody likes the second version, Satan Met a Lady (1936). The detective (Warren William) isn’t even called Sam Spade, although the film’s title seems to refer to Hammett’s description of Spade on the first page of The Falcon.

I made a point of avoiding re-screening either the ‘31 or the ‘41 version (and or course didn’t bother with Satan Met a Lady, even if it did have Bette Davis in it). I wanted – needed – to focus on the Hammett novel itself and not attempt any tie to the Warner Bros film.

That may seem odd, since John Huston’s Maltese Falcon is famously incredibly faithful. Legend has it the screenplay was just Huston’s secretary typing up the dialogue from the book for the director, and then that “script” got accidentally green-lighted. Probably apocryphal, but a wonderful story nonetheless.

And to bring Don Westlake back into it, we shared with each other that we’d both followed the movie along in the book.

How is the Huston film different from its source? Mostly it’s Bogart. The Spade of Hammett’s novel – and mine – lacks the warmth that peeks out, and sometimes surges out, from Bogie’s Sam. But Sam Spade as Hammett conceived him was self-contained and even cold. The book and the famous film also have a slightly different tone – the jaunty score is a factor.

I do wonder how many readers of my novel will picture Bogart as Spade, despite my echoing the Hammett description of a blond Satan.

You can pre-order the novel here.

Hardcover:
E-Book: Nook Kobo Google PLay Apple Books

M.A.C.

One-Star Amazon Reviews and Bobby Darin and Dragnet, Oh My!

Tuesday, October 21st, 2025

J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet – one of the best (if not the best) crime fiction web sites around – has long been a supporter of my work and this update/blog.

He wrote me recently: “I have suffered through spotty access to your blog for months. I generally use the Mozilla Web browser, but more often than not that has told me, ‘the page isn’t redirecting properly’ when I tried to pull up your web site….So decided to download the Microsoft Edge browser recently, and voila! Suddenly I have access again to your blog and the rest of your web site. That’s how I learned–finally–that you were rethinking which Nate Heller novel to write next, about which I wrote in my latest Rap Sheet “Bullet Points” post.

Here’s the link.

I am thrilled to have Jeff Pierce back in the fold, and he has since written a terrific piece in his other blog, Killer Covers, about the Paul Mann painting adorning the forthcoming Quarry’s Reunion and the character’s upcoming 50th reunion.

* * *

Barb and I usually watch a movie in the evening, and sometimes I follow up with another, after she heads to the Land of Nod.

In my need for something more bite-size (when another movie seems too much), I have become something of a You Tube addict, and – minorly to say the least – a You Tube celebrity (?!). I appear every Sunday on Robert Meyer Burnett’s Let Get Physical Media, which airs at one p.m. Central Time, with me showing up around 2 p.m. for my True Noir segment, in which I discuss film noir and other crime/mystery films that have appeared recently on physical media. My segment is usually around an hour. (See below for a link to a recent episode.)

Today I want to share some samples of wonderful things I’ve found and watched on You Tube, starting with Paul F. Tompkins presenting the Amazon 1-Star Review Theater, which I think any fiction fan will find hilarious.

From near the end of his life, my favorite performer is seen in this clip doing one of his best hits. Like “Mack the Knife,” this one – “Artificial Flowers” – is all about Bobby Darin thumbing his nose at the early death he knew he was facing.

This is a prime example of 1950s Dragnet, though it’s not the first episode, as it’s labeled. It demonstrates what a terrific director Jack Webb was, how quietly well-acted an episode could be, and how innovative the writing (I believe this was from a James E. Moser radio script). What characterizes Webb’s direction is a combination of verbal understatement and visual shouting. That’s a function of the need to fill small early ‘50s TV screens with something big and eye-catching.

Webb had actually been something of a comedian on some of his radio shows (hard to believe, I know) and his sense of humor (sometimes fine, sometimes cringe-worthy) began to creep into later episodes. When the humor worked, it was usually with the unusual and sometimes overtly comic witnesses Joe Friday and his partner would interview; when it didn’t work, it was usually in other witness interviews, the idea being that Friday and Smith would be low-key and the funny witnesses over the top.

But Webb transformed cop shows on early TV much as I, Love Lucy transformed sitcoms. He truly is an unsung genius. If you only know Webb’s late ‘60s and early ‘70s color Dragnet, you don’t know what he – and his famous program – was capable of.

Here’s a link to the most recent episode of Let’s Get Physical Media, where in my True Noir segment I discuss, among other things, the great under-remembered crime writer, W.R. Burnett.

I also have done several segments with my buddy Heath Holland on his Cereal at Midnight channel, where we talk about our favorite films in various genres. Here’s one of them, as we chose our ten favorite Westerns (five each).

* * *

Finally, as Halloween approaches, I thought I might take the liberty of recommending a horror novel of my own…well, and of Mickey Spillane’s. This one has flown under most readers’ radar, and I’m proud of my contribution to Mickey’s only strictly horror-oriented novel. Get it here. It’s considerably cheaper than at Amazon.

M.A.C.

Completing the 50th Anniversary Quarry Novel

Tuesday, October 14th, 2025

The past week was a tough writing one. Two days of writing that wrapped up a complex plot better than I could ever have hoped. This left me in an almost celebratory state, because I finished Quarry’s Reunion, the 50th anniversary Quarry novel (the first book in the series, Quarry – originally titled The Broker – was published in 1976).

Quarry's Reunion cover painting by Paul Mann
Art (copyright 2025) by Paul Mann for the cover of QUARRY’S REUNION, to be published in late 2026.

I had wrestled with the plot, which is an unusual one for Quarry as it’s a more traditional murder mystery than a crime novel, and has lots of moving parts, more Christie than Spillane. Right now I don’t know how my editor and agent will react to a change of pace like this; but I can really only write the novel that wants to be written. This one, appropriately given the 50th anniversary aspect, delves into Quarry’s past in a way I never have before.

The story that presented itself to me was almost something out of Grace Metalious. If that reference doesn’t mean anything to you, or even if it does, I’ll just say she was the underrated author of Peyton Place, one of the best-selling (and most scandalous) novels of the ‘50s and early ‘60s. I had to develop a whole cast, even generations thereof, the residents of a town in Ohio about the same size of my own smallish Muscatine, Iowa. I literally (not figuratively) wrote half a dozen breakdowns of the characters and their relationships, both familial and romantic, detailing a trust fund that would be the engine of the mystery, i.e., who would/could benefit financially from the death of a character or two.

These cast breakdowns and plot notions were very complicated, and my writer wife Barb suffered through each of them, telling me what worked and didn’t.

Further complicating matters, I began the book – did several chapters – before going into the hospital for an ablation procedure to deal with my a-fib. This turned into a nightmarish month of emergency room visits, ambulance rides, and three hospital stays, the middle one of which found me hallucinating about where I was and whether or not I was investigating a murder.

I wrote about this here before.

I bring it up, because it’s not normal for me to return to a book I began and plotted before having surgery and hallucinations. Kind of hard to just get back in.

But pretty much that’s what I did, although the intricacies of this plot with its Peyton Place-type sexual and criminal shenanigans found me having to re-plot every chapter or two. I often say that fiction writing consists of solving problems of your own creation.

So after I finished the book, having read it and made my revisions (minor as usual), I was pleased that it seemed, as Larry David would say, pretty, pretty good.

I work in WordPerfect and have to convert a manuscript to Word for submission to my editor. This inevitably has some hick-ups, some glitchy travails for Barb – who enters my corrections and the more minor revisions – and me. That makes this inevitable day of getting the book in shape to send always a stressful one.

But we got it out that door, sent to both my editor and my agent.

Whew!

Great to have that over!

I slept soundly and well that night, content that all was right in the world, except for our political situation of course, and then, at 4:44 a.m., I sat up in bed, horribly wide awake.

Somewhere in my brain, while I slumbered, the realization formed that I’d made a mistake in the novel, a really, really big one, with ramifications that would echo through the entire novel.

I got up and tried to solve the problem, resolve the issues it created. I sat in my recliner downstairs with a notebook in my lap and wrote down ideas, timeline shifts, anything I could come up with that wouldn’t damage a book I really liked as it was…but definitely required fixing. How to do that without a page one rewrite?

Barb noticed some lights were on downstairs and came down from the master bedroom to see what was up – had they been left on? Certainly her husband couldn’t be up at 5:45 a.m.!

But he was.

And never gladder to see my lovely bride.

I told her of my massive screw-up, and Barb – who reads my books in progress, chapter by chapter – admitted she hadn’t noticed the goof either. (By the way, I have no intention of sharing with you what that goof was. This piece is as close to an admission as you’ll get.)

We batted ideas around. We each came up with solutions, but none of them were easy or even practical fixes. As you might imagine, this went on for a while. I can only say I was grateful – felt blessed – to have a writer for a wife who could help me in a situation like this.

Finally we came up with something, something that would be manuscript-wide but mostly cosmetic, not disrupting the narrative and its flow.

I did not go back to bed. (I had already, by the way, sent my editor and agent e-mails telling them to dump the previous version of the book I’d sent them. A new version would be along soon.) I went back to the keyboard.

I’m not sure, but I think I worked up till about 4 p.m., with a short lunch break, and sent to my editor and agent the revised version. Then I took a long, long nap.

The next day I was worthless, as you might imagine, tired as hell and unsteady; but relieved. So very relieved.

Thank you, Barbie.

* * *

This good interview with me by the great Andrew Sumner of Titan, at the San Diego Comic Con, is right here:

M.A.C.

Happy Publication Day! And Conjuring Up an Injustice

Tuesday, October 7th, 2025

October 7 – the day this update appears – is the publication day of the new Trash ‘n’ Treasure mystery by Barb and me – Antiques Round-up!

Barb did a fantastic job on this one and I added my own touches, too. When she told me about some of the wacky things she was planning to do in this one, I had my doubts she – or anyone – could pull them off…but she did! “Yippee-ki-yay, Mother (and Brandy)!”


Hardcover:
E-Book: Nook Kobo Google Play

Barb is hard at work on her draft of the next book in the series, Antiques Web. She should be done by year’s end and I’ll saddle up for my draft come first of the year.

In the meantime, the movie that brings Brandy and her mother Vivian alive, Death by Fruitcake, should be available soon…we’ll let you know how, and where, to see it!

* * *

I have enjoyed the Conjuring movies, including the latest one (The Conjuring: Last Rites). I did wonder why in this latest installment nobody seemed to know how to switch on the lights when going into a room, but, hey – it’s a haunted house movie, so you need it dark.

The scariest thing about Last Rites is how cavalier Hollywood can be about giving credit where credit is due.

Before I get into this, let me say I am well aware that writers sometimes have to sign a work-for-hire agreement to get a gig. I signed plenty of those back when I was writing novelizations of movies and original novels based on TV shows. I get that.

But now and then something a writer has done as work-for-hire goes places nobody anticipated. For example, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel were screwed out of Superman because they had signed work-for-hire agreements when they were teenagers. It took decades – effing decades – for DC Comics to give anything to their estates and to include a “created by” screen credit for Siegel and Shuster on any new Superman movie.

Which brings me to Ed Gorman.


Ed Gorman (1941-2016) and his wife Carol

Ed was one of my two or three best friends in the writing business. He was probably the best short story writer in the genre. He was one of the best incredibly prolific writers of novels. I never read anything by him that wasn’t smart and engaging; he could be a little dark at times, but that was leavened with wry humor.

We used to talk on the phone, in those pre-social media days, for hour upon hour. He was incredibly affable and funny in those conversations, not only with me but in phone conversations with many others in the field. Nonetheless, he was notoriously a near recluse. I am one of the few people in mystery fiction who Ed spent time with in person. We even did some signings together, and he came to one of my band’s performances, at which he seemed loose and easy and to be having a great time. Later he told me he’d been terrified.

He was a unique person and a fine writer. I once told Barb that if I died before completing a novel to give it to Ed to finish. That’s how high my opinion was and is of him.

One of the ways Ed made a living was writing books for Ed and Lorraine Warren, the famous psychic/demon-hunter couple whose “real” adventures are the “factual” basis of the Conjuring movies.

Has anyone who saw one of those movies – and, again, I am a fan – believed them to really be “based on the true story”? That the outlandish things that happen on screen really did in real life? I don’t hold that against the Warrens or those who’ve turned their tall tales into films. I like a good scary story.

Here’s another.

One of the books Ed ghosted for the Warrens was called The Haunted. It became a TV movie and he may have received some payment for that, though I’m not sure. Ed did not receive a byline on the book, but the first page says this:

Special thanks and acknowledgment
to Ed Gorman for his work on this book
.

Ed developed The Haunted from 40 pages of notes provided by a reporter working with the Warrens, and spoke with both the Warrens and the Spurl family (who lived in the “haunted” house). I remember Ed telling me he didn’t have much to work from, and didn’t believe any of it anyway. So he just wrote a horror novel, he said, which would be sold as “non-fiction” (his quotes). He was clear about creating much of it out of whole cloth.

Ed was good at horror novels. Very good. He did most of them under the name “Daniel Ransom.” So the Warrens chose wisely.

The Conjuring franchise has made two billion dollars. The Conjuring: Last Rites had grossed over $187 million worldwide by September 7, 2025. The film’s debut included $83 million domestically and a record-breaking $104 million internationally.

The movie is based on The Haunted, which Ed Gorman wrote.

His estate has been paid not one cent.

He receives no screen credit, not even the acknowledgment that the original book carried on its first page.

It’s possible, maybe probable, that Ed signed a work-for-hire contract. It’s also likely he was paid only a few thousand dollars for the work. So maybe Warner Bros/New Line doesn’t owe him anything, legally. But I am of the opinion that, even so, his estate deserves a taste, and Ed deserves screen credit.

But that seems unlikely to happen.

As Count Floyd would say, “Scary, kids, scary!”

M.A.C.