Posts Tagged ‘Antiques Series’

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.

The Writing Life

Tuesday, September 16th, 2025

A box arrived from the UK with a few advance copies of our new Antiques/Trash ‘n’ Treasures mystery, Antiques Round-Up. When I say “our,” of course, I mean Barb and my latest novel in the now long-running series.

Barbara Allan and Antiques Round-Up

I have watched, I guess it’s been for decades now, Barb developing into a terrific writer. She was good out of the gate, and like most of us, her improvements are somewhat incremental and don’t make themselves clear until some time has passed and those improvements have accumulated.

I know I still think I’m improving as a fiction writer even at this late date. I’ve been writing long enough to have no doubt lost my fast ball here and there, but certain craft things have improved. Or at least I’m still trying to have them improved.

Barb and I have different approaches. She is slow-and-steady wins the race. Even now, I may not spend more than two months writing a novel (depends on the novel of course), but she spends most of her writing year on one book in the series. Fiction writing is a love/hate affair, but I have always loved it more than hated, and often Barb seems to be the other way around. She always talks about the current book being the last one she’s willing to do, while I’m always looking for more books to write, as if as long as I have a book contract, that God or the Grim Reaper or whatever will wait for me to finish the current novel.

If there’s a point to this ramble, it’s how proud I am of the way Barb has risen to a truly professional level, and this latest book – which will be published a couple of weeks from now – is evidence of that.

We were published for years by Kensington, but our current home is Severn House, a UK publisher that puts a lot of their emphasis on the United States market. But we do hear from readers who dropped away at the point Kensington stopped publishing us, largely because – thus far – the series has been tricky to find in Barnes and Noble, and BAM and other of the surviving brick-and-mortar book stores.

Some of these readers don’t even know the series is continuing, and when they find out it is, want to know where they can get back onboard. Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have the Severn House books in hardcover and e-book; and all of them eventually become available from those sellers in handsome trade paperback editions.

We have had a lot of Hollywood interest in the Antiques novels – specifically for TV – over the last fifteen years. It’s gotten very close – very – but as yet no cigar. That’s why we made an Antiques movie ourselves, Death By Fruitcake, with Paula Sands (legendary Midwestern broadcaster) as Vivian Borne and Alisabeth Von Presley (Midwest pop superstar) as Brandy Borne. We’re proud of our little movie – I scripted it from a Barbara Allan novella (Antiques Fruitcake) and Barb co-produced and served as production manager.

This past week Chad Bishop, our co-producer (and Director of Photography and Editor) and I began dealing with the “deliverables” (the things a distributor requires) for Twin Engines Global. This ranges from getting trailers and the film itself to them and making closed-captioning happen and taking lawyer meetings about getting an LLC put together and a hundred other things.

Certainly easier to just write a damn book. It was however a fun, hard, unforgettable experience, shooting and editing it and all, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Meanwhile, I am almost half-way through the new Quarry novel, Quarry’s Reunion, which will be the 50th anniversary book in a series that I thought Berkley Books had killed 49 years ago…but thankfully Hard Case Crime unexpectedly resuscitated it in 2006 with the help of filmmaker Jeffrey Goodman, who made a short film from my script (A Matter of Principal) and a film version of The Last Quarry (The Last Lullaby). Fans also helped keep it alive.

I mentioned that fiction writing is a love/hate affair. Though she seldom grouses, I know Barb finds writing difficult. Funny thing is, after all this time, so do I.

I will spend a full day writing two or three pages of description and set-up for a chapter, or an hour on one paragraph; fortunately for me, the rest goes a lot faster, and dialogue scenes fly, as they need to when readers encounter them. Most of my novels are mysteries, obviously, and I re-plot them constantly as I go. Quarry’s Reunion had five or six preliminary overview outlines, and I’m on the fifth or six chapter breakdown now.

Part of this is my approach being half planning, half improvisation. I try to know enough about the story I am about to tell without mounting my horse and riding in all directions. So I know major things – like who-dun-it and why. Then I come up with a plan, a road map, a structure, that may be twenty pages long. But I try to keep it loose enough to make discoveries as I go. This has me revising the plan, changing and tweaking the trip I’m taking, as I go.

Here’s another difference between writers. Though we come up with the “Barbara Allan” basic ideas together, Barb rarely asks me for an opinion or plot help or anything while she’s writing her draft. I’m willing to help, and often offer – but I have too many ideas, too many ways to solve a problem, to do anything but frustrate her, throw her off-track. So except in cases of emergencies, I keep tabs on what she’s doing on her draft, but don’t interfere. And when I do my draft, she gets out of my way. She does read my chapters as I go, so can catch anything I’m doing that will upset the plot applecart.

I mentioned above that I sometimes spend a day on a few scene-setting opening paragraphs, or an hour or more on a transitional paragraph between breaks within a chapter. And in recent years – due, I’m afraid, to all the media around us dumbing everybody down – I get some (not a lot) of readers and reviewers complaining about what they see as needless description. I will defend that only with this: I have to see a scene in my mind before I write it; and in description – yes, even clothing – I am writing about character as much as anything.

Still, as I said to Barb the other day, “It’s frustrating to spend so much time on the stuff some readers skip.”

Here’s where you can pre-order Antiques Round-Up; it’s out on Oct. 7. It’s likely also available via the Net at anywhere else you like to buy your books.


Hardcover:
E-Book: Nook Kobo Google PLay
* * *

Here’s a review of The Two Jakes 4-K Blu-ray (from Kino Lorber) that is a comprehensive look at the film and the disc, and includes the commentary by Heath Holland and myself about the film. You have to scroll down to read that, but the whole review (my opinion is higher than the reviewer’s of the film itself, but the review is thoughtful and fair, even when I don’t entirely agree with it).

The Two Jakes poster excerpt

This a new bio of me at a Dick Tracy Wiki site. Looks extensive, though I admit not reading it yet.

M.A.C.

Death by Fruitcake in Your Future

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025

Our film, shot one year ago here in Iowa, now has a distributor! After carefully considering four options, we have signed with a distributor, Twin Engines Global.


Alisabeth Von Presley and Paula Sands

What does this mean? Starting soon – a date TBD – you will have the opportunity to enjoy Death by Fruitcake on one or more streaming services. This will be the transactional stage, which means you pay to view it. After a number of months, it will move to streamers where you can watch free, but usually with commercials.


Alisabeth, Keith Porter, Paula

If you’re a fan of the books in the Antiques/Trash ‘n’ Treasures mysteries that Barb and I write (as “Barbara Allan,” you really won’t want to miss this. And I think any of you, who follow my work, will enjoy it as well. It’s a low-budget production, of course, funded largely by ourselves; but you likely enjoy seeing the amateur sleuth antics of mother and daughter Vivian and Brandy Borne brought to life.

We will keep you alerted as to when it becomes available on a streaming service (possibly more than one) as soon as we know.


Max and Nate Collins on set

I’m also pleased to announce that Twin Engines Global will be releasing physical media – a DVD – and I will provide ordering and availability info when I have it.

I love indie filmmaking and Death By Fruitcake represents my tenth production, starting with Mommy and Mommy’s Day, continuing on through Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market, Shades of Noir, Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life, my two documentaries (V.T. Hamlin & Alley Oop and Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane), and more recently Encore for Murder and Blue Christmas.

Filmmaking is definitely a sideline for me, at least as a writer/director. I’ve had several of my scripts produced beyond this – The Expert and recently Cap City. And I was lucky enough to land a bigtime, eventually Academy Award-winning production of Road to Perdition, as well as one season of an HBO series based on Quarry.

But I am definitely a regional director, usually operating on what would best be described as micro-budgets (the Mommy movies sported budgets that were solid for the video store era, where they saw considerable success). I am grateful to those of you who follow my novel-writing career with the support you’ve shown for these efforts.

And remember – what would the coming holiday season be without a slice of fruitcake!


On set

On set with Rene Mauck, Chad Bishop, Alsabeth Von Presley, Jeremy Ferguson, Kim Furness, Max Allan Collins
* * *

What We Did on Our Summer Vacation Pt. 3

Consider this a coda to last week’s post about my living through a hallucination-filled hospital stay, post-ablation surgery. This follow-up will not include me thinking I was trying to expose and then contain a murderer. Nothing so fun. I will make this brief, just to bring you up to date.

I returned home from my hospital stay on Thursday the 21 of this month (August). I was worn out from the mental gymnastics my brain put me through, but generally feeling okay. But over the next three days my energy declined to where I thought I might pass out any second.

Barb and I had our doctor’s nurse check my vitals. The nurse found my blood pressure to be dangerously low. We contacted my cardiologist’s office, where I was encouraged to wait two hours and have my vitals checked again. This led to another alarming result and we (Barb and I) were sent to the Muscatine ER, where after a bunch of tests I was returned by ambulance to the Rock Island Heart Center, where I’d been recently discharged.

That night and the next day were comfortable but concerning – my blood pressure was all over the place. Two great nurses, Paige and Jemma, kept my spirits up. Finally, on the third morning of my stay, my cardiologist gave me several options, the most appealing of which was getting a pacemaker.

There’s a certain irony here. Back in my Crusin’ days, I would often introduce “Ferry ‘Cross the Mercy” or “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying” by saying, “Little-known fact – today, Gerry and the Pacemakers all have pacemakers!”

This amuses me less now.

As anyone who knows us will tell you, the best thing about Max Allan Collins is his wife Barbara. She stayed with me in my hospital room (which this time I didn’t imagine was a terrible hotel room or a holding cell for a serial killer) for the two nights I was there. Barb is the best partner anybody ever had.

The procedure went swiftly and well, and I was discharged on August 30. I have some discomfort and still don’t exactly have my zip – but I wrote this, didn’t I? With one arm in a sling?

No doubt God or fate or just the ticking clock will eventually defeat me. But for now I’m winning.

I will be back writing the new Quarry tomorrow – Labor Day. Aren’t you supposed to labor then?

M.A.C.

Cap City on the Big Screen

Tuesday, August 19th, 2025

We had what was, I believe, the first public screening of Cap City, aka Mickey Spillane’s Cap City, at the Last Picture House in Davenport as part of the Quad Cities Alternating Currents arts festival. This happened on Saturday evening, August 16.

It wasn’t a full house – this festival is enormous with an unimaginable amount of stuff going on – but the third-of-a-house we had really seemed to like it, and the Q and A session I did after was smart and fun. Seeing Cap City on a big screen, with full sound, was a revelation – I had only seen it at home on my 55″ TV. But a huge screen and booming sound – in a dark room with a bunch of others – was a wholly different experience. For one thing, nuances in the performances of our large cast were revealed. And it looked great, with its black-and-white noir style and somewhat cinema verité shooting approach.

Though this isn’t the final “locked” version, it is only shy a couple of requests I made to director David Wexler, which he will make. The final version will go out on the festival circuit later this year.


Max and Barb with uber-fans Mike and Jackie White, who drove three hours to attend the Cap City screening.

The story of Cap City goes back half a dozen years, at least, when David approached me about licensing (and attaching me as screenwriter to) the novella “A Bullet for Satisfaction.” This was the fairly ancient novella begun by Mickey Spillane, found by me in Mickey’s files, and completed/revised by me for inclusion in The Last Stand. That novel was Mickey’s last completed work, but it fell a little short of what was needed for a book. I did not feel this final novel required me jumping on as a collaborator, but I did edit it, and finished/polished “A Bullet for Satisfaction” as the opening salvo of the book.

David thought the novella was a perfect distillation of Mickey’s noirish approach. I came aboard as a co-producer and delivered a script in 2020. It got a considerable amount of interest, but by (I think) 2022 David asked me if I’d be willing to rewrite the script’s protagonist from a tough male cop to a just-as-tough female. With my Ms. Tree history, I was fine with that, since we had interest from several credible actresses in doing Cap City if the female was the lead. It would also put some spin on that a more traditional male lead would have brought.

As is often case, we had considerable brushes with a green light for the project, which was designed to be a $3 million indie. It would have involved locations including the murder scene (a hotel suite), various government buildings, a bookstore, a bar, the protagonist’s apartment, a boathouse, a small yacht and assorted others. It was ambitious for the budget, but very doable. Both David and I have a lot of experience with working on a budget for an indie film.

Last year David called and was sad to say it seemed like it was time to move on. He just couldn’t find the budget. I had recently completed Blue Christmas, which had also been written for multiple locations but which I had turned into a one-set production, getting it made as opposed to being just an un-produced script in my desk drawer. I suggested to David that we use that approach – I would so a rewrite that took place entirely at the hotel suite where the murder went down, and have the suspects brought to the detective at the scene for questioning.

David loved the idea, and I wrote the script and he got the necessary funding, and had just the right actress for Roz, Erica Munez of HBO’s Long Gone By, and a big cast of East Coast actors with more credits than you could shake a stick at.

Here’s where it gets fun.

David calls me and wants me on set for the shoot. But I can’t, because the Day One of the Cap City shoot is also Day One of the Death by Fruitcake shoot, which I am directing.

And so it was that I had two movies shooting simultaneously. That’s a bizarre first but a fun one.

Look for Cap City at the film festivals and, soon after, streaming.

On the Death by Fruitcake front, it looks like we’ll be making a distribution deal later this week.

M.A.C.