Posts Tagged ‘Interviews’

True Noir, Medical Fun & Games and a Great Film

Tuesday, July 9th, 2024

The San Diego Comic Con will have a True Noir panel this year. I won’t be in attendance – except by way of a pre-recorded video greeting – for various reasons, including the start of shooting my next indie film, Death by Fruitcake. But actors from the production will be present (names TBA) and director Robert Meyer Burnett will be on hand as will producer Mike Bawden.

If you’re at the con, you’ll get the first real preview of our fully immersive audio drama, True Noir: The Nathan Heller Casebooks, based on the first Heller novel, True Detective.

True Noir at Comic-Con 2024

I’ve sat in on many recording sessions so far, via Zoom, and I believe about 80% of the recording is done, and I know director Rob Burnett is hard at work on the special effects and sound mix. Rob is doing a fantastic job. I can honestly say I’ve never been more excited about a project adapting my work, ever, and that includes the film of Road to Perdition and the HBO/Cinemax Quarry TV series.

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I had some very nice wishes from readers and friends of mine about my recent (brief) hospital stay. My cardioversion (in which I am jump-started like an old Buick to get my heart out of a-fib and back into regular rhythm) went very well. My recuperation has been minimal, and the hospital staff and my doctor were terrific.

So was my wife Barb, who was with me all the way (well, she had to leave while they were shocking me).

Two days later, I feel fine. Great, actually.

Thanks for your concern.

As a reward – a book giveaway next week!

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Heath Holland at Cereal at Midnight invited me on to discuss my ten favorite private eye movies. Take a look (but keep in mind these are presented not as the best but as my favorites…though the upper reachers of the list really are the best).

* * *

I’ve been a steady moviegoer since grade school, and Barb and I, pre-Covid, pretty much went to one movie per week, even after the home video revolution. Since the pandemic, we go less frequently. But I remember what it was like in the ‘70s and ‘80s when you could see a movie and know you’d taken something great in.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) changed my life. It rekindled my interest in true-crime-based movies and TV that had begun with The Untouchables TV series starring Robert Stack. I’d already been toying with the idea of writing a period private eye novel when Chinatown (1974) paved the way. It, too, changed my life. Dr. No and the Connery Bond movies that followed were similarly impactful, and some things I saw for the first time on TV – The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) – certainly shaped me artistically. Add Gun Crazy (1950) to that list.

In the 1970s you never knew when something mind-blowing might greet you at the movie theater – from The Godfather showing how a crime novel could become an epic film to American Graffiti (1973) sending me back into rock ‘n’ roll after I thought I’d left being in a band behind me. This was an era where your weekend entertainment might include seeing for the first time The Exorcist, The French Connection, Dirty Harry, Point Blank, Get Carter, Jaws, Rocky, Star Wars, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Harold and Maude, and Phantom of the Paradise. This is not a definitive list, but it demonstrates movies that had an impact on me beyond the usual cinematic experience. I can easily say I have been influenced as much if not more by movies than even my beloved Hammett, Chandler, Cain and Spillane.

Robert Towne died last week. He joins the other giants who walked the earth and influenced little Allan Collins. So, of course, did Chester Gould, Al Capp and Will Eisner, moviemakers on the page.

And it didn’t stop with the ‘70s – the ‘80s were around the corner. You could settle down in your theater seat with your Coke and popcorn and Dots and, wham! There was Raiders of the Lost Arc or Road Warrior or Evil Dead II or Back to the Future or Robocop (with my pal Miguel Ferrer in it!).

And I’m just scratching the surface.

Seemed like every week or two or anyway once a month some movie would change your life – or anyway mine – out of nowhere. Not that the ‘90s were too shabby – Groundhog Day alone must be noted. And I’m not saying good stuff hasn’t appeared in the 2000’s.

But that experience of knowing you’d seen something life-changing, which was startlingly frequent in the ‘70s and ‘80s, hasn’t happened much in several decades, at least not to me.

Which brings me to Horizon: An America Saga (Chapter One). This is the first film I’ve seen in a long time that gave me that sort of feeling that something important had happened to me in the movie theater, and I don’t mean that just no babies were crying. No. This is the best film I’ve seen in ages (and only the first 1/4 of it is out there right now – with Part Two coming in August, and Part Three in production, although Part Four may be in danger because of the disappointing box office so far of Part One).

Horizon: An America Saga

This is a sweeping (as we used to say) saga of the American west, going out of its way to tell a sprawling but coherent story of settlers, Native Americans, Old West towns, gunfighters, outlaws, families, wagon trains, the whole schmeer. Horizon is easy to follow, despite cutting back and forth between its four (as I count them) major story threads.

But it seems to confuse the poor little things under forty who can’t sit still long enough not to spill their popcorn. The complaint that Horizon is hard to follow – it isn’t, not at all – or that it’s slow – it isn’t, if somewhat leisurely at times, which is different – defeats the minds of the video-game damaged individuals who seem to dominate our multi-plex fare. The main complaint appears to be that there are just too many characters to keep track of, but also that there are too many story threads to weave in our brain-dead little consciousnesses, and where’s the action, anyway?…besides the opening attack by Indians on settlers and the closing attack of Whites on Indians that (rather brilliantly) bookend this first chapter. Of course, a viewer has to understand what the incredibly difficult, complicated partial subtitle “Chapter One” means.

Or that something like the incredibly tense meeting on a hillside by Kevin Costner’s taciturn saddle tramp and a chatty psychopathic young outlaw doesn’t represent “action.”

Look, I’m kind of pissed off about this. Let me take a slight left (or maybe right) turn and discuss the inability of some younger audience members to deal with nuance, or with storytelling that is less than breakneck, much less dealing with a story that cuts between various threads of that story.

I have taken to watching a good deal of YouTube. I do this chiefly because the bite-size nature available means I don’t have to commit to a feature film after, say, 11 p.m. when midnight is my cut-off for getting enough sleep. (Old men who shout at clouds need their beddy bye.) This has been beneficial to me, because I have access to some YouTubers (I admit that sounds like a description of someone floundering in a water park) whose opinions and approach resonate with me – for example, Robert Meyer Burnett (now a collaborator of mine), Heath Holland of Cereal at Midnight, and Ken on Mid Level Media. These are presences on YouTube that understand the medium. They aren’t the only ones, but the vast majority of the film-centric YouTubers are guys with beards and baseball caps in their basement exuding the charisma of a chunk of cheese. These are not class acts like Greg Mrvich of Ballistic BBQ, extolling outdoor cooking, or Jon Townsend of Townsends, which focuses on cooking circa the Revolutionary War (great history buff stuff).

It’s the reviewers who are the worst. Unlike Rob or Heath or Ken, these reviewers know next to nothing about how films are made and/or the history of film. And a good number of the reviews of Horizon are a prime example – these supposed lovers of film are bored, and see no interaction between characters in the various story threads or thematic connection either. Unlike Rob, Heath or Ken, many of these reviewers (I should say “reviewers”) make no attempt to meet a film on its own terms.

For about ten years I was the movie reviewer at the now-defunct (and much missed) Mystery Scene Magazine. I stopped after I’d written, produced and directed my film Mommy (1994), because I now knew how hard it is to make a movie. I realized that even making a bad or mediocre movie takes an enormous effort (which is not to say that I consider any of my own movies bad or mediocre, nor do I claim them as masterpieces). After making a movie, I stopped writing a regular review column (though I later wrote a similar column for Asian Cult Cinema, also departed and much missed, but restricted myself to writing only positive reviews). I have backtracked somewhat and occasionally do write a bad review of a movie (as opposed to a bad movie review), but I do so only reluctantly. I always think of the scene in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood where Orson Welles and Wood commiserate in a booth at (I believe) Musso & Frank’s about their mutual movie-making frustrations.

Know-it-all’s in backwards ball caps, beards and parental basements have no business delivering movie criticism unless they have something worthwhile to share. “I was bored,” “I almost feel asleep,” “Too many stories, too many characters,” etc. And yet this is how Kevin Costner’s 21st Century How the West Was Won has been greeted by many YouTube reviewers and some paid critics writing for actual national publications.

This is an abysmal period for movies. It’s all about kowtowing to Woke notions and an audience that doesn’t read and never did, has been sedated (if admittedly having their motor skills honed) by video games, and judges films by the car chase or explosion or other examples of the dangling-keys-in-front-of-an-infant school of criticism.

This does not mean that I think you have no right to not like Horizon. There are legitimate complaints that can be intelligently made, even if I might disagree with them. But consider this: “I don’t like westerns,” one attractive Black female YouTube reviewer said before dismissing Horizon on the following basis: it’s a western. An extremely full of himself YouTube reviewer, sitting next to his giggling girl friend (who had not seen the movie), complained of the boring composition of shots in the film and let us know how smart he thinks he is. Meanwhile my (limited) filmmaker’s eye perceived that almost any carefully composed frame of Horizon could be a framed image on a wall. Mine, anyway.

Look, every asshole has an opinion and you know the rest. I may be as full of crap here as, well, the run-of-the-mill basement-bound YouTube reviewers. But for those of you who like my fiction enough to stop by here and listen to me bloviate, I urge you not to listen to the Horizon naysayers.

Give it a try, and if possible don’t wait for streaming – those who dismiss this film as something that should have been a TV mini-series are apparently numb to the Utah vistas Horizon generously shares.

Now this isn’t exactly a review of Horizon. For that, let me repeat what I recently posted on Amazon (in response to a one-star scathing and astoundingly stupid review of Horizon):

This is the opposite of everything the one-star review of it, posted early on, claimed. Its four storylines are rich with character and incident comprising a How the West Was Won for a 21st Century audience. The emphasis is on the hardships the settlers, soldiers and saddle tramps all endured, sometimes out of their naïveté or greed and other times in their lack of choice for options when bad experiences and bad behavior drove them west. It’s no coincidence that it opens with the Indigenous people (the People) slaughtering settlers sadistically and ends with Whites slaughtering Indigenous people just as sadistically. The scenery is awe-inspiring, the shots deceptively well-composed in their simplicity, and the stories compelling — I know this movie has received some bad and mixed reviewes, particularly by YouTube dullards, but these reviews only reflect the limitations of modern audiences to know how to receive a movie that takes its time telling its interwoven (and it is interwoven) tale. The idea that this is slow and nothing happens reflects the mentality of viewers dulled by the swift, poor storytelling so common on movie screens today. Don’t wait for the inevitable reassessment — see it now, on a big movie screen. Then own it on physical media. This is Godfather level entertainment.

M.A.C.

Eliot Ness, Quarry, Writing Series Characters and More

Tuesday, May 21st, 2024

My YouTube appearances with Heath Holland at his Cereal at Midnight continue, with what I think is the best so far: a discussion of Eliot Ness on screen, kicked off by the current Blu-ray edition of The Scarface Mob from Eureka.

Also on the YouTube front, Robert Meyer Burnett, on his Robservations and Let’s Get Physical Media, continues to provide updates on his audio “movie for the ears” adaptation of my novel True Detective. It’s called True Noir: The Casebooks of Nathan Heller, and I am writing the scripts myself. I have delivered the first seven of ten of what will be a fully immersive audio presentation directed by Rob, with an incredible Hollywood cast, and will run at least five hours.

Todd Stashwick of Picard and Twelve Monkeys (and much else) makes a terrific Nate Heller. If this project resonates with the public, look for three more Heller novels to become movies for the mind, all adapted by Heller’s creator himself.

You know – me.

* * *

Paperback Warrior posted the cover of the upcoming (it’s a fall release from Hard Case Crime) Quarry’s Return. That was a post on X, which I guess is what they’re calling Twitter now. It’s from Elon Musk, who named a ship after Ms. Tree, then didn’t follow up on his people asking to license the name from Terry Beatty and me. Somehow I’m reminded of the penny-pinching kazillionaires in classic Li’l Abner by Al Capp.

Quarry's Return

But since this cover image is floating around out there, I thought I should share it, though we’re a few months away from the novel’s release. I didn’t expect to be writing another novel about Quarry in his (ahem) later years; but sequels have a way of worming into my brain as if I were a Presidential candidate and then percolating there (that’s what we writer folks call a mixed metaphor).

Now I have a notion for yet another “old Quarry” story that is wormily percolating, and we’ll see. I had thought that The Last Quarry would be the last Quarry; but then a whole slew (past tense of “slay”) of ‘em followed, filling in the blanks of his life and varied career. Then came Quarry’s Blood, which was really designed to be the last, only when it was warmly received for a book about a cold-blooded killer, I changed my mind (again). And now here’s Quarry’s Return, with Quarry again a geriatric retired hitman kicking younger ass.

It isn’t that I was planning to retire the character. I figured I might do the occasional younger Quarry novel while I am still above ground. I am never anxious to retire a character completely, in my imagination anyway. It wasn’t hard at all to bring Nolan and Jon back in Skim Deep something like forty years later. I knocked on their door and they promptly answered, not much the worse for wear.

I think the reason why I’ve stayed with my series characters is that good ones don’t come along that often. The only one I’ve really consciously retired is Mallory, because there really isn’t a premise there to generate more novels, and anyway he’s essentially me and that bores my ass off.

But I will never understand mystery and suspense writers who do a new character each and every time. Most of these scribes, well, many of them are simply hanging a new name on the old character. Also, I am too aware of how unsuccessful some incredible writers have been, trying to create a second series character. You may have noticed, if you’ve been paying very close attention, that I like Mickey Spillane – the man and his writing. But what’s your favorite Spillane series character after Mike Hammer? And Velda and Pat Chambers don’t count. (Velda could carry a novel, and some would say she carried a whole comic book series under a separate name. Hint: Ms. Tree. But can you imagine the sheer snooze factor of a Pat Chambers novel?)

So with apologies to you Tiger Mann fans, Mike Hammer can’t be created twice. Edgar Rice Burroughs came close by writing John Carter of Mars, but that character was no Tarzan (and Carson of Venus wasn’t even Carter). Going back to Mickey, his second greatest series protagonist was Morgan the Raider (The Delta Factor); but I had to finish the only other book that character generated (The Consummata) from a few chapters in Mickey’s files.

Barb, a while back (in the throes of writing an Antiques novel and enduring the suffering that process creates in my talented wife), started talking about ending that series, fed up with the difficulties of generating more stories about Vivian and Brandy Borne. I insisted that she stick with it (not that my insistence carried any particular weight) because the Borne girls are fabulous fictional creations, in my unhumble opinion. They live and breathe on the page, and act of their own volition, as all great series characters do.

Here’s the thing: Rex Stout was a genius. His Nero Wolfe books are among the most readable and re-readable novels of any kind ever written. No other two fictional characters live and breathe like Wolfe and Archie. They are as good as fiction gets in the world of the creation of mystery genre recurring characters. Holmes and Watson never breathed as fully, and before Nero and Archie, they were the top.

And yet Rex Stout’s publisher kept after him to create another series. And of course he was a smashing success with his other incredibly famous character, Tecumseh Fox. Right? Right? Okay, how about Alphabet Hicks? There’s a banger of a character! Or how about giving Inspector Cramer a mystery of his own? Or that famous female PI, Dol Bonner?

Nope. One of the few true geniuses of mystery fiction, Rex Stout, stunk up the place with these more contrived creations. So I’m of the opinion that when a mystery writer stumbles upon a character that resonates with the public, said mystery writer should give the public what they want.

Are there dangers? Yes, artistic ones. For example, what if I’d been hugely successful right out of the gate with Nolan, who was after all an homage to Don Westlake’s Parker (“homage,” as we all know, is French for “rip-off”). I might still be writing nothing but Nolan books. I’d have written, say, 40 or 50 Nolan and Jon novels…selling millions…and writing nothing else.

Writers do need to flex their talents. That’s why Robert B. Parker wrote westerns on the side and did his own unsuccessful Dol Bonner-type female private eye novel. So it’s risky, sticking with one series. I do think, with the Antiques books, you have two interacting characters – like Archie and Wolfe – who provide a kind of engine for the story beyond the plot machinations.

Mickey wrote about Mike Hammer throughout his sporadic career. Early on he came to feel he’d characterized Hammer so fully, there wasn’t anything else to say. He compensated by writing Tiger Mann and some standalones, though he drifted back to what was essentially the same protagonist under various names. What kept him artistically sane (not a word used much in relation to Mike Hammer, I grant you) was his decision to make Hammer always reflect where he, Mickey Spillane, was in his life. He allowed Hammer to grow somewhat older (not realistically so, but older) and to allow this indomitable character to have frailties – Hammer went on a seven-year drunk; he was, in several novels (including some I completed) recovering from wounds or otherwise physically impaired. This reflected Spillane’s own advancing years, and the on-and-off nature of his writing career.

Look, every mystery writer – every writer – has to do this his or her own way. I am only suggesting that for me it’s been an interesting, rewarding ride, following my characters through their advancing years (and mine). That was true of Nate Heller in the current Too Many Bullets. It was true of Nolan and Jon in Skim Deep. And Quarry in Quarry’s Blood and Quarry’s Return. And if I ever return to Ms. Tree, you can bet your ass she’ll be in menopause.

* * *

Speaking of Ms. Tree, Terry and I are working on the sixth and final Titan volume of the collected Ms. Tree, which gathers almost everything he and I did with the character and her supporting cast (no The P.I.s, though). She had an impressive dozen-year comics run (1981 – 1993) and represents one of the most gratifying collaborations I’ve ever enjoyed. Terry Beatty and I, I am glad to say, will always be thought of by many comics fans as a team.

Right now Terry is working on helping put together (much as he has on the Titan volumes of collected Ms. Tree) our Dark Horse Johnny Dynamite graphic novel, Underworld, in an improved publication that will happen later this year.

It’s an enduring frustration to me that we both worked on Batman but never together. And that we both did syndicated comic strips (Dick Tracy and Rex Morgan respectively), but not as a team. He’s still doing Rex Morgan, but he doesn’t need me – he writes it himself. I like to think he had a good teacher.

As for Dick Tracy, the VCI Blu-ray collection of the four RKO Tracy feature films – with two new commentaries by me and lots of bonus features – will be out in early August.

Getting back to Ms. Tree, here’s Comic Book Treasury’s best crime comics write-up (it invokes Road to Perdition, but lists Ms. Tree).

And speaking of Collins/Beatty, here’s a look at Wild Dog at Tvtropes. It says: “The series was writted by Max Allan Collins with art by Terry Beatty.” I don’t know who “writted” this otherwise nice piece.

M.A.C.

Tickets on Sale, Spillane Bargain, and a Novel Out the Door

Tuesday, January 30th, 2024

Advance tickets are on sale for the World Premiere of Blue Christmas in Des Moines at the Fleur Theater on February 24. Buy them here.

Advance tickets are on sale for the Muscatine premiere of Blue Christmas at the Palms theater on March 16. Buy them here.

When I have a ticket link for the Cedar Rapids Premiere at the Collins Road Theatre on March 13, I will post it.

When I have a ticket link for the Quad Cities Premiere at the Last Picture House on March 22, I will post it.

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Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction Audiobook cover

The Edgar-nominated Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction by Jim Traylor and me is on sale at Barnes & Noble for an astonishing $13.47. That’s literally half price for a new hardcover copy. Not sure how long this price will last, so I’d suggest striking while the iron is hot. [The Nate Heller novel The Big Bundle is also 50% off! — Nate]

Pictured here is the audio edition. It, and the e-book edition, are priced higher than the hardcover (at the moment).

For those of you wondering if I’m planning to attend the Edgar Awards event, that’s as yet undecided. I have expressed here my feeling that there remains enough anti-Spillane sentiment to make a win difficult. Also, the other nominees include books on Poe and Ellroy, the first the author the award is named after (!), the second a highly celebrated author in the hardboiled field.

The other factor is that Blue Christmas has been entered in the Iowa Motion Picture Association awards and I am waiting to see how we fare there. As a three-time former president of that organization – and with a new film I’ve written and directed utilizing Iowa talent (and Iowa money), my first indie offering since 2006 – I have a responsibility to consider that event (which takes place in the same time frame as the Edgars) instead. I can only be in one place at a time.

A further factor is that a New York trip would cost me about what I was paid as an advance for Too Many Bullets. Add to this a trip from Muscatine to Manhattan and the air travel (and taxi rides) it would entail would be difficult for me at this age and with my health issues.

Again, a decision has yet to be made.

I will say that in the unlikely event that Spillane wins, it would be an honor second only to being named an MWA Grand Master, an award I treasure.

* * *
Antiques Foe cover

This morning Barb and I shipped Antiques Slay Belles to Severn, our publisher (based in the UK).

Getting a novel out is a harrowing job. The writing itself was concluded last Thursday. We essentially took Friday off, then dug in for a long weekend of assembling the manuscript.

That’s always tricky. Both Barb and I write in WordPerfect, so a conversion to the more accepted Word is necessary. We also create a file for each chapter as we go. The first stage of prepping the completed manuscript for the publisher is to assemble the chapters into a single file, a task I take on. The next stage is for me to read the hard copy we’ve created and for Barb to enter the corrections and to consider the tweaks I’ve made (sometimes she disagrees with them, and we discuss, and usually she’s right). Usually I get about 100 pages done and Barb begins her process of entering the corrections/tweaks while I press ahead. This is a job (on a 60,000-word manuscript like Antiques Slay Belles) that usually takes two full work days.

Occasionally I discover something that got past both of us and that requires a rewrite. That happened this time, and a considerable slice of the first chapter had to be reworked. This takes considerable poise to deal with in a cool-headed manner, and of course we both ran around with our hair on fire for a while before figuring out how to fix the problem.

Another issue is the conversion itself. We frequently discover page-numbering problems, and working in one word processing program that requires a change into another word processing problem has, as they say, issues. I do a certain of amount of work in Word and so does Barb, but for fiction writing, we both much prefer WordPerfect and we pay for that preference at this last stage of the process.

I handle the actual conversion, and I go through page by page looking for conversion problems, but I inevitably miss a few. Still, I think we send in a very clean manuscript. About the only thing I like about the conversion process is that Word gives the entire manuscript a fresh spell- and grammar-check, and I’m able to address some goofs we made that we hadn’t previously caught.

Last step is simply to send it to our editor with an attachment of the manuscript.

Now we sit back and wait for the editorial response. Usually this comes quickly, but a problem I have that some writers do not is that I almost immediately move on to my next project. And by the time I get the editorial notes, asking this and that (about plot in particular), the novel in question is less than fresh in my mind.

Not complaining. All of this is part of the process. But I am guessing this aspect of getting a novel written (and delivered) is off the radar of most readers. And that’s not a criticism. You have a right to not care (or not seek knowledge of) how the sausage is made.

Just in case you are interested, though, I thought I’d share this vital but little discussed aspect of the creation of a manuscript by fulltime professional writers.

* * *

Later this week I am joining Heath Holland on a taping his Cereal at Midnight podcast for what may become a regular (once a month?) exercise in discussing Blu-rays and 4K’s. We are starting with the latest Kino Lorber boxed set of western films.

Heath has been slicing up my two-hour (yikes!) career interview with him into bite-size portions. Here’s me on the relationship between Quarry and Audie Murphy.

M.A.C.

The Big News This Week and More

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2024
Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction cover
Hardcover:
E-Book: Kobo
Digital Audiobook: Kobo Libro.fm Google Play
Audiobook MP3 CD:

You may have already heard my big news this week, which is that Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction (by James L. Traylor and me) has been nominated for an Edgar by the Mystery Writers of America.

I am of course thrilled, if for no other reason than it’s a further indication that Mickey is finally being taken more seriously and reassessed. When Jim Traylor and I had One Lonely Knight: Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer nominated for an Edgar in 1984, we were told confidentially by a member of the committee that we would have won but for one committee member refusing to even read a book about the dreaded Spillane.

I’ve been looking at various YouTube shows about the great Kiss Me Deadly (the film, and mostly raves) but those praising the film routinely condemn Mickey glibly, while expressing opinions about Spillane that indicate they have read little or nothing by him. Mickey was so controversial that you didn’t have to be familiar with his work to condemn him. And even the great Eddie Muller, introducing Kiss Me Deadly at a Noir City screening, characterized Mike Hammer largely in terms of anti-Commie lunacy. Of the first seminal six novels, only One Lonely Night is about “Commies” (and Joe McCarthy is essentially the bad guy) and only The Girl Hunters and arguably Survival…Zero! Of the later Hammers touches upon Russian bad guys. That’s three of thirteen novels. Of the thirteen posthumous Hammer novels I’ve completed, only Compound 90 deals with Communism and Russia. The most respected noir expert that Eddie is (rightfully) should recognize the very noir theme of a detective in love with a woman who turns out to be the murderer of the army buddy who gave an arm for him in combat. That’s I, the Jury, and not a Commie in sight. The Arkin brothers discuss Kiss Me Deadly and the more liberal of the two makes the comment that Mike Hammer seems to be a WW 2 veteran – you think?

This is my roundabout way of saying I have no expectation that Jim and I will win the Edgar for this book, which I am very proud to have co-written. The Spillane stigma is still there. And I’m up against books about James Ellroy (don’t get me started) and Poe himself. But Barb and I are probably going to the awards dinner. It’s a chance to be seen as somebody who is still in the game.

Anyway, here are all the nominees in the various categories.

* * *

Barb and I have a novella coming out from Neo-Text that can be pre-ordered at Amazon right now in e-book format. (There will be a print version, too, but it’s not listed yet.)

Cutout cover

Here’s what our novella Cutout is about as described by the publisher:

A young woman from the Midwest, recipient of an unexpected college scholarship, is recruited into a lucrative courier job that shuttles her from Manhattan to Washington, D.C. There’s a slight drawback: the previous two “cutouts” died by violence.

Sierra Kane – who has bounced from one foster family to another – faces an uncertain future when she receives an unapplied-for scholarship to Barnard College specifically designed for orphans whose academic records are merely above average. A second unexpected boon comes her way when another recipient of that somewhat mysterious scholarship offers her a part-time courier job.

Soon Sierra is caught up in a whirl of espionage and murder, with a new boy friend who may or may not be part of a plot, a college mentor with a possible agenda of her own, and an FBI agent who rebuffs Sierra’s plea for help.

It’s a classic story of a small-town girl caught up in an overwhelming big-city world; but Sierra Kane is a young woman whose curiosity and determination will lead her to the truth…and into more than one deadly confrontation.

Married writing team Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition) and Barbara Collins (Bombshell) – whose Antiques mystery series is a long-running mystery fan favorite under the name Barbara Allan – have crafted a novella that is at once as timeless as a fairy tale and as modern as a headline.

I am enormously pleased with the novella, although I really shouldn’t be taking top billing – the supposed value of my byline came into play and I was overridden. This book really is Barb’s baby. I did some plot consulting and did my usual punch-up draft, though her work needed little help.

For you e-book readers, here’s where you can pre-order it.

* * *

The enormously talented Heath Holland was kind enough to invite me on Cereal at Midnight for a freewheeling interview about my career. He has also pulled excerpts from our nearly two-hour talk that appear on YouTube separately.

We are discussing my making regular appearances on Cereal at Midnight (perhaps as often as monthly). Stay tuned.

Till then, here’s a link for that extensive interview.

* * *

At Lisa’s Book Critiques, Glen Davis was kind enough to list (and briefly discuss) Too Many Bullets as one of his favorite novels of 2023.

* * *

My new expanded version of Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane is available on several more streaming services, including Apple TV.

It’s on Roku, too, and Amazon Prime, Tubi and Vudu.

M.A.C.