Over a long and blood-spattered career, I have had most of my worst notices published by the Kirkus reviewing service, widely known among authors as the most merciless of its kind. It is one of the major publishing “trades,” along with Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal and Booklist.
Lately, on occasion, I’ve been receiving some good notices from Kirkus. It reminds me of what Noah Cross tells Jake Gittes in Chinatown: “Of course I’m respectable. I’m old! Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” Thank you, Robert Towne.
Anyway, Kirkus has published a review of the new Mike Hammer novel by Mickey Spillane and me, Dig Two Graves, and it’s a good one.
BY MICKEY SPILLANE & MAX ALLAN COLLINS
RELEASE DATE: AUG. 22, 2023
Mike Hammer goes west.
Celebrating both his secretary/partner/lover Velda Sterling’s return from a long absence in the early 1960s and his own comeback from a protracted period of drying out, Hammer is out Christmas shopping with Velda and her mother, Mildred Sterling, when Mildred is hit by a car and sent to the hospital. Unlike the driver who struck her, she’s not dead, and summoning the couple to the side of her hospital bed, she unreels a revised version of Velda’s origin story: Velda’s father wasn’t unassuming Roger Sterling but Rhinegold Massey, Mildred’s mobbed-up first husband. After evading a prison term for his part in an armored car robbery by turning on his co-conspirators and getting whisked off to Dreamland Park, an Arizona retirement community whose entire population is in the witness protection program, Rhino, now rechristened Rainer Miller, suffered a fatal heart attack after a mugging two months ago. Putting aside his initial assumption that he was the target of the driver who nearly killed Mildred, Hammer decides to head out to Dreamland Park to ask questions, and Velda decides, over his objections, to accompany him.
Longtime fans of the franchise begun by Spillane and continued by Collins, working once more from his late friend’s drafts and notes, will anticipate that asking questions will be the least interesting thing Hammer and Velda do among the surprisingly spry and unsurprisingly felonious residents of Dreamland Park. The amusing conceit of a town for snitches allows full rein for Hammer’s signature blend of violence, chastely described lust, and revenge served cold, with several surprising twists thrown in as a bonus.
Like the denizens of its imagined retirement community, you just can’t keep this franchise down.
I should note that the release date of Dig Two Graves has been revised to September 19, 2023.
The splendid audiobook of Dig Two Graves, however, read by the wonderful Stefan Rudnicki, is available now.
Here’s a sample of Stefan reading the novel in a voice entirely suited to Mike Hammer.
Purchase Links:
Hardcover: 
E-Book: 
Digital Audiobook: 
Audio MP3 CD:
Audio CD:
My 1994 movie Mommy is playing on Roku (and a couple of other streaming services). I think Mommy’s Day is available, too.
I provided a link a few weeks ago to Mike Finn’s excellent review of the first Fancy Anders novella, Fancy Anders Goes to War as recorded by Skyboat, an outstanding production. But I thought I’d share the review with you here:
It’s a delightful confection that sets an improbable story of murder and sabotage involving a cast of characters finely balanced to respect early Twenty-First Century sensibilities, against what seemed to be a reasonably accurate portrayal of women working in a warplane factory in California in late 1942.
Almost all of the interesting characters, good or bad, are women. Almost all the women are exceptionally good-looking, with comparisons being drawn to well-known film stars of the period. They also come from ethnically and socio-economically diverse backgrounds and are comfortable climbing on gantries and riveting and bucking metal together to make warplanes.
The main character, Fancy Anders, (who is, of course, very good-looking) is a twenty-something rich, white, college-educated socialite who wants to work as an investigator in her father’s well-connected Confidential Investigations company. He recruits her as a secretary but leaves her in charge when he’s recalled to military service setting up an intelligence unit in DC.
When the CEO of Amalgamated Aircraft, a man she’s known all her life and who she calls uncle, needs someone to investigate the allegedly accidental death in his factory of the worker selected to be the real-life model for the Rosie The Riveter propaganda campaign, Fancy jumps at the chance to go undercover at his factory.
What follows is a fast, fun, uncomplicated but engaging romp as Fancy, who is not very good at being undercover, tries to find out what happened to Rosie and in the process gets herself into a great deal of trouble.
This was popcorn but the good kind of popcorn with just the right amount of melted butter and salt.
The ‘enhanced audio’ turned out to mean that appropriate background noises were added to the narration. To my surprise, the sound effects lifted the story by adding a retro Saturday Morning Matinee At The Cinema ambience that I enjoyed.
Gabrielle de Cuir’s narration was perfect.
This link will take you to the Audible page where you’ll find both Fancy Anders novellas, plus samples of the excellent Skyboat productions. The third novella (Fancy Anders Goes Hollywood) should be out this year from Neo-Text – our superb artist Fay Dalton is finishing up the illos now.
It’s my hope we will place a collection of the three novellas with a publisher – the novellas were designed to add up to one novel, a la Hammett’s Dain Curse – with Fay’s illos in full color. Counting the covers, that would add up to a stunning 33 full-page illustrations.
The new Wolfpack e-book, Dark Suspense (Volume Four in the Max Allan Collins Collection) is available now, gathering the novels Mommy, Mommy’s Day, No One Will Hear You (written with frequent collaborator Matthew V. Clemens) and the anthology Reincarnal, the title novella being the source of the movie that we are trying to launch here.
My indie film Blue Christmas is in serious pre-production now, although the disappointing lack of any support from Greenlight Iowa has us scrambling for funds. We have already raised $7000 (our goal) at Indiegogo, but will have to come up with possibly as much as $13,000 more…chicken feed in movie terms and a small fortune in real world terms.
I am considering offering some rare books of mine here, signed, to raise some of those funds. Does that hold any appeal to any of you? We will also be looking at some other grants and possible funding sources here in Iowa.
This film is going to happen. We’re going full steam ahead. Exactly who we’ll be able to cast and how many locations we’ll be able to use, however, are in question. We have confirmed Muscatine Community College’s black box theater as our “studio” for the production. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, VCI will be bringing out the expanded Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane documentary on Blu-Ray yet this year (and I hope to have the cover art for you soon) with Encore for Murder with Gary Sandy as Mike Hammer as a bonus feature (with a DVD only release of just that recorded Golden Age-radio style play).
I guess things are getting back to near normal, as Barb and I have started going out to the movies again, although not on our old once-per-week schedule. More like once-a-month.
But one thing remains a constant: we are back to walking out on movies. The idea is a combination of (a) life’s too short, and (b) we have better stuff to see waiting for us at home.
This image is not an endorsement.
What did we walk out of? The Meg 2. We had liked the first film quite a bit, but this one is fairly dire. Much of it occurs in murky underwater shots and the dialogue is cringe-worthy. The worst shark movie since Jaws 4.
I watched the new Shout Factory edition of Dragnet, the spoofy Dan Aykroyd/Tom Hanks movie from 1987. I remember not loving it on its release, but was grateful for Dragnet getting some attention. My reappraisal? It’s a bad movie. Aykroyd has some good moments and seems to respect (even as he kids) the original Joe Friday. This strikes me as Hank’s least effective performance, broad and trying too hard; but he’s not given anything at all smart to work with. Dabney Coleman plays a Hugh Hefner type with a lisp – horrible. Even Christopher Plummer is bad. How do you get a bad performance out of that man? Harry Morgan as the late (Uncle Joe) Friday’s partner Bill Gannon, now a captain, picks up a paycheck with surprising dignity.
Dragnet deserves a real movie, set in period, based on some major real crime. What a shame it died this way (yes, there was a brief, not terribly good revival on TV that lasted an eyeblink).
Jack Webb was the Orson Welles of TV. He deserves better.
In the meantime, Barb and I have been watching (mostly for the first time) Star Trek: The Next Generation, and it’s a very good series…a few duds, but the original had some of those, too. We’ve also worked our way through the Erle Stanley Gardner adaptations on Perry Mason. We’re still watching shows from the earlier seasons and what a wonderful series that was.
That’s how Barb gets me to walk out of things like Meg 2 – she whispers, “We have better at home.”
And she’s right.
M.A.C.
