Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher « Friends/Family/Fans of Max Allan Collins

Processing Spillane and Heller

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2021

I should probably dispense with asking you to buy and then Amazon-review both Fancy Anders Goes to War and The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton (co-written by the great Dave Thomas). I won’t even remind you what wonderful Christmas gifts they would make.

I just have too much class for that.

Instead, I’ll talk about process this week. Who doesn’t love process? A few weeks ago I touched on the challenges and difficulties of Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction, co-written with James L. Traylor. We are waiting with anticipation for the editorial notes to come back, which will require tweaking but I hope nothing major, as I am very proud of my draft, and Jim likes it, too.

What surprised me was reading all the material about Mickey I’d gathered going back to my junior high days – I literally used the scrapbook I kept, because it had various articles and reviews pasted in among my carbons of indignant letters to anti-Spillane reviewers and my cartoony portraits of Mickey. What I hadn’t anticipated was the picture all of that material would paint when, for the first time, I read it all at once…not just in dribs and drabs as articles and such first appeared.

I feel like I put together pieces of the Spillane puzzle that had eluded me, despite my close personal relationship with the man for the last 25 years of his life. Many assumptions I’d made – and had cockily presented as fact in various pieces and introductions about Mickey and his work over the recent years – proved short-sighted…not wrong exactly, but lacking nuance.

For example, I no longer think his conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses had anything much to do with the near decade-long respite he took from novel writing. I do think his style shifted, and the violence and sex were both more restrained; but not absent. Re-reading The Deep recently, I saw how he used the threat of impending violence to create a story about a tough hero who really only kills once, and then in self-defense. In The Girl Hunters, Hammer kills nary a soul, though he does trick the “evil one” (as Traylor puts it) into self-destruction.

This probably had as much to do with his attempt to develop as a writer and to respond through his work to the incredibly unfair and even vicious attacks upon him throughout the 1950s. Other than perhaps Elvis Presley, no figure in popular culture had ever seen so much success and, simultaneously, so much condemnation. But the bio will, for the first time, reveal the major reason he stopped writing novels at his popular peak.

Writing about Eliot Ness with Brad Schwartz was a similar experience for me. So often Ness had been presented as a glory hound when the research showed he was primarily responding to pressure from above to get positive press. Additionally, things routinely dismissed by the Ness naysayers – including events reported in his autobiographical The Untouchables (mostly ghosted by sportswriter Oscar Fraley) – turned out to have really happened. It shouldn’t have been surprising to learn that Eliot Ness was actually Eliot Ness, but it was.

The Big Bundle (Cover Sneak Peak)

And now, for the first time in several years, I am digging into the research for the upcoming Nathan Heller novel, The Big Bundle (for Hard Case Crime). The case I’m dealing with – the Bobby Greenlease kidnapping of 1953 – is not as famous as most of those I’ve examined; it was at the time, but today it seems mostly forgotten. What gives it the needed household-name-crime aspect that a Heller novel requires is a sinister connection to Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters. It is, in fact, the first of two novels about Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy, although this first one focuses primarily on the Greenlease case.

The Heller process is an odd one. First I have to select the true crime that seems appropriate for Nate’s attention (and mine, and yours). Second, I have to familiarize myself enough with the crime to write a proposal to be submitted to an editor/publisher, who must first sign on before I start serious work. Once we’re at that stage, I have to dig into the research, where the proposal was just a superficial look at the case. The approach has always been to look at the subject as if I were preparing to write the definitive non-fiction treatment of the case and then write a private eye novel instead.

A real problem with the proposal stage is that I am only guessing what the book will be about. The in-depth research (you will not be surprised, many of you, that I am in touch with George Hagenauer right now) is what reveals the book to me. And it always surprises me.

Here’s a small example. In True Detective, in what is essentially the origin of Nate Heller, Heller sells out to the Chicago Outfit to get promoted from uniform to plainclothes – to become a detective. He fingers the fall guy (who is playing along) to get somebody blamed and put away for the publicity-attracting murder of reporter Jake Lingle. The willing patsy, very minor in all of this but a seminal part of Heller’s story, is a real-life low-level mob guy named Leo Vincent Brothers.

So I’m researching The Big Bundle yesterday. For reasons I won’t go into right now, a taxi cab company run by a St. Louis racketeer named Joe Costello is instrumental in the story. I went in familiar with Costello in, again, only a superficial way – his name came up in the preliminary research and got him on my radar. So now, reading a book called A Grave For Bobby by James Deakin, I learn that Joe Costello’s partner in the taxi cab company…wait for it…was Leo Vincent Brothers.

This kind of thing always sits me on my ass. This tiny fact isn’t key to the story – it’s just an odd resonance, and a reminder that Heller’s life is just one long story, not really a succession of novels. Another name turned up yesterday, a Chicago thug with ties to the JFK assassination.

It would help if I had a steel-trap mind. But I don’t. I didn’t in my thirties and I really, really don’t in my seventies. So such discoveries send me scrambling back into the research.

In the meantime, I am looking for a way to insert Nate Heller into this narrative in a meaningful, credible way.

Wish me luck.

* * *

Two brief Blu-ray recommendations.

Jack Irish Season 3 is out from Acorn. It’s the final season of this series (there are actually five seasons, but the first two were movie-length episodes) and it’s a four-hour movie, essentially – one story, wrapping up the series in a smart, thoughtful way. I will go so far as to say it’s one of the best wrap-ups of a series, certainly one of the most satisfying, I’ve ever seen.

Guy Pearce plays a solid modern version of a private eye in this Australian neo-noir with all the surviving regulars back. Three years have passed since the preceding series and the passage of time and the need to learn, grow and move on is the central theme.

Great series.

Speaking of great, Eddie Muller has delivered one of the best Blu-rays of the year in the Flicker Alley presentation of The Beast Must Die (La Bestia Debe Morir), a 1952 Argentinian noir based on the Nicholas Blake novel, The Beast Must Die. Blake was really Cecil Day-Lewis, a UK poet laureate who is also the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

While it’s a bit pricey, the blu-ray is essential for noir enthusiasts, and if you spring for it, be sure to watch Muller’s introduction, which provides context and more, including how-to-watch Spanish-language melodrama of this period, i.e., the acting tends not to be subtle.

You can get it directly from Flicker Alley here.

* * *

Check out this lovely review of Fancy Anders Goes to War.

Here’s a Ms. Tree: The Cold Dish preview with info.

Also here.

I did a Mike Hammer interview for what, uh, appears to be an interesting magazine….

M.A.C.

Tags: Eliot Ness, Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher, Fancy Anders, Fancy Anders Goes to War, Interviews, Mickey Spillane, Ms. Tree, Ms. Tree: The Cold Dish, Nathan Heller, Reviews, Scarface and the Untouchable, Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction
Posted in Message from M.A.C. | 11 Comments »

Rock Oldies, London Praise, and I Love Suicide Squad

Tuesday, August 10th, 2021

My band Crusin’ played its second gig of what will be a short season (one more for sure, maybe two) and it went well. A nice crowd joined us on an upper floor of the local library (!) for the Second Sunday Concert series. We delivered two eclectic sets and the audience seemed to love it, and really responded to our off-the-cuff, often tasteless jokes. And son Nate helped us load in and out – thanks, son!

Crusin’ — Second Sunday Concert Series, Muscatine.

M.A.C. with Crusin', Second Sunday Concert Series August 2021
M.A.C. performing with Crusin’, Second Sunday Concert Series

Somebody has unearthed an early (possibly first?) Seduction of the Innocent gig at San Diego Con in 1988. Worth a look. Miguel on drums. This is before Chris Christensen joined up and shared drumming duty with Miggie and guitar duty with Bill Mumy.

Barb and I went to the Happy Together Tour concert in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at the restored and beautiful Paramount Theater. About half the audience (including us) wore masks. The older demographic meant most were vaccinated, but this was our first venture into a concert, and while we had a blast, I think the vaccination rate will have to go up before we do so again.

The Cowsills – a band I had no respect for or interest in back in the day – were the best act, hands down, vocally, instrumentally, with great showmanship. They opened, which was wise, as it got the crowd whipped up right off the bat. Everybody was good, though a couple of the acts hid the fact that no (or very few) original members were part of the INSERT NAME OF BAND HERE. Two of the original Association members made that line-up of three more valid than most, but the Association appearing alone has a full stage of singers and players whereas here they used the backing band everybody did.

But Gary Puckett was charismatic and in a fine voice, and a genuinely impressive stylist. My band the Daybreakers opened for Gary Puckett and the Union Gap on a mini-tour in Iowa in early 1968 (we were promoting “Psychedelic Siren”). Their equipment didn’t arrive by plane as planned and we loaned them ours (equipment, not plane) – they struggled through with our garage band gear and gave us a signed picture.

Would have loved to reminisce with Mr. Puckett. He was essentially the headliner, coming on right before the Turtles wound up the show and getting five songs (not the usual four), with the pre-recorded announcer bringing him on and off. The Turtles are really just a Turtle now, with Mark Volman very funny but not up to singing much and the great, ailing Howard Kaylan (the lead singer) replaced by Ron Dante of the Archies. He did “Sugar Sugar” and the probably mostly diabetic audience lapped it up.

That sounds like a less than glowing review, but it was really a fun, fine show, the backing band excellent, with the hit after hit nature of the beast pulling the nostalgic heart strings. “Cherish” was our song, Barb and mine, and even a stripped-down Association had its way with us.

* * *

A nice surprise came recently when the London Times gave a rave review to the second of the Eliot Ness non-fiction tomes by Collins and Schwartz, in honor of that book appearing in trade paperback. That review appears below (minus an incredible color photo of Kevin Costner as Ness in the DePalma Untouchables film):

Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher by Max Allan Collins and A Brad Schwartz review — the thrilling history of the torso murderer

One evening in September 1935 two boys playing softball in a run-down area of Cleveland, Ohio, found a young man’s corpse hidden in undergrowth. The body was naked except for a pair of black socks, and bore the marks of torture. Its genitals and head were missing. Decapitation seemed to be the cause of death.

Detectives were perplexed. They were used to seeing mutilated bodies. Yet as one noted, this was usually done “to prevent identification, but almost never to kill. It’s a hell of a job to remove a human head.”

Police later worked out that the dead man was Edward Andrassy, a small-time drug dealer, pornographer and pimp who worked shifts in Cleveland’s City Hospital. And his was not the only body they found that day. Dumped 30ft away was another male corpse, similarly abused. No one ever established who this second man was. But he and Andrassy would come to be known as victims of a serial killer known as the Cleveland Torso Murderer or the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. During the next three years ten more chopped-up cadavers appeared around the city, and the case became notorious across America and as far away as Nazi Germany. It embarrassed Cleveland’s police, who could do nothing to stop it. And it dogged the man in overall charge of the force: the fabled American crime-fighter Eliot Ness.

Ness is one of the most famous names in the annals of American crime-fighting: he was the inspiration for Dick Tracy and the 1950s TV series The Untouchables. The latter was supposedly based on Ness’s exploits in Prohibition-era Chicago, when he helped to build a case against Al Capone’s mob. But it was almost entirely fictitious. So there is much in his life for historians to explore.

Max Allan Collins and A Brad Schwartz are Ness aficionados. Collins has written several novels and a one-man stage show featuring Ness; Schwartz, an academic, has been obsessed since childhood. They collaborated on a previous book, Scarface and the Untouchable, chronicling Ness’s clash with Capone. But when Capone went to jail, Ness was in his late twenties and barely halfway through his life. What, the authors ask, did he do next?

Well, in 1934 Ness moved to Cleveland, to shut down illegal alcohol distilleries. Within a year, however, he was made city safety director, overseeing the police and fire services. He was not a detective (still less an FBI agent). And he seldom carried a gun. Rather, he was a conscientious, stiff-necked stickler for standards in public life, an intellectual, a progressive and an ardent believer in institutional reform.

Ness believed that urban life would be safer and happier if young men were kept out of jail and encouraged to serve their communities. He hated bent police officers and placed his trust in “untouchable” types — like himself — who would not be bribed or bullied by criminals or politicians. He thought officers should be fit, sober and alert. He loved technology and pioneered the use of police cars fitted with two-way radios. He used journalists and ad campaigns to portray his policies in a favourable light. Most of these were radical ideas in the 1930s, and not universally popular. But Ness took police professionalism seriously and saw it as a force for social change. “I want to prove what an honest police force with intelligence and civic pride can do,” he once said.

Sadly, none of this high principle counted for much when there was a crazed killer on the loose. The detectives who worked the Mad Butcher case under Ness may have had car radios, but they did not have access to modern forensics or DNA testing. Moreover, Collins and Schwarz argue, Ness was a rationalist, who believed crime had logical solutions. “The idea of a murderer who killed solely for satisfaction made no sense to him.” When he did try to get progressive, it was a disaster.

Since the Butcher preyed on Cleveland’s shanty towns, Ness sent officers in to round up the “hoboes, transients and homeless” from the slums and set fire to their shacks. Needless to say, victim-blaming on this scale made for poor public policy. For three years the butcher went about his demented business. And he was never caught, although Cleveland police investigated thousands of suspects. In 1939 an immigrant called Frank Dolezal was tortured by sheriffs outside Ness’s jurisdiction into confessing to one murder, and died, supposedly of suicide, in his cell. The other prime suspect, Frank Sweeney, an alcoholic medic and army veteran related to a senior Cleveland politician, was committed to a mental asylum but never brought to justice. After Ness left his post in Cleveland in 1942 Sweeney wrote him cryptic postcards but stopped short of a confession. When Ness died of a heart attack in 1957, after a post-police career of failed business ventures, heavy boozing and spiralling bad luck, the case remained unsolved.

In arranging this slab of Ness biography around the Butcher case, Collins and Schwarz are on slightly thin ice. Today many pious historians turn up their noses at murder narratives that focus on (or glorify) killers and cops, arguing that we should instead elevate the victims. Moreover, in using the salacious horror of the killings as a peg for what is really a much broader chronicle of Ness’s post-Chicago years, the authors give the Butcher somewhat more prominence in Ness’s life than he deserves.

All the same, this is a deeply researched book — the source notes run to more than 100 pages — which reads like a thriller and sheds new light on a poorly understood modern American icon. Crime history doesn’t get a lot better than that.

As much as I am thrilled by this review, I disagree with aspects of it (are you surprised?). First of all, Ness was a detective and man of action. Second, I feel Brad and I make it clear who the Butcher was. In writing a non-fiction book, however, we had to leave it up to the reader to draw that conclusion from the evidence we present. Still, this is sweet UK kudos for a book that was, I’m afraid, woefully ignored in the USA.

The possibility of a Showtime Ness/Capone series is written up here (as you may recall, Scarface and The Untouchable has indeed been optioned by CBS and a Showtime deal made – resist holding your breaths, however, for the show to appear).

* * *

The Wild Dog/Suicide Squad fuss continues to be covered on various comics sites, thankfully ignored largely by the wider media. Many comics fans think the creators of a character should shut up and let subsequent writers do whatever they like.

Okay, the problem here is that Wild Dog is a hero and only a criminal in the sense that Batman originally was and Zorro always was. Re-purposing the character as a right-wing lunatic who led the Jan. 6 Insurrection and took a proud dump on the Speaker of the House’s desk reflects a lazy, disrespectful writer and a quietly contemptuous editorial/publishing staff with zero regard for the original intent of the creators.

The Suicide Squad concept is villains being traded reduced sentences for taking on dangerous missions (The Dirty Dozen). Wild Dog isn’t a villain. And even if you allowed him to be viewed as one and arrested and imprisoned by the Justice System, tying him to the most notorious domestic terrorist act in modern times is a cheap shot I can’t let pass without comment.

Bleeding Cool has done the most coverage and their most recent post at least reprints my views and Terry’s, which is really all I ask. I don’t expect the writer or DC to do anything but ignore us and our wishes. It’s not like they’re headquartered in the Siegel and Shuster Building.

So you may be expecting my reaction to the new Suicide Squad film to be wildly, doggedly negative. Nope. I loved it. It’s over-the-top, beautifully written and directed by James Gunn channeling Quentin Tarantino. Oddly, it appears to be nihilistic but betrays a good heart in the final fifteen minutes. I’m not sure the movie would work without Idris Elba, who really, really needs to be the next James Bond. Also, John Cena is excellent after stinking up the joint in the latest Fast and Furious.

Another movie you might expect me to hate: Jungle Cruise. Nope. Loved that, too. It is also over-the-top, in a different way, and Duane Johnson (come on, this is the Rock, you know it and I know it) is just an actual, no kidding charismatic movie star and there’s nothing to be done about it. Emily Blunt is charming, too. It’s one of those movies that is somehow stupid and smart all at once, and if it veers too heavily into Pirates of the Caribbean mode in the second half, well, they are both Disneyland rides, aren’t they? At least we haven’t been subjected to a It’s a Small World After All flick (my mother used to sing that song to me because she knew it drove me into an absolute rage but would get me out of bed).

But we streamed both movies. As much as the Happy Together Tour pleased us, and how great it was for Crusin’ to appear as part of the Second Sunday Concert series, Barb and I are both getting paranoid about Covid again. We have grandkids we don’t want to infect, and being fully vaccinated doesn’t seem to be enough.

M.A.C.

Tags: Crusin', Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher, Movie Reviews, Reviews, Wild Dog
Posted in Message from M.A.C. | 5 Comments »

Bam! Pow! Zap!

Tuesday, July 20th, 2021

To Live and Spy in Berlin received a nice boost from BookBub. The new release price is $3.99 for the e-book; it’s $14.99 for the “real” book.

And on Wednesday the San Diego virtual Comic Con link with my panel with the great Andrew Sumner of Titan will be available. The discussion includes the upcoming Titan Ms. Tree third volume, the Nolan reprints from Hard Case Crime, and the Mike Hammer 75th anniversary publications from various publishers…and more.

The trade paperback edition of Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher, the non-fiction work by A. Brad Schwartz and myself, is available now. It has a slightly different, tighter subtitle, at my urging: Hunting a Serial Killer at the Dawn of Modern Criminology. The info is here.

It looks like both Mommy and Mommy 2: Mommy’s Day are available for streaming on Roku.

Getting back to Live and Spy in Berlin, the indefatigable J. Kingston Pierce at the definitive mystery fiction web site The Rap Sheet said the following about John Sand:

I read and enjoyed both Come Spy With Me and Live Fast, Spy Hard, Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens’ initial two John Sand espionage novels, though I haven’t yet had a chance to write about them. And now the pressure to do so is even greater: Collins writes in his blog that the series’ third installment, To Live and Spy in Berlin, is due out on July 14, from Wolfpack. That makes three fast-paced, James Bond-ish adventures published in just nine months! No wonder I can’t keep up. “Will there be more John Sand books?” Collins asks. “That’s up to you. We have left something of an incredible effing cliffhanger [in book three] that needs resolving, so it’s on your conscience not ours if sales don’t justify that resolution.”

* * *

Barb and I took in Black Widow this weekend and I’m happy to report it’s a good film. It concentrates on espionage and action/adventure, and character interaction, particularly between Black Widow and her sister, well-portrayed by Scarlett Johansson and a scene-stealing Florence Pugh. There’s a surprising amount of humor and the Marvel-style, sometimes wearying action sequences don’t really get out of hand till the last half hour.

I could not help, in watching Black Widow, but flash onto a complaint a reviewer had recently about To Live and Spy in Berlin, specifically that John Sand was not a realistic character but rather a “cartoon.” While I would prefer the more exact “comic strip character,” I don’t argue with that designation.

Ever since I began also being a writer of comics, my novel writing has frequently been the target of reviewers who (rather lazily I think) remind potential book readers that I am a lowly comics writer. This has happened less post-Road to Perdition, which was a key component of the new attitude toward comics, i.e., graphic novels.

But I used to have reviewers who would look at, say, Nate Heller and write, “Bam! Pow! Zap!” in regard to my prose writing – sometimes in a kidding way, others in a more dismissive manner. The idea that anyone would look at Nate Heller and think “comics character” is absurd, but these reviewers knew I was writing the Dick Tracy strip and took a predictable cheap shot.

I think generally – and again, Road to Perdition played a role in changing attitudes in and about the field – readers mostly now understand that the comics form accommodates everything from over-the-top superhero to grimly realistic real life and everything that falls between. It’s a storytelling form with as many, actually more, capabilities than most others.

When the comics label on a writer is used, however, it’s almost always disparaging – meaning the writer is producing kid’s stuff or ridiculously over-melodramatic junk.

So is John Sand a comic strip character in the sense that his adventures are unrealistic and run to outrageous melodrama? I would say yes to that. And it’s intentional. But that does not mean (as a few detractors of the series say) the John Sand novels are spoofs. I’m getting a bit tired of having to say this, but Austin Powers, Derek Flynt and Dean Martin’s Matt Helm are spoofs. John Sand is an homage to Fleming’s Bond (and the early Bond films) and something of a pastiche with a dollop of my historical fiction approach. Bond, by the way, was in addition to novels a long-running comic strip signed by Fleming and pre-dating the films (Connery cast, in part, because he resembled the James Bond of the UK comic strip).

The problem I run into – and those of you who drop by here frequently are aware of this – is the reader who likes one or two of the series (or one-shot novels) I write, and is confused, irritated or even angered by others. Of course, sometimes it’s easy to tell which Max Allan Collins is performing today – no one is likely to confuse Antiques Fire Sale with Killing Quarry or G.I. Joe with Nate Heller in Better Dead.

On the other hand, most – actually, much – of what I write is melodrama. Kitchen-sink realism interests me not a whit. My technique, which may or may not always be successful, is to layer a believable, even realistic surface on a story that is larger than life (“over the top,” in the view of detractors). That’s common to Antiques Fire Sale and Killing Quarry. No apologies.

I realize it can be confusing. Mike Hammer is more in the vein of John Sand (not surprisingly, since Bond was a British take on Hammer, largely) but would seem to be more along the lines of Quarry or Nate Heller. But my responsibility is to do the best job I can whichever road I go down on a given project.

And I am a professional writer. This is how I make my living, how I keep the lights on around this joint. This means I write for various markets and even multiple audiences. I admit it’s a frustration when a reader gets mad because, say, Girl Can’t Help It features people-next-door protagonists in a small-town setting. That’s actually a pretty good example – I do run into Antiques readers who love the Girl books, but would likely be appalled by Quarry.

Another aspect of course is the need for me to stay engaged. When I come to Quarry or Nate Heller after doing books that aren’t about them, I do so with renewed energy and interest. Robert B. Parker and I started out about the same time. You may have noticed he did just a bit better than I did in the world of publishing. But had one of my early series taken off – Nolan or Quarry specifically – I might have spent the bulk of my career writing chiefly about one of them…and going quietly nuts. Rich, but nuts.

I like that I have created a bunch of things, written over 100 books about a bunch of different protagonists in different settings and even eras.

Here’s an example of my approach, and it will demonstrate why some readers embrace my work and others don’t like it at all. The Caleb York books grow out of an unproduced screenplay Mickey Spillane wrote for John Wayne in the 1950s. When I was asked to write a series about York, I decided to approach it (and the first book, The Legend of Caleb York, a novelization of Mickey’s screenplay) as if I were doing a 1950s western movie that might have starred Randolph Scott or Audie Murphy.

In other words, the Hollywood Myth of the West, which had little to do with the actual Old West. I did this unashamedly and with a certain amount of delight. But at the same time, the world Caleb and his cast are plopped down in is a rather realistic one, with a lot of research brought to bear. York will shoot it out in the kind of Main Street gunfight that almost never really happened, but if he goes into a hardware store in the 1880s, by God it will be an 1880s hardware store. A bad guy right out of High Noon will have his roots in Quantrill’s Raiders. It’s a mix.

It’s trying to provide a recognizable realistic surface and undercarriage to a tale that is mythic, larger-than-life.

One of the things I try to do here is let you know what I’m up to with whatever my latest book is. I think I’ve made it clear than To Live and Spy in Berlin is neither Austin Powers nor John le Carré. Matt Clemens and I knew damn well we were over the top. But we did it with a twinkle in our eye but, while we were in the middle of the writing, a conviction in the reality of our fairy tale world.

* * *

The Wild Dog controversy raged on for a week but has cooled somewhat. I have nothing more to say about it, right now anyway.

However, one earnest soul reminded everyone that I had killed Moon Maid almost right out of the gate when I took over the writing of the Dick Tracy comic strip in 1977. This point was made, apparently, to show I had little respect for what had gone before. The Earnest Soul asked, “What did Chester Gould think?”

Well, here’s the thing. Chester Gould was still signing the strip with me and his assistant Rick Fletcher. Chet was consulting on a regular basis and knew, and understood, that the Tribune Syndicate wanted us to remove all remnants of the moon era from Dick Tracy. He had already dumped most of it himself.

So what did Chester Gould think? He may have been reluctant, but he went along. And, as I say, put his name on the strip…above mine.

* * *

Here’s a nice write-up about To Live and Spy in Berlin from our pal Sean Leary at quadcities.com.

M.A.C.

Tags: Appearances, Comic Con 2021, Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher, John Sand, Mommy, Mommy 2, Ms. Tree, Reviews, To Live and Spy in Berlin, Wild Dog
Posted in Message from M.A.C. | 4 Comments »

Posts Tagged ‘Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher’

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Rock Oldies, London Praise, and I Love Suicide Squad

Bam! Pow! Zap!

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