This from Alisabeth Von Presley on instragram:
You can stream it on Amazon or grab your own copy (which, obviously, you should).
Directed by the incredible Max Allan Collins. Truly one of the most joyful humans to work with. I loved every second of this experience with him and the entire cast & crew!!
Here’s Tim DeForest on Bullet Proof:
Collins’ novels are fictionalized versions of cases Ness actually worked. In this case, he’s looking into labor trouble. A couple of smart racketeers are entrenched in important union positions, using this to extort money out of local business owners.
Ness’ problem is getting enough of the victims to testify, since doing so could be dangerous to their health. In the meantime, Ness recruits an old friend who is involved in the unions to help gather evidence. The friend is an old union hand, but recognizes that the racketeers aren’t doing the working class any favors.
Eventually, the situation escalates from vandalism and extortion to murder. There’s an attempt to hit Ness as well, but the top cop comes up with a clever plan to gather supposedly lost ballistics evidence and soon finds himself stalking a killer through a warehouse filled with plate glass.
It is yet another great entry in this great series. The story progresses logically and Collins presents Ness as a strong, smart protagonist. Characterizations of both good guys and bad guys are excellent.
It’s available here in a $10.99 trade paperback.
There is also a four-book collection of all my Ness novels in Kindle e-book format.
And Wolfpack has 16 of my novels (some with Mickey Spillane) as well as other e-book collections. If you haven’t read the three John Sand novels (Matt Clemens and I paying tribute to James Bond), the two Mommy novels, the Blue Christmas collection (with the novella that is the source of the film), or my pre-Antiques series collaborations with my wife Barb, this is where you’ll find them: https://wolfpackpublishing.com/collections/max-allan-collins
As I await hearing from one of my regular publishers on a book proposal, Barb and I have gone into Extreme Spring Cleaning mode.
To say our basement – home to many books, magazines, comic books, DVDs and laserdiscs – was overdue for attention would be a ridiculous understatement.
The shelves in what should be a library have become overstuffed and random, where for years they had been reasonably well-organized. Much of my Nathan Heller and other historical research lives there, until recent years decently curated. Now what should be an array of wonderful reading material looks like the Yard Sale from Hell.
Barb and I have spent most of two weeks on the project of sorting and culling, boxing up books and DVDs and magazines and comics to go to Half-Price Books and Davenport’s Source Bookstore. I admit to prefering the latter, because Half-Price Books is Complete Highway Robbery; but when stuff has gotta go, it’s gotta go.
This has involved going into nooks and crannies where previous books, comics and mags have been subject to water damage. These go unceremoniously into the trash. Here’s the thing about going through sixty years of collecting: you face not just your own mortality, but that of physical objects.
Sorting correspondence has been rewarding, however, with letters turning up from Chester Gould, Mickey Spillane, Ross MacDonald, Brian Garfield and (a huge stash from) Donald E. Westlake. Less rewarding have been decisions about which runs of magazines to keep and which to get rid of.
The difference between hoarding and collecting, particularly if you don’t collect carefully, is a surprisingly small one. Rob Burnett keeps his DVDs and Blu-rays and 4K discs alphabetized, and I bet Terry Beatty knows where every collectible he owns can be found.
I have always been good about not going overboard with multiple editions. I do have various editions of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost (Hammett, Chandler, Spillane), but mostly I keep only one copy of any book I love. And deciding what to keep that doesn’t fall into the “love” category, say a book you liked, or a not particularly good book by a favorite author, well…that’s where Barb comes in. She snatches me from the jaws of insanity and pitches what questionable item I’m contemplating into oblivion.
And I have to say she’s incredible. For example. Barb has, from the start, never minded me buying men’s magazines. She’s been beautiful as long as I can remember (going back to my crush on her in the fifth grade), and her self-confidence has never been shaken by paper images. We have pin-up paintings all over the house and she likes most and tolerates the rest. When our son Nate was a little kid, his friends would look around wide-eyed and say, “Does your dad like girls?”
But how many women would patiently pile copies of Hustler and Penthouse into box after box to take to be sold to a book dealer for pennies, nickels and dimes? Few, if any other wives, would. She even insists on loading up our vehicle with boxes of books, mags and comics, not wanting me to risk my heart condition.
And it’s true that I can only work for a couple of hours before either taking a long break or hanging it up for the day. This kind of sorting requires a lot of up and down and reaching for this or bending for that, which is hard for a guy whose meds all come with dizziness and balance side issues. If just you’re starting to feel sorry for me, which I sincerely doubt, my most recent check-up showed that I am in incredibly good health for somebody with so much shit wrong with him.
I have known for a long time that my possessions come seriously close to owning me. Now I am finally getting even with them.
And even at this stage – past the half-way point – our basement lair is looking more like a library and less like a embarrassment.
M.A.C.
