Our movie Death by Fruitcake, based on the mystery novels by “Barbara Allan”), is now available to stream FREE on Prime Video, The Roku Channel, and Apple TV.
Please support our effort. I am aware that not everyone who likes my work connects with (or has even tried) the Antiques novels that Barb and I write. Yes, they are cozy mysteries but with a subversive tongue-in-cheek edge. I love the books and enjoy being able to lean into the comedy, and the series must be pleasing someone because we just deliver book #20 in the series.
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Barb and I have spent the better part of a month in our basement dealing with comic books, hardcover and paperback books, DVDs and other assorted collectibles gathered over my lifetime. The collecting urge began probably when I was five or six, fed by a junky antique shop within easy walking distance where comic books could be traded two for one. It gave me admission to a world where the first Captain Marvel comics were still being published and Mad and the EC horror comics were available to rend and tear my childhood sensibilities.
The first comic book story I remember reading was in a coverless copy of Vault Horror: “All Through the Night” by Johnny Craig. That’s the one about a serial killer dressed as Santa Claus.
Three people shaped me (not including Johnny Craig).
First, my mother read me Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan novels at bedtime, and encouraged my comic book reading. She had been a fan of the Dick Tracy strip when my father was in the Navy out of San Diego. Here is the cover of one of the first two Dick Tracy comic books I read at age six.
Of course my father was hugely instrumental (kind of a pun) in shaping me as regards music. For the first phase of his career he was a high school music teacher, celebrated as a chorus man throughout the state of Iowa (with his brother Mahlon, an incredible band man). This was in the early 1950s and Dad’s high school productions of Oklahoma and Carousel were among the first – if not the first, as the Des Moines Register claimed – such productions anywhere. He and a mentor of mine, Keith Larson, put on an original musical (Annie’s Musket) during this period.
I was in most of Dad’s productions, of which Carousel is the one I remember most vividly, because he arranged to have a working carousel on stage. He was an amazing vocalist and vocal teacher who gave up teaching to become an executive in industry, a career shift he did not love but paid well; on the side, he directed a national championship Elks male chorus for fifty years to exercise his creativity and stay sane.
Sidebar: in high school, as a sophomore, I was put in a vocal quartet (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) to try out for All-State, the winners being part of a massive chorus at a concert in Des Moines every year. Our young choral teacher – perhaps unaware that my cronies and I had mounted two musicals in junior high – said he couldn’t afford to spend time with us. He would be too busy coaching the three other quartets of upper classmen, who had a genuine chance of being selected All-State; but he was letting us attend the competition for the “experience.”
I went home, told my father, and he gathered my fellow quartet members (I was the tenor) and coached us, which exposed me first-hand to what a great teacher he was. We won State (the other three quartets did not) and our same quartet went on to win as juniors and seniors, as well – I believe the only quartet in the state to do so.
Not all was sunny between my father and myself. He went to college on a split sports/music scholarship, and was a huge sports fan. I was not. I was a little kid who did not get his growth till junior high kicked in. I went out for football, to please Dad, and did well. By high school, as a defensive lineman, I had the most tackles in the Little Six (our conference).
Why I liked football was that I could strike metaphorically back at the bullies who had made my childhood miserable. I was a scrappy kid, as a skinny good student in glasses had to be, and had something like half a dozen fist fights between junior high and high school. There was just something about my face, and attitude, that begged bullies to take a punch.
Still, in those days fathers and sons were rarely close, and I was closer to my mom than to my dad. He was quietly dismayed that I would go to movie matinees on the weekends with my mother and not stay home and watch sports with him. I was a story guy, a book reader, and had (and still have) little interest in watching people play games. I liked to participate in football, where I could clobber somebody and get away with it, and scant interest in watching it.
My father and I developed a much better relationship as adults. He was supportive of my rock ‘n’ roll efforts and got my band the Daybreakers an invite to Nashville because of a successful former student of his who became a country western recording artist (Jack Barlow); that led to our record contract with Atlantic’s Dial subsidiary. But I think my thematic obsession in my writing of fathers and sons, parents and children, flows from my uneasy relationship with Dad.
The other major influence on me, growing up, was my late uncle, Richard Rushing. My uncle was an insurance investigator who had ambitions to be a writer, and that likely planted a seed. He was funny, in a dark way, and that seed probably got planted in me as well.
In his basement he had a 1950s man cave, with a TV and a fridge of beers (an alcoholic, clearly, but I didn’t realize that till later). We watched movies on the little black-and-white TV and he would cackle, “It’s a gobbler!” when a flick was bad. Yes, I learned about some movies being turkeys from Uncle Richard. He had Playboy centerfolds on the wall – these were those early, discreet nudes; but this was still bold for the times. And, yes, another seed was planted in me.
I have three really vivid memories of Uncle Richard.
The key one had to do with the Great Cavern of Comic Books. When I was five or six, and obsessed with comics, we sat in my uncle’s back yard and he gestured, with beer can in hand, toward the exterior cellar doors of his little bungalow. He told me, his eyes gleaming, that through a passage therein was a tunnel leading to a massive cave where all the back issues of all the comic books were stored – not just Donald Duck and Superman, but EC horror and Mad and…any title a child in 1954 could imagine.
The existence of this cavern seemed doubtful to me, even at six. So I would beg Uncle Richard to take me through those outside cellar doors and prove his tale true. He would refuse. Simply too dangerous to put his favorite nephew at risk. Trolls and hounds from Hell guarded the passage, after all.
Within a year or two, I understood this was bullshit courtesy of my beer-guzzling uncle. But for years – even today – I could and can picture this treasure trove of four-color wonder.
The other vivid memory of Uncle Richard came when I was starting to write crime fiction at age 14 or so, very much in Mickey Spillane’s sway. My insurance investigator uncle showed me (inappropriately) photos of crime and accident scenes he had investigated. One was of a fat man who had drowned in his car, eyes bulging, arms reaching for the sky through the busted glass of the submerged windshield in which he was trapped and getting nothing but more water.
“That’s what death is really like,” my uncle told me.
The other memory is even worse. As the years passed, Uncle Richard’s mental illness asserted himself. I don’t know when this happened, probably at least thirty years ago; but I was called to the psyche hospital in Iowa City to be told how serious his condition was. Maybe I had to sign off or something, as a representative of the family. I don’t remember.
What I do remember is the sight of my uncle strapped down to a table, stark naked (as Mickey would say), and giggling and laughing hysterically. He confided in me, spitting as he spoke, that he had completely fooled these doctors into thinking he was crazy.
What has brought all of these memories swirling to the surface?
Well, as I said at the outset, Barb and I have been dealing with my sixty-plus years of collecting, and it’s been sobering and illuminating. For one thing, I discovered things I thought lost, like several zippered storage cases of CDs for the car (one consisting entirely of Christmas titles); last week I mentioned finding letters I thought were gone, like the nice one from Ross Macdonald that I have since tucked inside my copy of The Blue Hammer. For another, I’ve had to deal with unceremoniously dumping precious but now water-damaged items.
And I didn’t even know I still had my Rootie Kazootie 3D comic book.
It has been, and still is, a lot of work. I am waiting for word to come in a writing project and taking advantage of the down time to deal with this basement from heaven and Hell. Barb has been doing amazing things – just now she interrupted the writing of this to say she’d got our jukebox working! It has been dead for years, but thanks to her now is experiencing a late Easter resurrection.
Coming across a Dick Tracy comic book I know my mother bought me (the one pictured here)…finding the poster I made for Camelot, when in my junior year I played King Arthur, and made my father proud…I have finally entered the Great Cavern of Comic Books my uncle teased me with, with only memories stirred and no trolls or hell hounds. I feel like I have performed an autopsy on the life that I am still living.
And other than the dust inhalation and the coughing, it doesn’t hurt at all.
M.A.C.
