This is being posted on my birthday, March 3, 2026. My birthdays are a stupidly big deal to me. Some of it’s for the usual reasons: cake, presents, and having your family sing “Happy Birthday.” It’s a childish fallback to…well, childhood.

Right around my eighth birthday I received (thanks to my mother having written him) a lovely letter from Chester Gould, including a drawing of Dick Tracy, and I think it’s fair to say it started me off on the road I’m still traveling. A birthday present from my folks a year later was a drawing board/easel – I wanted to be a cartoonist until mystery writing took over in my early teens, at which time I received another stellar birthday present from Max Senior and Patricia Collins – a typewriter.

I’ve often talked about another gift my parents gave me, though it wasn’t for my birthday. During high school, when all of my friends were out getting summer jobs, I was told that my allowance would continue through summer vacation – including my meal ticket money, even though I wasn’t in school eating the terrible cafeteria food for those three months! All I had to do was view writing as a job and write every day using my new typewriter.

I would write a novel in the summer and spend the school year trying to market it – emphasis on trying. Let’s stop there, as this is turning into a Horatio Alger story. (Can you picture little Allan Collins at his typewriter, writing away, his cheeks smudged with typewriter-ribbon ink? Not those cheeks!)

So what do I want for my birthday in 2026? Let’s start with another birthday in 2027 (and a few more after that). I find myself contemplating mortality because, first, I will be 78 tomorrow (assuming I wake up), and second, I still have books to write.

This birthday has an uncomfortable resonance because Max Allan Collins, Sr., died on his birthday at age 78. My father didn’t like thinking about death, and got angry if the subject came up (it took my mother forever to get him to get their wills made, and another forever or two to get him to purchase cemetery lots). He really never had to deal with dying. Never faced it.

And he didn’t have to, because on the morning of his 78th birthday, he said to my mother, “I think I need a nap” (or words to the effect) and went off to do that and passed away peacefully in his sleep.

My father and I had a sometimes contentious relationship – I was a headstrong smart-ass (not much has changed) and he was a sports guy and I wasn’t interested. But he was also a musician – his male chorus was around for fifty years under his leadership and won multiple national competitions – and that was common ground. During my rock ‘n’ roll days, specifically the last ‘60s, I grew a full-face beard and he didn’t speak to me for about two years. When I trimmed it to a mustache, I taunted him: “You gonna speak to me half the time now?” He smiled – he had an excellent sense of humor if not of irony – and the long family nightmare (“Ask your son to pass the salt”) was over.

For a period of a year or so, Dad and I sat in the country club (he was a member, I was not) over lunch and in the lounge, while I interviewed him about his experiences in the Navy in the Pacific during WW 2. These experiences were the basis of my novel USS Powderkeg (also published as Red Sky in Morning by Patrick Culhane). He didn’t live to see it published, but he (obviously) knew it was in the works. If you haven’t read it, the USS Powderkeg edition is revised and my preferred version, under my name, available at Brash Books.

I am pleased to say my relationship with my son Nathan, Barb and my only child, is closer and warmer than I enjoyed with my father. But I loved Max Collins and I’m not talking about myself – I was always “Allan” and “Al” until a publisher slapped the “Max Collins” byline on my first novels and I was stuck with it, adding “Allan” after a while, at Don Westlake’s suggestion. Yes, my real name is somehow my pseudonym.

Obviously father-and-son relationships are at the heart of my work – not intentionally, but when I look back at it, there it is. Road to Perdition is the most obvious example (several scenes from my life with Dad are reworked there, in particular the driving lesson). But Nolan and Jon are a surrogate father-and-son relationship. So are Quarry and the Broker (Quarry’s own father turned his back on him). And, in Road to Purgatory, Michael O’Sullivan and Frank Nitti are father-and-surrogate-son. Strained familial relationships inform the Mommy movies and novels; the Jack and Maggie Starr series; and the Antiques novels, although that’s more about Barb’s relationship with her mother.

Pardon all this reflection, but it may be the only positive thing about birthdays at my age. They are like Thanksgiving, minus the turkey: I think about what I’m grateful for. At the top of that list are Barb and Nate and grandchildren Sam and Lucy (their mother, Abby, is a gem, too). Next would be my collaborators in writing and music, everyone I played rock with, a joyously long list headed up by the late Paul Thomas but also my Seduction of the Innocent bandmates, including the late very much lamented Miguel Ferrer. Then come my collaborators on fiction and comics, not including a couple who were difficult but definitely including the likes of Barb (again), Terry Beatty, Matthew Clemens, Dave Thomas and (most recently) Robert Meyer Burnett. My collaborators in the seven movies and two documentaries I’ve made is an incredibly long list, headed up the late Michael Cornelison, though Phil Dingeldein and Chad Bishop rate at least a mention. And Patty McCormack – my God, what an honor and pleasure knowing and working with her.

Hey, I’m leaving so many people out it indicates it was a mistake even getting into this. But I’ve somehow managed to live an interesting life while never moving away from Muscatine, Iowa. Life has taken me to Hollywood and New York and all around Chicago. Band jobs in San Diego and Omaha and Atlanta and St. Louis, opening for the Rascals and Gary Puckett & the Union Gap and the Buckinghams and the Turtles (Flo and Eddie) and Peter Noone and the Grassroots and….

It’s been a trip. Visits to England and Germany and Italy, but never France (had to turn down an all-expenses-paid invite to a Paris mystery con because I was about to shoot Mommy).

But the most important gift I’ve received, other than my family’s love, is a career that let me make a living writing. It really is readers that fuel my engine. And the reason why I want to stick around for a few more years, pacemaker and all, is this: I still have stories to tell. The only thing that could kill me, besides time and maybe dementia, is not having anybody out there who wants to read me.

That I couldn’t survive.

I don’t believe I’ve ever done this before, but I want to share a review from Amazon with you. It’s the first Death by Fruitcake review we’ve received there, and it’s a beauty.

(It’s signed: zagain.)

Now that’s a birthday present!

We had an open-to-the-public table read of my horror script, House of Blood, at the Muscatine Community College “Black Box” theater on Friday and Saturday evenings.

Much of the cast were veterans of either Blue Christmas, Death by Fruitcake or both (I read the stage directions). Friday was lightly attended, but we had a nice house on Saturday.

Will House of Blood be my next micro-budget production? Don’t know. The audience’s reaction at the reading was encouraging, and most of the actors would be asked back for the film, if there isone and they are available.

But the only way there will be another micro-budget M.A.C. production is if we do reasonably well with Death by Fruitcake. We have a new distributor (DeskPop) who have issued a DVD and got us onto a slough of streamers. Here, again, are the links.

AppleTV
YouTube Movies
Google Play
Amazon Digital Buy/Rent
Amazon DVD
Oldies.com

What would “reasonably well” be? Simple: if we make back our investment and enough beyond that to make another movie.

The reason why House of Blood is the probably our next film (again, if there is one) has to do with its ability to be staged on a micro-budget. A Death by Fruitcake sequel would require a bigger budget project based on one of the Antiques novels, which means more locations and more shooting days…and more money spent.

The day, alas, is gone that we had numerous mystery-oriented magazines. Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock are still around, publishing short fiction and limited reviews.

But Mystery Scene is kaput, and only The Strand remains above water.

One of the best fanzines available by subscription is Deadly Pleasures from editor George Easter. It reports news about the genre and has an impressive stable of top reviewers – a fanzine at its best.

It is, thankfully, still around, although strictly in digital download form. The current issue includes three (count ‘em, three) reviews of Return of the Maltese Falcon.

Finally, I know you’re wondering what you can give me for my birthday. If you like Return of the Maltese Falcon, let people know by way of Amazon comments, B & N and Goodreads. If you like Death by Fruitcake, on DVD, comment at Amazon; ditto at streaming services. Same goes for True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, wherever you bought it whether as a download or physical media. (Big True Noir event coming!)

As I reflect on my career, I am convinced that everything good that has happened has to do with loyal readers. So all I ask (and I know it’s a lot) is keep reading me…and favorably commenting. Smart word of mouth is everything.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep blowing out those candles.

M.A.C.