Posts Tagged ‘Mickey Spillane’

Cap City on the Big Screen

Tuesday, August 19th, 2025

We had what was, I believe, the first public screening of Cap City, aka Mickey Spillane’s Cap City, at the Last Picture House in Davenport as part of the Quad Cities Alternating Currents arts festival. This happened on Saturday evening, August 16.

It wasn’t a full house – this festival is enormous with an unimaginable amount of stuff going on – but the third-of-a-house we had really seemed to like it, and the Q and A session I did after was smart and fun. Seeing Cap City on a big screen, with full sound, was a revelation – I had only seen it at home on my 55″ TV. But a huge screen and booming sound – in a dark room with a bunch of others – was a wholly different experience. For one thing, nuances in the performances of our large cast were revealed. And it looked great, with its black-and-white noir style and somewhat cinema verité shooting approach.

Though this isn’t the final “locked” version, it is only shy a couple of requests I made to director David Wexler, which he will make. The final version will go out on the festival circuit later this year.


Max and Barb with uber-fans Mike and Jackie White, who drove three hours to attend the Cap City screening.

The story of Cap City goes back half a dozen years, at least, when David approached me about licensing (and attaching me as screenwriter to) the novella “A Bullet for Satisfaction.” This was the fairly ancient novella begun by Mickey Spillane, found by me in Mickey’s files, and completed/revised by me for inclusion in The Last Stand. That novel was Mickey’s last completed work, but it fell a little short of what was needed for a book. I did not feel this final novel required me jumping on as a collaborator, but I did edit it, and finished/polished “A Bullet for Satisfaction” as the opening salvo of the book.

David thought the novella was a perfect distillation of Mickey’s noirish approach. I came aboard as a co-producer and delivered a script in 2020. It got a considerable amount of interest, but by (I think) 2022 David asked me if I’d be willing to rewrite the script’s protagonist from a tough male cop to a just-as-tough female. With my Ms. Tree history, I was fine with that, since we had interest from several credible actresses in doing Cap City if the female was the lead. It would also put some spin on that a more traditional male lead would have brought.

As is often case, we had considerable brushes with a green light for the project, which was designed to be a $3 million indie. It would have involved locations including the murder scene (a hotel suite), various government buildings, a bookstore, a bar, the protagonist’s apartment, a boathouse, a small yacht and assorted others. It was ambitious for the budget, but very doable. Both David and I have a lot of experience with working on a budget for an indie film.

Last year David called and was sad to say it seemed like it was time to move on. He just couldn’t find the budget. I had recently completed Blue Christmas, which had also been written for multiple locations but which I had turned into a one-set production, getting it made as opposed to being just an un-produced script in my desk drawer. I suggested to David that we use that approach – I would so a rewrite that took place entirely at the hotel suite where the murder went down, and have the suspects brought to the detective at the scene for questioning.

David loved the idea, and I wrote the script and he got the necessary funding, and had just the right actress for Roz, Erica Munez of HBO’s Long Gone By, and a big cast of East Coast actors with more credits than you could shake a stick at.

Here’s where it gets fun.

David calls me and wants me on set for the shoot. But I can’t, because the Day One of the Cap City shoot is also Day One of the Death by Fruitcake shoot, which I am directing.

And so it was that I had two movies shooting simultaneously. That’s a bizarre first but a fun one.

Look for Cap City at the film festivals and, soon after, streaming.

On the Death by Fruitcake front, it looks like we’ll be making a distribution deal later this week.

M.A.C.

Capitol Crime, The Dark City & San Diego Comic Con Schedule

Tuesday, July 1st, 2025

Here’s a trailer for Cap City aka Mickey Spillane’s Cap City.

This movie is something director David Wexler and I have been working on for some time. The idea was always for me to adapt the Spillane/Collins novella, A Bullet for Satisfaction, into a film. The novella shared space with The Last Stand in the Hard Case Crime-published book of that title.

The script went through various iterations. Originally, as in the novella, the lead character, a tough detective in a corrupt town, was male. For various reasons, it was decided I’d rewrite it for a female lead, a la Ms. Tree.

The projected budget was in the very low millions, and we came close to getting it financed. But it never quite came together, and finally David was ready to move on; but I suggested I rewrite it to mostly play on one set, a technique I had used on Blue Christmas. This excited the director, my envisioning a way to go from low-budget to micro-budget and still get the story told.

So I rewrote the script accordingly.

Ironically, David wound up shooting Cap City during the same two-week period that I shot Death By Fruitcake – two movies of mine shooting simultaneously! I had to turn down a trip to the east coast to be on set for Cap City because I was busy.

I’m very pleased with the finished result of Cap City (and Fruitcake of course). David is preparing to take it out to festivals, and I may be screening it in the Quad Cities in August as part of the non-competitive festival, Alternating Currents. That looks likely but not a sure thing just yet.

More to come on that front soon.

In the meantime, here is David’s biography:

David Wexler is President of Cinema 59 Productions. He is a writer/director based in New York City. Prior to his feature films (EVIL WEED, THE STAND UP, ANCHORS, TURTLE ISLAND, LAST SUPPER, VIGILANTE), David focused on television, creating and producing the critically acclaimed reality show “College Life” for MTV.

Wexler’s film, Motorcycle Drive By, about Third Eye Blind, was an official selection of the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival. Most recently, his film Disintegration Loops was an official selection of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.

Cinema 59 often works with Creative Diversions (a Toy/Game company) to create 360 degree entertainment.

* * *

Executive Order and Fate of the Union will be promoted via Amazon’s Monthly Deals, starting 7/1/2025 and running through 7/31/2025, each will be offered at 2.99 USD during the promotion period. (This is e-book only.)

These are book two and book one of the Reeder and Rogers Trilogy. Supreme Justice is not part of this offer, but it’s available here.

The trilogy by Matt Clemens and me has proven unfortunately prescient, particularly Supreme Justice, which has gone on to be one of my bestselling titles, just behind Road to Perdition and Saving Private Ryan.

* * *

Cleveland Magazine has put out a “read local” booklist and the first of my Eliot Ness novels, The Dark City, is on it. I might have preferred Butcher’s Dozen, but a recommendation is a recommendation.

Here is where you can get The Dark City.

* * *

For those of you who asked where my movie Mommy could be streamed, the link is here.

* * *

Finally, here is the schedule for my panels at the San Diego Comic Con.

SAN DIEGO COMIC CON PANELS 2025
THURSDAY
“Leave Them in Suspense”
11:00 AM — 12:00 PM
Room 23ABC
Panel will include Ted Van Alst, Jr., Max Allan Collins, Arvind Ethan David, Shane Hawk, Holly Jackson, and Catriona Ward. This panel will be moderated by Mysterious Galaxy.

FRIDAY
“Spotlight on Max Allan Collins”
4:00 – 5:00
Room 28DE
Robert Meyer Burnett (Robservations) interviews Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition) on a career ranging from Dick Tracy and Ms. Tree to the current all-star immersive ten-chapter audio drama, True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, based on Collins’ Nathan Heller series.

SUNDAY
“Max Allan Collins: A Titan at Hard Case Crime: From Ms. Tree to Nolan to Heller to Spade & Hammer!”
11:00AM – 12:00PM,
Room: 32AB
Andrew Sumner interviews Max Allan Collins on the author’s work at Titan Books and sister company Hard Case Crime.

M.A.C.

Quarry Up for an Award, Mike Hammer’s Big Announcement

Tuesday, June 17th, 2025

Things have been popping around here. First came news that Quarry’s Return has been nominated for the Best Paperback Novel “Shamus.” The Shamus is an award that means a lot to me, because my late friend Bob Randisi and I, and a few others, were grousing to each other about the Mystery Writers of America ignoring private eye novels in their Edgar awards. Bob was not one to let the grass grow under his feet and very soon he’d created the Private Eye Writers of America and the Shamus awards.

Arguably, the Shamus awards became the second most-prominent and prestigious honor of its kind in mystery fiction. Others have come and gone, and some may lay claim to being more important now; but I know and remember what it meant to me.

In 1983 my novel True Detective was published and got quite a bit of attention in its approach to merging the PI story with historical crime, and for being the longest private eye novel ever written (later my novel Stolen Away would eclipse it). I was, predictably, ignored by the Edgars but got a Shamus nomination. I was a long shot to say the least, because I was up against a Murderer’s Row of mystery writers: James Crumley, Stanley Ellin, Loren Estleman and Robert B. Parker. But my book won, and I was boosted considerably in the business…and both Nate Heller and I are still around. Stolen Away won the Best Novel in 1992. The series went on to be the most-nominated in the history of the organization.

Anyone who says awards don’t matter (like me, when I lose) are full of it. If Bob Randisi hadn’t started up the PWA, I wonder if Heller and I would still be around.

Nate Heller and True Detective are the basis, of course, of True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, director Robert Meyer Burnett’s ten-episode audio drama from my adaptation. (truenoir.co)

Quarry has been nominated for the Shamus several times (my hitman even got an Edgar nomination last year for Quarry’s Blood) but I don’t recall him ever winning. Kind of makes sense in the PWA, because to make a private eye out of Quarry, you have to squint and look sideways. But the books are very much built on the private eye novel paradigm.

In other private eye news…

Matthew McConaughey is serious talks with Skydance about reuniting with True Detective writer Nic Pizzolatto in the Mike Hammer movie that has been threatening to happen for a decade or so.

Matthew McConaughey and Nic Pizzolatto

The film is based not just on Mickey’s work but draws upon the entire series (including the collaborative novels and short stories that share a Spillane/Collins byline). I have read the script and it’s solid; as an executive producer, I was able to provide notes, to get the characters and concepts in line with Mickey’s and my work.

This news exploded all over the Internet. I lost count at 21 articles. Here’s a typical one from Deadline.

It was everywhere, from Variety to the Hollywood Reporter. I am optimistic but I never believe this kind of thing till I’m on set and the cameras are rolling. But it has a real feel to it.

You will note a certain irony here: the title of my novel True Detective is of course the title of the (later) HBO series that brought together actor McConaughey and writer Pizzolatto – a highly rated and regarded series that I have never seen, since the use of the title irked me. On the other hand, I plucked the title from the vintage true-crime magazines that were on the newsstands when Heller was starting out in the other True Detective.

* * *

Here’s a cool review of The Last Quarry.

My band the Daybreakers has a Wikipedia page! And I didn’t submit it much less write it (a few inaccuracies, but hey).

M.A.C.

A McGinnis Cover! A Dream Come True…Plus True Noir!

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025

Robert E. McGinnis died recently at 99, and that was still way too damn soon.

Bob McGinnis I spoke to only once, though he paid me a great, generous kindness, which I have talked about here previously but will touch on again, below.

McGinnis was the prime illustrator of mystery/crime paperback covers of the 20th into the 21st Century, and also a major contributor to movie-poster art. There are other contenders to that throne – James Avati, Robert Maguire, Barye Phillips and half a dozen others – but McGinnis was the king. As J. Kingston Pierce said at Crime Reads a few years ago, “McGinnis has turned out well over 1,000 covers, including many for books by John D. MacDonald, Carter Brown, Edward S. Aarons, Erle Stanley Gardner, Brett Halliday, Ed McBain, and Max Allan Collins….(H)e’s also illustrated dozens of movie posters…from the James Bond films to Dean Martin’s Matt Helm flicks.”

I do not take lightly being on a list of noir mystery writers that includes the luminaries on the J. Kingston Pierce list. Nor do I exaggerate when I say I had hoped, as an adolescent wanting to be a mystery writer, that one day I might be lucky enough to have a book of mine with a McGinnis cover.

McGinnis only did a few covers for Mickey Spillane novels. Mickey had just about every top illustrator in the game adorn his books from time to time – Avati, Phillips, Lu Kimmel, James Meese among them. During the heyday of the paperback original, McGinnis was noted for his stunning covers for the Brett Halliday “Mike Shayne” reprints at Dell. Several foreign markets used Shayne covers for various Spillane titles.

Meanwhile, at the movies, McGinnis was doing one stunning poster after another for the James Bond series, particularly the early Sean Connery entries, which were the best of the Bond bunch (McGinnis did other Bond movies, too, including most of Roger Moore’s). But Bond wasn’t McGinnis’ only movie poster work – among other famous films, he did the poster art for Barbarella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (in addition to many others).

Poster Art for You Only Live Twice

I will repeat myself – I spoke of this not long ago here – but after Charles Ardai published the first two Nolan novels (Bait Money and Blood Money under one cover as Two for the Money), I said I preferred writing new novels for Hard Case Crime. Charles said the advances would have to be the same as the reprint rate, and I said, fine – just put a McGinnis cover on my novel. That was half-joking, because Two for the Money had a weak cover among the usually stellar covers of HCC novels. But Charles called my bluff and got McGinnis to do the cover for The Last Quarry, which initiated the return of that character to a whole new series of novels, a short film, a feature film and a TV series (one season, but that counts).

As I’ve also mentioned here previously, when I called Bob McGinnis (Charles put me in touch) to tell him how thrilled I was with the cover for The Last Quarry – that after a career filled with mostly serviceable covers at best, having a McGinnis cover was a dream come true. He repaid that compliment by gifting me the original art, which hangs on my office wall, just up to my right as I write this.

When the aforementioned Quarry TV show sparked renewed interest in the character, Charles wanted to get the five early novels out as a group; but Hard Case Crime is noted for its strong pulp-flavored covers, which you might reduce to “guns and girls,” a certain cheeky politically incorrectness attached to their retro cover art. Only Charles didn’t have time to assign five artists to get five cover paintings, done all at once, and cover paintings were key. And he preferred to have the same artist do all five for some continuity.

I suggested to Charles that he call Bob McGinnis and see if any paintings might be available – perhaps things he had done for other publishers years ago, the rights to which might have come back to him. Charles did this, and discovered that McGinnis had five appropriate unused paintings in his inventory, all with the flavor of the old Mike Shayne covers. These apparently were the only such unsold paintings that still existed.

Quarry Hard Case Crim cover

Charles snapped them up, and those Quarry novels all sport McGinnis covers as well as an inset image of Quarry plucked from Bob’s cover to The Last Quarry. In addition, three more of my novels (one of them a Spillane collaboration, The Consummata) have been blessed with McGinnis covers. I may have a record for mystery writers of my generation – ten Robert McGinnis covers on Max Allan Collins novels.

Astonishing.

One of the peculiarities of my association with Hard Case Crime is that Charles (and the folks at Titan, the parent company) will say “yes” to just a general idea of the book I have in mind to write. This means cover art gets assigned before the book is written. This happened twice with McGinnis covers – Quarry’s Choice and Quarry’s Climax – which had artwork come in before I’d written a page, and allowed me to write the women and the scenes McGinnis had imagined into the novels themselves.

That was an old pulp tradition that both Charles and I relished – a writer being handed a piece of art and asked to write a story around it. In his later years, McGinnis had a tendency to offer up slender, leggy beauties and that led to me including some women in my novels that varied from my standard blonde, Coke-bottle-waist bombshells (blame my beautiful blonde wife for that). The result was I had to work a little harder and be more creative, both good things.

I was blessed with one last McGinnis cover, when he painted a rather magnificent one for the Mike Hammer graphic novel The Night I Died, based on material written by Spillane and expanded and re-imagined by me. Mike Hammer: The Night I Died not only has two, count ‘em, two long-limbed McGinnis beauties, but a very credible rendition of Hammer himself, who has rarely appeared on book covers. (This graphic novel was also serialized in four issues, also with lovely covers but none by McGinnis).

What can I say about this incredible artist and genuinely nice man, who has entertained me for years and who provided some truly memorable covers to eleven works of mine?

How about – thank you.

* * *

Barb and I listened to the complete True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak this past weekend. It’s four and a half hours long, so we divided it into two evenings.

Okay, I’m biased. But I think it’s terrific, thanks to director Robert Meyer Burnett, composer Alexander Bornstein, a stellar cast led by a fine Nate Heller in Michael Rosenbaum, casting director/producer Christine Sheaks, producer Mike Bawden, co-producer Phil Dingeldein, and a raft of talented professionals skilled in audio production.

If you are even a casual fan of my work – and in particular if, like me, Nate Heller seems to you to be my signature character (no offense, Quarry) – you will want to hear this production. The toughest critic I know – Barbara Collins – said, “I thought it would be good. But it blew me away. Wow!”

I mentioned Alexander Bornstein above, and he has provided True Noir with a full, memorable score. So memorable is it that not only will there be a soundtrack album, but it will be a 2-CD set. Our Blu-ray of the production, which will include the ten episodes of The History Behind the Mystery and a lot more, will likely include the soundtrack CD’s.

This is not a talking book or a radio show – it’s a movie for the ears and the mind.

Go to truenoir.co and hear for yourself.

M.A.C.