Posts Tagged ‘Baby It’s Murder’

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An Impact-ful Noir, James Stewart, and…More

Tuesday, February 4th, 2025

I don’t generally review physical media (that is, Blu-rays) here, but this one, from VCI (who – full disclosure – distributed Blue Christmas) is a worthwhile exception. The movie I’m talking about is a fairly well-regarded noir that I’d never seen: Impact (1949), with Brian Donlevy (perhaps best-known for starring in Preston Sturges’ The Great McGinty (1940) and playing Quatermass in two mid-‘50s Hammer adaptations of the British TV serials).

Impact movie poster

What made me pop this disc into my Blu-ray player the very day said disc arrived, however, was the presence of the two female leads – Helen Walker and Ella Raines. Walker starred with Fred MacMurray in Murder, She Says (1945), that greatest of comedy noir, and had a memorable femme fatale role in the original Nightmare Alley (1947) (accept no substitutes). Raines was a noir favorite (Phantom Lady, 1944) and also a favorite leading lady of John Wayne’s (Tall in the Saddle, 1944). Both women were strikingly, somewhat unconventionally beautiful.

Impact movie poster
Helen Walker

Both actresses, despite varied careers, are probably most associated with their film noir work. Walker in particular played a number of femme fatales, while Raines was more often the “good girl” in the mix, and that’s the case in Impact.

Impact movie poster

And, in Impact, it’s the two women who make the most, well, impact. Donlevy is quite good, and his performance has more colors than was his usual practice – he’s made to go more places, and he goes there in an understated but typically powerful way. He was not usually the leading man, and even playing Quatermass, for example, comes across as a character actor. In any event, a man with a lot of walls that are difficult to look behind.

In Impact, he plays a rather ruthless leader in the automotive industry, casually running roughshod over his board of directors. But at home, in his insanely large and lavish apartment, he is a love-struck pushover to his beautiful, charming wife, Walker in a tricky role. What seems like a textbook happy marriage, if dominated by the female, soon reveals itself with Donlevy as the cuckold targeted by Walker for homicide.

I don’t want to ruin the many twists and turns – one of them involves the great Anna Mae Wong in her second-to-last big-screen performance – but structurally this is like nothing else in the noir (or any) catalogue. It was shot by iconic cinematographer Ernest Laszlo (Kiss Me Deadly, 1955). And it begins as a noir out of the Double Indemnity (1944) play book, if largely from the targeted victim’s POV, playing as a bigger-budget Detour for about the first third.

Then the second act finds a wandering Donlevy (after fate or maybe God gives him a pass on being a murder victim) winding up in what seems to be an Andy Hardy movie, minus manic Mickey Rooney. This is where Ella Raines comes in as a war widow running her late husband’s gas station. The whole mood is wholesome small-town after the harrowing noir first act, cross-cutting with the efforts of Walker back in the big city to dodge the Columbo-like efforts of an unlikely elderly police detective who is inexplicably the very British Charles Coburn (he refers to an impending retirement to justify all this).

Primarily, though act two is chiefly about good old-fashioned small-town American goodness, which redeems Donlevy, despite the Carville-like setting presented just short of cloyingly and with the shadow of big city nastiness hanging over all this normal niceness. There’s a level of Christianity under this section – traditional be-merciful, do-unto-your-neighbor-as-you would-have-them-do-to-you variety. Yup, this is the middle act of a film noir and it works.

Then there’s the third act, of what is an exceptionally long (almost two-hour) noir, where Donlevy does the right thing and comes forward back in Big Town to reveal he’s still alive and that his wife, now facing murder charges, didn’t get the job done. Somehow (beautiful plotting here) this lands him in the pokey facing a murder rap of his own. The third act is sort of a Columbo-tinged 1950s Perry Mason episode.

All this from journeyman director Arthur Lubin, best known for directing Abbott and Costello and Francis the Talking Mule!
It’s the damnedest thing I ever saw, and I loved it.

Here is a very good article on Ella Raines with an interview with her daughter.

Here is an in-depth look at the Hollywood rise and the tragic fall of Helen Walker.

Winchester 73 movie poster

I also watched the Criterion 4K release Winchester 73 (1950), one of the five great westerns James Stewart starred in that Anthony Mann directed. Mann would go on to be a specialist in grand-scale historical epics (The Fall of the Roman Empire, 1964) but came out of Poverty Row films noir, like T-Men (1947) and Raw Deal (1948). The latter films connect well with the noir-ish Stewart westerns.

Stewart is my favorite actor of his era, probably of any era. No one starred in more great films – and I mean great films – than Jimmy Stewart…from his Frank Capra classics to Philadelphia Story (1940), Harvey (1950), Rear Window (1954, Vertigo (1958), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Other gems were sprinkled here and there – Bell, Book and Candle (1958) a particular favorite of mine – but with the Anthony Mann-directed westerns a major part of Stewart’s incredible cinematic legacy.

No other actor has a list to rival James Stewart’s. He wasn’t always good – when the material was spotty, he could be hammy, as in the J. Edgar Hoover valentine, The FBI Story (1959) or if were miscast, as in The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), or was trying to elevate weak material (Thunder Bay, 1953, also Mann).

I mention all this because Winchester 73 is a revenge story, and Stewart displays his dark side, his eyes gleaming as he starts to strangle Dan Duryea. This is the side of Stewart first displayed in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), the disturbing boiling over of his frustrations in the final quarter of that film. And it comes to a stunning head in Vertigo, which is my favorite film. Number two on my favorites list (right before Chinatown) is Kiss Me Deadly, which brings us to Mickey Spillane.
Are you surprised? Doesn’t almost everything I write about here come back around to Mickey?

Here’s why it does this time: Winchester 73, and several other Stewart/Mann westerns, are revenge tales, and most of the great post-war films among Stewart’s best depict a hero who is touched by madness and rage. The actor who came back changed, even damaged, from war service is not unlike the PTSD-ridden Mike Hammer of those five early Spillane novels. Or for that matter the WW 2 vets who made Spillane the best-selling post-war mystery writer.

Everybody talks about Spillane (when they talk about him at all these days) in terms of sex and violence; but it is the rage, the thirst for revenge, that really drives Mike Hammer in the first five novels, and that is the same engine in Winchester 73, Vertigo and other stellar Stewart (post-war) performances. Interestingly, with the possible exception of The Glenn Miller Story, most of Stewart’s positive salutes to America and the military are minor, even boring things – Thunder Bay, Strategic Air Command (1955), The FBI Story.

Even in Winchester 73, it’s clear Stewart is a (Civil) war veteran come home changed and traumatized. Circling back to Impact, Donlevy is likely a war veteran and his love interest lost her husband in the war. So many of these noirs, so many melodrama movies of the late forties into the early ‘60s, are impacted by the Second World War – the sacrifices and heroism but also the horrors.

I was born in 1948, and I grew up hearing – often in an indirect, undramatic, even nostalgic fashion – stories and indications of that war from my father and other male (and female) relatives. Gen Z has no memory of even this second-hand experience, and the Greatest Generation is mostly gone now – so why should we expect Gen Z to remember something they never experienced?

This brings me, inevitably, to my own work. We are a month away from the final Mike Hammer novel, Baby, It’s Murder, becoming available. You can order it from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or wherever you like to buy books right now. And True Noir, my ten-episode adaptation of the first Nate Heller novel, True Detective, directed by the fantastic Robert Meyer Burnett, is also available for order now (it’s in progress – the first five episodes are available and the rest will drop on a weekly basis).

So from Mike Hammer we go to Nate Heller, the detective of mine who is involved in real historical crimes and mysteries. Those of you (and this includes me) who were not alive in the early ‘30s can experience it through this immersive audio drama…and from my books, which cover most of the rest of the 20th Century.

I advise sampling some of Jimmy Stewart’s best movies, to any of you Gen Z saplings out there, as not a bad move.

M.A.C.

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Completing “Completing Mickey Spillane”

Tuesday, January 14th, 2025

Before I get into the topic of the day, let me express my concern and support for my friends in the Los Angeles area over the cataclysmic fires that have destroyed so much. My friend Robert Meyer Burnett, who at this writing is safe, has spoken eloquently on his YouTube channel (see his recent Observations) about the disaster and its impact. To me, and to many, Los Angeles is the capitol city of entertainment present and past, and thinking about not just the homes and businesses, but landmark structures, that have been lost is staggering, as are the terrible losses to the populace.

I wish I didn’t hate the phrase “our hearts and prayers go out” so much, since those words are just a reflexive go-to in so many situations; but I wish I had better words to replace them.

* * *

Last week I discussed collaboration here, but I did not mention the most unusual and important collaboration I’ve been half of.

I would think most people who stop by here are well-aware of my love for Mickey Spillane the man and Mickey Spillane the writer (he hated “author”).

It has been the greatest privilege, the high honor, of my career for Mickey to have entrusted me with completing various works-in-progress and novels-in-consideration of his to fruition. The thirteen Mike Hammer novels Mickey wrote have been expanded by fourteen more novels by Spillane/Collins. Seeing my name on a book jacket next to him remains something I can barely compute.

I’ve told this story many times, so I’ll keep it brief. Mickey, who was dying of pancreatic cancer, called me and asked me if I’d complete for him The Goliath Bone, designed to be his last Mike Hammer, should he not be able to do so. I of course said I would, if that became necessary. Shortly after, he instructed his wife Jane to conduct “a treasure hunt” in his three offices at his home in South Carolina and turn everything she found over to me.

That treasure hunt, a few days after Mickey’s funeral, was conducted not just by Jane but by Barb and me. Stacks of manuscript were assembled on the Spillane dining room table, and the three of us began to sort.

Among the manuscripts and other typescript and occasional hand-written material were half a dozen substantial Hammer manuscripts – eighty to one-hundred double-spaced pages each, as well as two non-Hammer novels well in progress, Dead Street and The Consummata (the sequel to his The Delta Factor). Additionally, the completed screenplay of The Saga of Caleb York, never produced, became a novel, The Legend of Caleb York, followed by five more York novels signed Spillane and Collins, the only books I shared with Mickey’s byline that he didn’t write some of, though they were drawn from material in the unproduced screenplay. I also turned his screenplay The Menace into a novel.

The play Encore for Murder – which appeared as a Stacy Keach full-cast audio drama – later performed in Owensboro, Kentucky; Clearwater Florida; and my home of Muscatine, Iowa – was based on a Spillane synopsis. I had planned to write a novel version but that never happened. Encore does exist, with Gary Sandy as Hammer, as a special feature on the Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane blu-ray and as a freestanding DVD. Gary played Hammer in the Owensboro and Clearwater productions, as well.

Another screenplay, The Green Woman, with a science-fiction/fantasy aspect, awaits novelization, if time and a market present themselves. A number of Spillane fragments, some fairly substantial, may one day serve for novels or short stories. But the demand will have to be there.

In Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction, the biography that James L. Traylor and I wrote about Mickey, we included supplementary material at the end of the book. My essay “Completing Mickey Spillane” discussed each of the Spillane/Collins Hammer novels and how I approached them in the writing.

Again, there were six substantial manuscripts, literally novels in progress. Then came a number of shorter but somewhat substantial fragments in varying shape, usually a chapter or two or three, and sometimes endings, and in some instances character and plot notes. The last three novels I wrote that were discussed in “Completing Mickey Spillane” came from (unproduced) synopses Mickey did for the Stacy Keach television series (Murder, My Love and Masquerade for Murder) and Kill Me, Darling was developed from several radio and television scripts (unproduced versions of the same otherwise unpublished story).

The remaining two Hammer novels, which had not been completed at the time Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction was published, are Dig Two Graves and Baby, It’s Murder, the former developed from a couple of chapters that appeared to be a few chapters into the story – Mickey’s beginning was not among his papers.


Hardcover:
E-Book: Amazon Google Play Nook Kobo iTunes

Which brings us to the final Mike Hammer novel of the canon, Baby, It’s Murder, to be published on March 4, 2025 (a day before my 77th birthday). It derives from a two-chapter fragment in Mickey’s files. I made the story a flashback, as I needed…or at least wanted…to give the series some finality. Let’s just say the wraparound chapters (one fore, one aft) take place at a funeral.

Those of you who have followed these books, and have not dismissed them as “continuations,” as some have despite the actual Spillane content they include, I give my deepest thanks. If you haven’t read them, or read the first few and drifted away, I will say only that these are all books of which I am very proud. My greatest thanks goes to Mickey. And to Jane.

If you are interested in these books, I would suggest snagging them soon. The last few books have had fairly short print runs, and maybe half a dozen entries ago, Titan stopped publishing trade paperback reprints of the Spillane/Collins titles.

Are these the last Mike Hammer books? Or anyway the last Mike Hammer books that would contain real Spillane material? Possibly. At my age, how many projects I have ahead of me is unknown. I still have two Hammer fragments I did not complete…yet. They may become short stories, or they may become novels, if the long-promised Mike Hammer film from Skydance becomes a reality.

There is one manuscript waiting for a publisher (though I haven’t approached any as yet). Mickey wrote a draft of a Mike Danger science-fiction novel; my draft has never been completed. Mickey and I discussed the possibility that if the Miramax movie option didn’t come to fruition (and it’s long since passed) we might convert it into a Hammer.

Danger, of course, was Mickey’s original name for Hammer (when he was prepping to do it as a comic book in the late ‘40s). He and I revived it for a comic book company, Big Entertainment, where it had a three-year run (and scored a contract with the Weinsteins). The science fiction aspect of the story has Danger (now Hammer) being sent into the future. It’s a kind of Spillane take on the H.G. Wells Time Machine.

If I can find the right market, that one will be out there as a non-canonical Hammer. Mickey had an idea for a sequel, too, also with an s-f aspect.

If you want to know the many reasons for this famous, bestselling writer (never author!) leaving so many manuscripts unfinished, it’s all spelled out in Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction. For those you waiting for the trade paperback of that one, none is currently scheduled, though the book is staying in print.

One final fun fact: my grandmother’s maiden name was Spellman. And Spillane and Spellman are apparently different versions of the same name.

* * *

This week I recorded the rest of the True Noir “History Behind the Mystery” episodes. If you have signed up for True Noir, now’s the time: go to truenoir.co.

And here’s the second “History Behind the Mystery.”

* * *

Here’s an article on Tom Hanks and his “comic book movie” (Road to Perdition).

M.A.C.

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Happy 2025

Tuesday, December 31st, 2024

This will be brief, but I want to acknowledge a few of the people who have made 2024 so rewarding for me.

First, Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime continues to give me and Nate Heller and Quarry a showcase for our wares.

Second, the whole group at Titan Books, including Nick Landau, Vivian Chung and Andrew Sumner – these three made the continuation of Mickey’s Mike Hammer novels, all based on material from Mick’s files, with Jane Spillane’s blessing, a reality, right up to the coming year’s Baby, It’s Murder. That whole bunch, with Charles Ardai added in, and my agent Dominick Abel, made my forthcoming Return of the Maltese Falcon (a year from now) possible.

Third, my producer on Death by Fruitcake, who also shot and edited the feature film, Chad Bishop. A one-stop-shopping moviemaker, Chad was also instrumental in getting Blue Christmas out there.

Fourth, the cast of Death by Fruitcake, every one of ‘em, but a special shout-out to our leads, Paula Sands, Alisabeth Von Presley and Rob Merritt. These three brought the principal players of the Antiques mystery series (by “Barbara Allan”) to credible, incredible life.

Fifth, the production manager and exec producer on Death by Fruitcake, who made the entire thing possible and even kept me alive – the love of my life, Barbara Collins.

Sixth, the incredible Robert Meyer Burnett and a phenomenal name cast for turning my script, based on True Detective, into the ten-part, immersive audio drama, True Noir: The Assassination of Mayor Cermak (available at truenoir.co). Big thanks also to producers Mike Bawden, Christine Sheeks and my longtime collaborator, Phil Dingeldein, who is directing and producing our History Behind the Mystery video series that accompanies each episode of True Noir.

Seventh, the members of my band Crusin’ (established 1974!) – Bill Anson, Scott Anson and Steve Kundel. We are now officially defunct, but you never know – a reunion could happen.

Eighth, my son Nathan who runs this website and posts these blog/Updates and does a fantastic job.

Ninth, thank you to everyone who reviewed Blue Christmas, even those of you (very much in the minority) who gave us bad reviews. All of you helped us get the word out that our little Christmas noir existed. Positive Amazon reviews still appreciated.

I know I have left people out. I did the best I could with my ancient brain. My apologies.

This year-end wrap-up ends a productive, exhausting 2024. A lot is coming up, including the last Mike Hammer novel and the 50th anniversary of Quarry, not to mention a certain Sam Spade book. We’ll be promoting Death By Fruitcake, entering a few film festivals and competitions, and we’re discussing a Quad Cities premiere with the Last Picture House in Davenport. I will be starting my draft of Antiques Round-up in January – Barb is wrapping her draft up now. And God willin’ and the crick don’t rise, we’ll be doing at least one more of the Antiques novels. A lot else is in discussion, but we’ll wait till 2025 to get deeper into any of that.

People always ask me one of two questions – are you still writing? The answer: Yes, nobody sends money to my house if I don’t. The other question is, why at your age are you working so hard on so many projects? Because at my age, the clock is not my friend.

But all of you are.

M.A.C.



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Let’s Kick True Noir in the Starter and Another Recognition Plus the End of Mike Hammer!

Tuesday, July 23rd, 2024

The Kickstarter for True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak is live right now.

It’s important, if you’re a devoted reader of mine – a Nate Heller fan – that you participate in some way.

What differs about this effort is that when the Kickstarter time is up (less than two months from now) the final product will be ready to deliver to you, immediately. Some of the physical media versions will take longer to produce, but if you are buying a download, you will not face the usual (and sometimes interminable) Kickstarter wait to receive it.

I have written this adaptation of True Detective, the first Nate Heller novel (Private Eye Writers of America “Best Novel” Shamus, 1984) myself – a 350-page script that will be ten thirty-to-thirty-five minutes each. Much of it has already been recorded. Our casting director/co-producer Christine Sheaks has assembled an incredible cast. And I’ve been able to attend many of the impressive recording sessions via Zoom.

We have two key roles we haven’t announced the actors for as yet – Heller himself and Frank Nitti. Watch this space, and the Kickstarter page, and you’ll know soon.

Anyone who has enjoyed (or is right now in the process of enjoying) the Nathan Heller novels will be…what’s the most evocative, graceful term?…a pig in shit listening to this ten-part adaptation.

I try not to do a hard sell here. We’re friends in this space and I don’t want my friends battered with that kind of thing. But this is key, in my opinion, to my legacy as a crime/mystery author and to Heller’s ability to thrive in the popular culture. I wish I had Jerry Lewis to plead my case and wind up singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

But Jerry is dead, and I’m 76.

So if you’re a fan – and I know you’re out there, I can hear you aging – contribute to this Kickstarter effort. And tell others about it, please. How serious about this am I? Well, the next Nate Heller novel – One-Way Ride – will be the last. And Heller’s future thereafter will be tied up with how well True Noir does. The plan is for three or four more audio adaptations of various novels (probably, next, The Million-Dollar Wound) and three seasons of live action thereafter. I will do all the scripts myself. This is an ambitious plan but doable…with your support.

In other words, if enough of you guys and gals (that phrase alone dates me, doesn’t it?) step up, NATE HELLER LIVES.

If you stop by here regularly, you know that I am about to direct Death by Fruitcake, an adaptation of the Antiques series, a micro production Barb and I are funding ourselves. For Blue Christmas, we ran a Kickstarter. For Death by Fruitcake, we plundered our savings to make our film because I don’t want to get in the way of this Kickstarter for True Noir.

True Noir in a weird way is a co-Hollywood/Iowa production. Our gifted director, Robert Meyer Burnett, is operating out of California. The executive producer, Mike Bawden, is in the Iowa/Illinois Quad Cities. And I of course have written that 350-page adaptation here in Muscatine, Iowa.

Also key is my longtime collaborator and pal Phil Dingeldein of dphilms in Moline, Illinois, who has been recording behind-the-scenes and promo footage from the very beginning. You’ll be seeing of some his work for the project right here soon.

The team is a strong one and I’m proud to be part of it. Again, forgive the hard sell. Just try to picture me looking up at you with big Margaret Keane eyes.

If you are going to the San Diego Comic Con, Rob and Mike and a bunch of the cast members will have a panel THIS WEEK on Thursday July 25 at 5:30 p.m., Room 6A. I am not attending because the travel, and the crowds and difficulty of attending this event (at which I was long a regular attendee – Seduction of the Innocent, anyone?), make it impossible for me to take part in what is a major part of the launch by Imagination Connoisseurs Unlimited, Rob and Mike’s company. Also, I began fulltime pre-production Fruitcake yesterday (Monday July 22…less than a month out of first day of shoot!).

I am incredibly frustrated that I can’t be at the con panel, but Phil Dingeldein and I recorded a greeting video that will welcome attendees to this key event. If you are going to the con this year, don’t miss this panel.

A poster announcing the event will be given to the first 1000 attendees (well, 999…I asked Rob to save me one). You saw this image a few weeks ago, but here it is again – it’s a banger, as they say.

True Noir: The Nathan Heller Casebooks poster

This project is the big one.

Be part of it…and you’ll never walk alone.

* * *

Normally I would lead with this (but the Kickstarter trumps…pardon the expression…all else):

I am pleased and frankly proud that I’m receiving the 2024 Strand Critics Life Achievement Award.

My statement about this recognition, given by the Strand magazine to the media, is here:

“This is a lovely honor from the last magazine of its kind, much as I am part of a passing pulp breed,” said Collins. “My heroes included Chester Gould, Mickey Spillane, and Donald E. Westlake, later my mentors and friends. My love of movies culminated in the filming of my Road to Perdition. Nathan Heller, Quarry, and Ms. Tree are evidence of my love for detective fiction, much as the Antiques books written with my wife Barbara are of my love for her. I am lucky and blessed to make my living telling elaborate lies about humans at their best and worst.”
M.A.C. holding copies of Skim Deep and Bait Money
* * *

I have completed – and sent to my editor Andrew Sumner at Titan Books – the final Mike Hammer novel, the fifteenth collaborative entry by Mickey Spillane and me on that series (sixteen, if we count the short story collection, A Long Time Dead). That collaboration is posthumous on Mickey’s part, with me (at his request in the last week of his life), taking on the responsibility of completing his unfinished works, primarily Mike Hammer novels.

The novel, with a wraparound that takes place at a cemetery bracketing an early ‘70s yarn, is entitled Baby, It’s Murder, the resonance of which will become clear when you read the book. Despite the bulk of the novel taking place around 1973 (coincidentally the start of my professional writing career), it serves well, I think, as a concluding Hammer novel. You’ll see what I mean if…when…you read it.

The Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer Legacy Project has been a joy and a challenge. I’ve done a few non-Hammer collaborations, too – The Menace for Wolfpack from an unproduced Spillane horror screenplay and completing three novels, Dead Street, The Consummata and The Last Stand (the latter an edit job) all for the great Hard Case Crime.

I do have a few things left that I hope to do – another unproduced Spillane screenplay that could become a novel, two or three Hammer short stories from fragments, and most important, the Mike Danger novel Mickey wrote the first draft of, one of his last works. It’s likely that I’ll convert it into a Mike Hammer novel, but its science-fiction elements make finding the right publisher tricky.

Also, if Skydance actually makes the Mike Hammer movie it secured rights to do, I might offer to do the novelization, and perhaps get a new Hammer novel out there as well. For example, I have yet to novelize the radio-style play, Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder (seen on the VCI blu-ray of the revised, expanded Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and as a standalone DVD with Gary Sandy as Hammer) and that’s a possibility.

My position has been – and I immodestly think it separates me from other “continuation” novelists of series, like those picking up after Robert B. Parker, for example – is that all of these books are stories Mickey set out to write. Every one of the Spillane/Collins-bylined books have real Spillane content. The only exception are the Caleb York novels – the first one, The Saga of Caleb York, reflects his unproduced screenplay (written for his pal John Wayne!), and the subsequent five are by me, utilizing his characters and some plot threads left by the screenplay.

The fifteen additional Hammer novels, and the short story collection, reflect the belief and enthusiasm of a handful of publishers…

Otto Penzler, who first published The Goliath Bone, The Big Bang and Kiss Her Goodbye, as well as the collection A Long Time Dead and the Collins/Spillane critical biography, Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction.

Nick Landau, Vivian Cheung and Andrew Sumner at Titan Books, who picked up reprint rights on the first three Spillane/Collins Hammer novels and published the next eleven novels. (Charles Ardai at Hardcase Crime stepped up for non-Hammer novels.)

These are people in publishing with a sense of history, with a grasp on the importance of Mickey Spillane in a pantheon of private eye writers that includes Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

My sincere gratitude goes out to them all.

M.A.C.

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