Posts Tagged ‘Dead Street’

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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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100 Reasons to Love Mickey Spillane

Tuesday, June 27th, 2017
Spillane 100

How about an advance look at what’s planned for Mickey Spillane’s 100th birthday next year?

Two books will share centerstage – The Last Stand and Killing Town. Both are really special. The Last Stand will feature two novels – a short one circa early ‘50s, A Bullet for Satisfaction, which I co-authored from an unedited rough draft; and a full-length one, entitled (appropriately enough) The Last Stand.

The latter novel is the last book Mickey completed. My contribution has been to give it an edit, based upon comments Mickey made to me when he and I discussed the book shortly after I read it. This was probably around two weeks before he passed. Mickey was working on The Last Stand and two other novels simultaneously, The Goliath Bone and Dead Street (both of which I completed for him).

With his wife Jane Spillane’s permission, I held back The Last Stand until now for several reasons. First, it’s not a typical Spillane novel – it’s more of an adventure novel along the lines of Something’s Down There, the last book published during his lifetime. While we discussed having it published as the first book after his death, ultimately we decided to set it aside, probably for the centenary. I felt it was better to make the Mike Hammer novels a priority – to get them finished and out there. I’ve obviously been doing that, as well as completing (for publication by Hard Case Crime) Dead Street and The Consummata, both crime novels in keeping with a typical Spillane approach.

The Last Stand is a fun novel, a modern-day western and a disguised rumination on the tough guy entering old age, and readers will be very entertained. But I thought for those who might be confused by a lack of certain expected Spillane elements, including the more typical A Bullet for Satisfaction would make for a nicely balanced volume. Satisfaction is a rogue cop revenge tale with lots of sex and violence (the hero’s name is Rod Dexter).

Hard Case Crime will be doing the book in both hardcover and paperback, something they only do occasionally. Publisher Charles Ardai also brought a loving hand in the edit.

So we have the final Spillane novel.

And we have the first Mike Hammer novel.

Wait, what…?

Killing Town is another manuscript I salted away with the centenary in mind. It’s a substantial manuscript, longer than those I’ve been dealing with of late, and it represents Mickey’s first go at doing Mike Hammer, probably circa 1945…predating I, the Jury. I will tell more of the story behind it later, but it’s a novel that takes place in an industrial town in upstate New York with Mike Hammer running a dangerous errand for an army buddy. It could not be more typically vintage Spillane in tone and approach. Titan is publishing in hardcover.

I have not begun my work yet, but it’s the next big project.

We will also in 2018 have the mass market edition of The Will to Kill, the paperback of the Caleb York novel The Bloody Spur, various new audios, and more.

Those of you with blogs might want to think about doing a Spillane piece for 2018. (His birthday is March 9.) I will be writing something for Mystery Scene, and hope to complete a non-Hammer short story for The Strand.

* * *

Here’s a nice piece on Hard Case Crime with an emphasis on comics.

Publisher’s Weekly includes Quarry’s Climax in upcoming books they’re showcasing.

Here’s an audiobook review of The Titanic Murders.

And finally here’s a NSFW link that shows a reader enjoying an advance look at Quarry’s Climax.

M.A.C.

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Better Dead

Tuesday, March 15th, 2016
Better Dead

Hardcover:
E-Book: Amazon Nook Kobo

The first Nathan Heller novel in three years, BETTER DEAD takes a step back in time from the JFK Trilogy (BYE BYE, BABY; TARGET LANCER; ASK NOT) to deal with the events of the Red Scare-era 1950s.

This book has been coming for a long time. It’s one of the projects that got set aside when it came time for Heller to make a comeback after about a decade away. To get Heller back out there, I proposed the Kennedy trio, a good bet for a sale because of the high-profile nature of the material; a trilogy with Marilyn Monroe, Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy was appealing. But it meant skipping several things I had planned to do, including a Robert Kennedy/Jimmy Hoffa book that I hope eventually to get around to.

With BETTER DEAD, the tricky thing is that I have two cases for Nate to deal with. Neither seemed right for a single book, but together – with the shared era and a number of common characters beyond Heller himself – the whole just might exceed the sum of its parts.

Joe McCarthy is one of the characters – and factors – that joins the two stories: the Rosenberg “atom spies” case, and the Frank Olson murder. The latter has to do with the Army scientist who was dosed with LSD at a CIA retreat, which had unfortunate results.

Heller is working on the East Coast exclusively this time around – he’s just opened a branch office in the Empire State Building – which puts him right in the heart of Mike Hammer’s world circa 1953. Heller has always had things in common with Hammer, but this time – in this setting – those commonalities come out more prominently. In fact, as the guy completing the Hammer stories from Spillane’s files, I several times questioned whether I’d slipped out of Heller territory and into Hammer. And is that a bad thing? Certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

On the other hand, Heller’s victories can never be as complete as Hammer’s.

Others in the cast include Bettie Page, Dashiell Hammett, Roy Cohn, Bobby Kennedy, and Sidney Gottlieb (the CIA’s Dr. Feelbad).

It’s a wild one. Watch for it May 3rd.

– – –

Check out this cool QUARRY’S LIST review.

MURDER NEVER KNOCKS is a Pierce’s Pick this week!

Here’s a nice review of QUARRY’S DEAL.

And here’s a somewhat late-in-the-game review of DEAD STREET.

M.A.C.

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Antiques Swap — Collect it!

Tuesday, May 5th, 2015
Antiques Swap
Hardcover:
E-Book: Amazon Google Play Nook Kobo iTunes

The latest entry in the Trash ‘n’ Treasures series (usually referred to as the ANTIQUES series) hit the bookstores last week. Barb and I (the co-authors, as “Barbara Allan”) spotted ANTIQUES SWAP nicely displayed in the Davenport Barnes and Noble.

This one begins at a swap meet but actually touches upon other, more risque meanings of “swap,” in a plotline we feared might be frowned upon by our editor, though we got away it. Cozies are supposed to be…cozy. The murders are supposed to be…nice. But for all the humor we put into the books – and we put a lot in – we try not to take homicide too lightly.

We also realize that our audience may include some readers – possibly you – who don’t regularly read cozy mysteries. After all, the great reviewer Jon Breen has called us a “subversive” take on the form, which he meant as a compliment. When we created the series, and were asked to include certain elements (exotic setting, cute pet, gimmick premise), we did so in an overtly tongue-in-cheek way that we thought would get us rejected.

Obviously we weren’t.

By the way, neither of us love the term “cozy,” and I suspect a lot of mystery writers feel that way. But the term seems to be the reigning one, much as “noir” has supplanted “hardboiled.” Cozy mysteries are more properly called “traditional.”

Ours are definitely in a sub-genre of comic mysteries. We don’t, however, consider ourselves to be spoofing the form or doing satire. Just as we take the murders in the stories seriously, we take our two main characters seriously and follow them through problems and challenges in their lives. Vivian Borne, Serenity’s theatrical diva, may seem larger-than-life, but I’ve met her at various times in various forms. You probably have, too.

Of everything I work on, the ANTIQUES series is the one that maintains the most constant presence. That’s largely because Barb spends almost all of her writing time on it. Of late we’ve been doing a novel and a novella every year, and that keeps her in production all but a few months in the summer. So we’re discussing the stories pretty much year-round.

Also, the nature of the book business is that once you’ve “finished” a book, you’ve just begun – a copy-edited manuscript will roll in unannounced for you to check through (and we both have to do that), and then galley proofs (which we both have to deal with). These never arrive at a good time, and always are due yesterday.

Barb and I had barely finished next year’s ANTIQUES FATE when the upcoming novella, ANTIQUES ST. NICKED, arrived in galley proof form. She’s gone through it already. I haven’t yet.

In the meantime, I continue work on THE BIG SHOWDOWN, the sequel to the current THE LEGEND OF CALEB YORK. I admit to feeling something of an imposter, as I have read precious few western novels in my time. On the other hand, I love movie westerns and have a huge collection of them on DVD and Blu-ray. I’ve said here many times that MAVERICK was my favorite show in childhood (and still ranks high) and that the episode “Shady Deal at Sunny Acres” is the greatest hour of episodic television ever…an opinion that hasn’t changed.

While working on CALEB, I have subjected Barb to a festival of western movies…but “subjected” really isn’t right, because loves western movies, too. Right now we’re in the midst of a Joel McCrea festival. I rank McCrea in the upper reaches – in the top five western stars (John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Audie Murphy and Gary Cooper being the others). Regular readers of mine know I am an Italian western fan, since Nolan was largely based on Lee Van Cleef’s screen persona in those films.

What I find really difficult in the CALEB YORK novels is balancing the myth with the real west. Despite my reputation for historical accuracy with the Nathan Heller novels, I am much more interested in the mythic west than the real thing.

THE LEGEND OF CALEB YORK seems to be a little tough to find in bookstores, so I recommend you order it online. It’s already in a second printing.

Incidentally, while writing ANTIQUES FATE – which touches upon the British school of mystery writer – we spent our evenings in a festival of UK crime fare, leaning heavily on MIDSOMER MURDERS and the new Blu-rays of the great Joan Hickson as MISS MARPLE.

* * *

This terrific ANTIQUES SWAP review just came in from one of our favorite writers (and favorite people), Bill Crider.

My writer pal Ed Gorman used this review of the Dover reprint of STRIP FOR MURDER at his terrific blog.

The QUARRY series gets great play in this article about Memphis trying to lure the series back there (it’s shooting in New Orleans currently with limited Memphis footage scheduled to be shot later).

A recurring cast member has been added to the QUARRY series.

Here’s another of those articles about movies you didn’t know were based on comics, with ROAD TO PERDITION included. But either I am getting very old or the world is getting very young when such movies include ANNIE and THE ADDAMS FAMILY (!!!).

And finally, of all things, here’s a review of the audio of DEAD STREET, the first Spillane novel I completed (though I took only limited credit for my polish and concluding chapters).

M.A.C.

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