Posts Tagged ‘Mike Hammer’

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Dig the New Mike Hammer Novel & The Real Perry Mason

Tuesday, June 13th, 2023
Dig Two Graves cover
Hardcover:
E-Book: Amazon Google Play Nook Kobo iTunes

Over the years, I’ve had many a bad review from the notoriously tough Kirkus book reviewing service. Lately they have liked me more – perhaps it’s my age. I keep remembering John Huston as Noah Cross in Chinatown observing, “Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”

Dig Two Graves, the new Mike Hammer – right now scheduled to be the penultimate book in Titan’s Mike Hammer Legacy series – will be published August 22nd and can be pre-ordered now.

Here’s how Dig Two Graves is described at the Amazon site:

Mike Hammer, the iconic PI created by the master of noir Mickey Spillane, takes on the mob in the first of two gripping final novels for the deadly private eye.

Winter 1964. After a hit-and-run accident nearly kills her mother, Mike Hammer’s partner (both in life and the PI business), Velda Sterling, learns her father is not who she thought he is. Seeking to uncover her true, troubling heritage, Velda and Mike travel to Phoenix, Arizona – and sunny Dreamland Park, where retired law enforcement officers protect and corral notorious criminals held under Witness Protection.

Mike and Velda find themselves swept up in escalating violence, fueled by the missing millions from an armored-car robbery, which leads them to a deadly midnight confrontation in a cemetery – where secrets are buried and open graves await.

Speaking of Mike Hammer, a Facebook scribe in the midst of a bunch of nice praise by others for the Spillane/Collins novels tried to dissuade Spillane fans from reading these novels, thusly: “The parts by Mickey are great, (but) when it shifts, it stops reading like Mickey and I’ve studied Mike hammer novels for my own writing back when and can tell the difference. I like when Collins writes his own characters but not much on the hammer.”

Here’s the thing: this reader makes the assumption that when Mickey’s material runs out, I take over and finish up the book. Some of you may recall, from previous posts and from an essay in the back of Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction – that this assertion is as inaccurate as it is confident. With the longer Spillane manuscripts – the 70-page to 100-page ones – I expand the material to fill to double that length. So my work is interspersed with his from the start. That’s partly to create a consistently shared voice that I can continue when the Spillane material runs out.

But that’s an over-simplification, because I have used the material in Mickey’s extensive files in a bunch of ways. For example, I sometimes combine manuscripts – Lady Go, Die! is mostly from the late ‘40s, but I weave in a similar serial killer chapter from the ‘60s to provide more genuine Spillane material. In Complex 90, the books begins with Spillane (expanded by Collins), then flashes back to a Hammer in Russia sequence I wrote, then when we come forward and Mike is back in New York, I’m working from Mickey’s material again.

Also, I have scraps of Spillane, paragraphs that he jotted down – descriptions of Manhattan, action scenes – that I weave in when I can. Sometimes he has provided plot and character notes that I use; other times he has written a rough draft of the ending. I worked from the more extensive manuscripts at the beginning, because I wanted to get that stuff out there – The Goliath Bone; The Big Bang; Kiss Her Goodbye; Lady, Go Die!; Complex 90; King of the Weeds; Kill Me, Darling; Killing Town. Murder Never Knocks had several chapters and a last chapter from Mickey; The Will to Kill had a few opening chapters but the mystery was wholly set up as if a blueprint had been given me; Murder, My Love and Masquerade for Murder came from Spillane synopses with scraps of description and action by him from the files woven in.

Both Goliath Bone and Kiss Her Goodbye had two versions of their partial manuscripts, which in both cases I combined. The former also had half a dozen versions of the first chapter. The latter shared the same basic premise but went off into two entirely different mysteries, which I combined. Kill Me If You Can utilized an unproduced TV pilot Mickey wrote. The upcoming Dig Two Graves combines two unfinished manuscripts, including a first pass at Dead Street, and this – Dreamland Park – was the major building block of Graves. But the other unfinished manuscript suggested an evocative back story involving a gangster who had fathered Velda.

A lot of work and, frankly, ingenuity goes into this process, and I frankly resent it when supposed hardcore Spillane fans turn their noses up because I’m involved and not every word choice sounds to them like Mickey would have made it.

I don’t try to write like Mickey – I don’t have to. I took in his words like vitamins starting when I was 12. I concentrate on getting Hammer himself right – Mickey considered character all important. Now and then I have a spooky burst like he is taking over. I was watching TV one Sunday morning (during the writing of Goliath Bone) and I suddenly reached for a scrap of paper and in a blistering array of words recorded the last few paragraphs of the novel. To me, they read like the Mick. It felt like automatic writing.

Here’s the thing: when Mickey, not long before his passing, asked me to complete the unfinished material in his files – in part to keep his name out there, but primarily to provide some income for his wife, Jane – he made it clear that these would be collaborations. When Jane reminded Mickey that I was not a Jehovah’s Witness and would likely indulge in more sex and violence than had been in his more recent work, he was fine with it.

Listen, these books are not pure Spillane. They are Spillane/Collins collaborations. I am not writing them by working with a Ouija board. I bring my own sensibilities in, but do not let them swamp Mickey’s. There are differences between Spillane and Spillane/Collins, just as in any good collaboration the end result is two plus two equals five. My Hammer novels reflect my wise-guy sense of humor more than Mickey’s Howard Hawksian male kidding. I do some of the latter, but I am not about to leave my wit behind when I work on Hammer.

I also tend to give Velda more to do. Mickey created a great character in her that I like to utilize, particularly in the post-Girl Hunters material. I also pay more attention to continuity than Mickey did. Like Rex Stout, Mickey paid scant attention to the details of continuity, though time-passage shifts in character (echoing his own over the years) are a huge part of his work.

I have tried to make sense of some things, to make them hang together. The origin for Velda (in the LP Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer Story) I re-reworked giving her a vice cop background that made it possible for Velda to get a PI license in New York state, and for her to have a reason to abruptly abandon Mike (in Kill Me, Darling) to pursue her vice cop boss’s murderer in Florida. (That novel, by the way, combined two Spillane manuscripts.)

So, yes, to some degree this is my take on Hammer, not Mickey’s. But, as I say, my mandate is to be consistent with the character as Mickey conceived him. And, further, to keep each Spillane/Collins novel in the context of when Mickey wrote the material I am working from. This means when I write King of the Weeds, I’m doing the older, Killing Man/Black Alley Mike Hammer; and when I’m putting together Kill Me, Darling and Killing Town, it’s the young Hammer of I, the Jury and My Gun Is Quick. Many of the books – The Big Bang, Kiss Her Goodbye, Complex 90 – were begun by Mickey in his “comeback” period, after The Girl Hunters (1962).

Some Hammer fans only like those first wonderful six ‘40s/’50s novels, from I, the Jury to Kiss Me, Deadly. Understandable, as those are masterpieces of the genre. I most enjoy writing about early, psychotic Hammer – from the very first novel about him (Killing Town) to exploring his descent into the bottle (Kill Me If You Can). But my job was to complete the books Mickey began – so if it was a ‘60s manuscript, the ‘60s Hammer was who I wrote about; if it was an early 21st Century manuscript, I wrote about that older Hammer. It was Mickey, not me, who put a cell phone in his hero’s hands.

I don’t mean to suggest that I’ve had a lot of criticism from Hammer fans – quite the opposite. And the reviewers have largely come around to the once reviled Mickey and Mike, through my efforts. It’s gratifying.

Still, it’s disappointing that a few hardcore Spillane/Hammer fans are denying themselves these novels, particularly ones like The Big Bang and Complex 90, which were announced during Mickey’s lifetime. When I remember how frustrating it was to be waiting for those books to come out – waiting and waiting and waiting – and now to glance across my office to the bookcase where the shelf of the Spillane/Collins hardcovers reside, and see those very titles looking back at me…wow. The long wait is over.

* * *

Elsewhere – and here, a little – I’ve discussed the HBO reboot of Perry Mason. And I’m going to do that again – right now.

First, an interesting take on reboots from my eight year-old grandson, Sam. His father, Nathan, was telling him about the upcoming Teenage Mutant Turtles movie. Both Nate and Sam are Turtles fans, you see. Sam has a remarkable sense of what he’s ready for, in terms of pop culture that may not be appropriate for a boy his age.


Sam Collins is astonished to see his grandfather’s name on a book at the local library.

When Nate told Sam about the upcoming Turtles movie, Sam thought it might not be right for him. Nate asked him why.

“It’s a reboot.”

Nate said it was a reboot, yes.

“Well,” Sam observed, “reboots are dark.”

And isn’t that the truth. The Michael Keaton Batman, decades ago, started the trend – reboots had to be dark and serious and grown-up, even when the subject matter was inherently juvenile.

The HBO Perry Mason, which has considerable merits, is a case in point, sort of. Erle Stanley Gardner was one of the best mystery writers of his day, and remains eminently readable. His Mason novels are like James M. Cain stories combined with a mystery – the same Cain-like subject matter, sex and money, and (again, like Cain) display a genuine interest in how businesses work. Perry and his secretary Della Street had a warm relationship that one assumed was sexual, away from work…but we rarely saw them away from work. Mason and his detective, Paul Drake, reflected the way criminal lawyers work, i.e., with an investigator or investigative staff.

Mason, well into the 1950s, was something of a sleaze. Remember the line in Better Call Saul? “You don’t need a criminal lawyer…you need a criminal…lawyer.” Perry hid clients, messed with evidence, switched guns, broke and entered, and it was just delightful.

A lot of that went into the first few seasons of the original Raymond Burr series. Some of that gets into the good but not great HBO reboot. The second season of the new Mason was a big improvement, but it still suffers from anachronisms (it’s set in the early ‘30s) and with a subservience to current sensibilities. Some of that doesn’t hurt, even helps. Paul Drake, for example, is Black here, and lives in a Black part of town; this puts flesh on the Gardner Drake’s bare bones and is an enhancement. But do both Della and Hamilton Burger have to be gay? Isn’t one of them enough? Must Della be Perry’s pal and not sly lover? Must she really be a superior lawyer to Perry, even though she isn’t one? Did I really see him (and an unsympathetic judge!) allow her to handle a key courtroom cross-examination in a murder trial? In 1934?

Yikes.

But if you’re young enough, you won’t care; and if you’re old enough, and haven’t thrown anything through the screen yet, you’re in for some good acting, crafty plot twists and great production values.

My advice to the producers of this series (which will not be heeded) is to at least make Della bisexual so she and Perry can be more than good buddies. And stop using phrases like “throwing shade” and “gaslighting,” and instead make use of actual colorful ‘30s argot.

Also, read some Gardner and watch some Raymond Burr Perry Mason episodes. (I did a project with Burr and he was a wonderful, smart man with a great sense of humor. He was planning to have Perry marry Della in the final of the later TV movies.) Right now Paramount Plus is running the first eight (of nine) Perry Mason seasons. The series is also available on DVD.


Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale as Perry Mason and Della Street

To you mystery fans out there, I would recommend the many episodes based directly on Gardner’s novels. The non-Gardner-derived episodes are entertaining but cookie-cutter, where Gardner is a wild, unpredictable ride, rarely telegraphing which character will be the murder victim. The first season of the series consists almost entirely of adaptations of Gardner Perry Mason novels (or short stories) – something unique in the history of American broadcasting. The second season is about half Gardner adaptations, and then after that it’s more sporadic. As it progressed, the show was actually adapting Gardner novels within a year or so of publication! Toward the end of the long run of the series, remakes of adaptations were also made, under new titles.

I tried hard to find a list of the Gardner adaptations on the Internet, to no avail. I decided to put just such a list together, for myself and Barb and, dear reader, you. You are very welcome.

Perry Mason Episodes
Based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s Novels and Short Stories

Season 1 (1957 – 1958)
1. The Case of the Restless Redhead
2. The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece
3. The Case of the Nervous Accomplice
4. The Case of the Drowning Duck
5. The Case of the Sulky Girl
6. The Case of the Silent Partner
7. The Case of the Angry Mourner
8. The Case of the Crimson Kiss
9. The Case of the Vagabond Vixen
10. The Case of the Runaway Corpse
11. The Case of the Crooked Candle
12. The Case of the Negligent Nymph
13. The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink (pilot)
14. The Case of the Baited Hook
15. The Case of the Fan-Dancer’s Horse
16. The Case of the Demure Defendant
17. The Case of the Sun Bather’s Diary
18. The Case of the Cautious Coquette
19. The Case of the Haunted Husband
20. The Case of the Lonely Heiress
21. The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister
22. The Case of the Fugitive Nurse
23. The Case of the One-Eyed Witness
25. The Case of the Empty Tin
26. The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife
28. The Case of the Daring Decoy
29. The Case of the Hesitant Hostess
30. The Case of the Screaming Woman
31. The Case of the Fiery Fingers
32. The Case of the Substitute Face
33. The Case of the Long-Legged Models
34. The Case of the Gilded Lily
35. The Case of the Lazy Lover
37. The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde
38. The Case of the Terrified Typist
39. The Case of the Rolling Bones

Season 2 (1958 – 1959)
41. The Case of the Lucky Loser
44. The Case of the Curious Bride
45. The Case of the Buried Clock
50. The Case of the Perjured Parrot
52. The Case of the Borrowed Brunette
53. The Case of the Glittering Goldfish
54. The Case of the Foot-Loose Doll
58. The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat
59. The Case of the Stuttering Bishop
62. The Case of the Howling Dog
63. The Case of the Calendar Girl
65. The Case of the Dangerous Dowager
66. The Case of the Deadly Toy
68. The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom
69. The Case of the Lame Canary

Season 3 (1959 – 1960)
72. The Case of the Garrulous Gambler
79. The Case of the Lucky Legs
86. The Case of the Mythical Monkeys
87. The Case of the Singing Skirt

Season 4 (1960 – 1961)
111. The Case of the Waylaid Wolf
121. The Case of the Duplicate Daughter

Season 5 (1961 -1962)
139. The Case of the Shapely Shadow
144. The Case of the Mystified Miner

Season 6 (1962 – 1963)
166. The Case of the Shoplifter’s Shoe
175. The Case of the Velvet Claws

Season 7 (1963 – 1964)
184. The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito
187. The Case of the Reluctant Model
188. The Case of the Bigamous Spouse
197. The Case of the Ice-cold Hands
204. Case of the Woeful Widower (Fiery Fingers)

Season 8 (1964 – 1965)
224. The Case of the Blonde Bonanza
235. The Case of the Careless Kitten
239. The Case of the Grinning Gorilla
241. The Case of the Mischievous Doll

Season 9 (1965 – 1966)
244. The Case of the Candy Queen (Silent Partner)
246. The Case of the Impetuous Imp (Negligent Nymph)
255. The Case of the Golden Girls (Vagabond Virgin)
258. Case of the Vanishing Victim (Fugitive Nurse)
260. Case of the Sausalito Sunrise (Moth-eaten Mink)
265. Case of the Fanciful Frail (Footloose Doll)

M.A.C.

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55 Is Not the Limit! Barb and Me

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2023

Our wedding anniversary is coming up on June 1. It’s our 55th, a number that sounds more like a speed limit than a designation of how long two people have been together in a marital partnership. Barb and I have been a couple longer even than that – the fall of 1966 – and have known each other since childhood.

Barbara Collins

In the West Junior High band, here in Muscatine, Iowa, Barb was first chair trumpet and I was second chair. I was okay (not false modesty) but she was excellent. I tried several times to “challenge” her, the process by which you could unseat the person occupying the chair above yours. I failed miserably, and I would even say trying to play “Golden Gate” (the difficult piece she sadistically chose) was one of my more humiliating experiences, even in junior high terms, which is basically one humiliating experience after another. The band director actually interrupted my performance, saying, “I lost you somewhere, Mr. Collins.” Barb had already completed the impossible number flawlessly.

And yet I wound up marrying the girl who had visited upon me the most withering humiliation of my youth. This only goes to show how weak a male can be when a beautiful blonde is willing to go out with him. (I should also note that I quit band after junior high, concentrating on chorus.)

We were thrown together, in a way, because we were the only two of our extended crowds who had, after high school graduation, wound up at Muscatine Community College and not at the University of Iowa or some other institution of higher learning. Our first date in MCC days was to Wild Cat Den as part of a group that may have been a church one – I don’t recall. I only know I made clear to Barb how little I enjoyed the Great Out of Doors. Despite her lovely company, I had a terrible time, looking out for snakes and other small creatures bent on my destruction.

How we wound up on a second date, I will never know. We went to the nearby Quad Cities to a movie – possibly a drive-in – and I was trying to impress her with my brilliant gift of gab. She was quiet, occasionally nodding, and doing her best not to look glazed (she still does this when I am off on some verbal tear, which is frequent). She states that the moment she fell in love with me was when I put my hand in a water glass (during some brilliant monologue) and she had smiled and thought to herself, “He’s not so smart. I can put up with this.”

We were an item by Thanksgiving, disgusting our fellow students with our lovey-dovey behavior. It became obvious to me that, within this quiet lovely girl, was a smart, funny human being worth hanging out with forever. A crisis having to do with her mentally ill mother dragging Barb and two of her sisters across country (to Arizona) to get one of those sisters well from a supposed illness (undiagnosed) had only brought us closer together upon her inevitable return. Her mom’s general erratic behavior had a lot to do with why we decided to get married right after graduation from MCC – Barb was nineteen, I was twenty.

When I look back on these fifty-five years, I realize how very lucky I was and continue to be. While I tend to focus on my career, I don’t value anything more than my relationship with Barb. She has continued to amaze and amuse and delight me, and occasionally put me in my place. I had no idea – nor did she – that she would develop into such a wonderful writer. The Antiques series is a unique accomplishment and my co-authorship of Barb’s novels is among my proudest achievements. The son we produced, Nathan, is another.

Then there’s how beautiful she still is. I am obviously a shallow soul. I have been criticized for celebrating attractive women in my fiction – apparently I should have been celebrating harridans – but I admit that one of the great pleasures of my life is the many times each day when I glance at this lovely girl (yes, I know she’s a woman!) and think, “Wow. How can I be this lucky?”

On the other hand, it’s another reason for people to hate me. I get it. I would feel the same way. I’d be right there with you saying, “That lucky effing stiff.”

She may or may not read this. She reads my updates sporadically – after all, she is subjected to what I think every time we go out together. We’re easy to spot. She’s the beauty. I’m the beast with his fingers in the water glass.

* * *

The day this appears we will have seven days remaining on the Blue Christmas Indiegogo fund-raising effort. Just in case you were wondering what to get Barb and me for our wedding anniversary.

I will continue, this week, to honor requests from anyone who puts in $35 or more to do my best to fill in some blanks on their M.A.C. want list. Barb and I have sent out around fifteen packages so far, often containing one-of-a-kind items that I’ve parted with in gratitude for this support.

We do not know yet (soon, I hope) if we’ve nabbed a Greenlight grant, but even if we don’t, we intend to go forward with the best version of Blue Christmas we can. The Indiegogo $5000 (we are at 85% now!) will go toward matching funds, if we get the grant, or into the production itself, if we don’t.

Chad Bishop is the mastermind here, aided and abetted by Karen Cooney. Karen is the go-getter who went and got me to do Encore for Murder as a fund-raiser for the local Art Center. If I hadn’t had the experience of turning that one live performance into a multi-camera movie (or “movie”), I would not have got my filmic juices flowing again. Right now Chad and my longtime collaborator Phil Dingeldein (and a talented young woman named Liz Toal) are working hard to get other projects going, including Reincarnal and even Road to Purgatory.

I did not imagine at this age (75, choke) post-open-heart surgery that I would be back at filmmaking again. Few in that field have trod a weirder road than mine. Mommy and Mommy’s Day had respectable low budgets (half a mil and a quarter of a mil respectively); but after that, my then best friend slash producer stole most of the profits, and my subsequent productions have been put together with spit and chewing gum – Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life are respectively $10,000 and $15,000 productions but managed to get national distribution and some decent critical reaction.

And yet my graphic novel Road to Perdition became a $90 million movie (at the same time Real Time was shooting on a budget that maybe covered one day of stocking Perdition’s craft services table) and I made respectable money on two films I wrote but did not direct, The Expert and The Last Lullaby. The Quarry TV series at Cinemax, for which I wrote two scripts, also paid some bills.

Along the way there have been two documentaries (Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop) I wrote and directed, and three short films, and one I didn’t direct – A Matter of Principal – but wrote; that one was an award-winner and led to the feature, The Last Lullaby. By the way, that’s a Quarry movie with a great Tom Sizemore performance and it’s available on Amazon Prime right now.

I am the rare writer of prose fiction who will admit that he likes movies as much as books. I feel lucky, even honored, to have been able to do as much as I have in that arena, even if my own little movies have never made me a dime. The joys of collaboration – my friendships with the likes of Phil and Chad and the late Steve Henke, my creative collaboration with the late Mike Cornelison – are more reward than anyone could dream of.

Should I have gone to Hollywood and pursued that dream, as opposed to joining the fiction-writing ranks of Hammett, Chandler, Cain and Spillane? No. I do not have the temperament for what Hollywood puts writers through. Because movies are my side hustle, screenwriting for Hollywood on occasion is something I can abide. I would also probably have been married three or four times by now, and I refer you to earlier in this post for the reasons why that would have been a tragedy.

Last night I watched Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder on the local public access channel. Because we have landed a deal with VCI that includes both home video release and streaming for both the new expanded Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and Encore for Murder, we have decided not to offer either to the Iowa or Quad Cities branches of PBS. But my collaborator Chad Bishop runs Channel 9, Muscatine’s public access channel, and his participation in the project includes the right to show Encore there.

I had worked on Encore on a computer screen – on several actually – and have seen it projected on a full-size movie screen at our recent premiere showing. But this was the first time I’d seen it on my TV at home. And that was a thrill, because that’s the venue we had in mind. I refer to it as a “movie,” but really it’s a TV program. I thought it held up pretty well. When you consider that we only decided to record the play a few days out from dress rehearsal and its one public performance, it’s another of the small miracles that seem to litter my life.

And there’s nothing wrong with small miracles. You can enjoy them. The big miracles are so overwhelming, you can’t really enjoy them.

But I’m willing to try.

* * *

I did an interview with Jason Dehart on his podcast Words, Images, & Worlds that is fairly wide-ranging and covers some things that have rarely come up, like the influence of Hong Kong movies on my work.

This is a really good interview with my frequent collaborator, Matthew Clemens.

Here’s a way to access my Batman comic strip continuity with Marshall Rogers.

Here’s a free-wheeling interview that I really enjoyed doing – you might, too.

Finally, he’s a largely positive review of Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life.

M.A.C.

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The Movies Keep Pulling Me Back In!

Tuesday, May 16th, 2023

I’ve spent a lot of time here, at this update/blog entries, over the past year or so talking about Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer, and my efforts to complete Mickey’s work and to specifically celebrate the 75th anniversary of Mike Hammer’s first appearance in I, The Jury.

Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction cover
Hardcover:
E-Book: Kobo
Digital Audiobook: Kobo Libro.fm

A good deal of these posts have centered upon the biography written by Jim Traylor and me, Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction (and published by Mysterious Press). The response to that book has been terrific, and I have reason to hope our bio will be considered the definitive work on Mickey and will play a major role in getting this great and very influential mystery writer his due.

Lately here I’ve discussed certain Spillane-centric efforts of myself and longtime collaborator Phil Dingeldein, the Director and Photography (as well as Editor) on my indie films Mommy, Mommy’s Day, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life. We have expanded my 1998 documentary, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane, from 47 minutes to 61, covering the later few years of Mickey’s life and work as well as my project of completing his unfinished manuscripts (at his request in the final weeks of his life).

We also – and as I’ve reported here, did so last-minute and somewhat on the fly – recorded the performance last September in Muscatine, Iowa, of my Golden Age Radio-style play, Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder, capturing Gary Sandy’s charismatic performance as Hammer (he had starred in productions of Encore at Owensboro, Kentucky, and Clearwater, Florida, previously, and of course was Patty McCormack’s co-star in Mommy’s Day).

This fall the expanded Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane with Encore for Murder presented as a second feature will be out on home video from VCI Entertainment. VCI will be taking both the documentary and the edited/recorded play performance out to the streaming services, too. We are also in early stages of putting together definitive versions of Mommy and Mommy’s Day, having finally located their un-Filmlooked masters (not coincidentally Mickey appeared as Mommy’s lawyer in both).

Things on these updates will begin swinging back toward my own (and Barb’s) work, as only two more Hammer novels (one already delivered, Dig Two Graves) are planned. That may change, as Skydance has optioned all the Hammer novels (the solo Spillane and collaborative Spillane/Collins ones). A renewed interest in Mike Hammer and his creator, due to a new big-deal movie, could inspire me to go back to the files and see what of Mickey’s unfinished work remains.

Encore for Murder has led to a reawakening of my interest in filmmaking. I’ve continued to do the occasional screenplay (director David Wexler is prepping Cap City, based on the Spillane/Collins novella, “A Bullet for Satisfaction”) but I had thought, after my heart surgery and other medical fun-and-games, my moviemaking days were over, save for the occasional scripting job.

But working with editor Chad Bishop has revitalized me, and so we are moving from Encore – that little “movie” that sort of willed itself into existence – to Blue Christmas, based on my novella, a sort of Scrooge/Maltese Falcon mash-up. We have only a couple of more weeks on our Indiegogo campaign to raise $5000 that will provide some of the matching funds needed if our Greenlight grant comes through (and if it doesn’t, those funds will go into the production itself).

A good number of you have supported this effort and I appreciate it…very much. I have been offering perks here that are not part of the Indiegogo descriptions of levels of participation. What I’m doing is working with contributors to fill items on their M.A.C. want list, according to the level of their contribution; most of you will be thanked on screen. Here’s a window on the Indiegogo page. We are at nearly $3000 at this stage.

Anybody who contributes $35 will be recognized on screen. (Keep in mind my postage and handling for your perk, once we’ve decided via e-mail what you’d like, comes out of that $35.)

Our budget is probably going to be around $150,000, with “in kind” figured in – in kind covers things like meager-to-no salaries for actors and crew, local businesses supporting us with free lodging and food, etc. We are seeking a relatively small amount but need it to secure matching funds, often a requirement with grants, or to help cover cash outlay. Much of what we’re doing is volunteer and includes the support of Muscatine Community College, where we’ll be shooting much of the production in their Black Box theater.

Really, I anticipate putting on screen something like looks like at least a half-million-dollar production. (We did Real Time and Eliot Ness for $10,000 and $15,000 respectively.)

I am a believer in the notion that if the story is strong, and the performances and production professional

enough, you don’t have to have huge stars and Hollywood production values to make a satisfying movie. It’s a small miracle that we’ve done five features, two feature-length documentaries, and three award-winning shorts right here in this corner of Iowa. If you want to help us work another minor miracle, consider stepping up.

We are coming down the pike here. If you’ve been thinking about participating, now’s the time.

* * *

While I did not attend the Edgars this year – I can lose so much more easily at home than in a New York hotel – I was asked by the MWA to write about Mickey for their nifty program book. In that publication, a number of mystery writers were celebrated by other pros in the field in brief essays about why each of the chosen artists were worth, well, choosing.

This is what I wrote:

MICKEY SPILLANE
by Max Allan Collins

In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, TV private eyes were the rage. Among the first was Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958) with Darren McGavin, which I started watching when I was ten. Video P.I. series were often directly based on literary sources – The Thin Man, Phillip Marlowe, 77 Sunset Strip, Perry Mason – with the biggest hit, Peter Gunn, a Hammer variation. I haunted the spinner racks, using my buck a month allowance to buy 25-cent paperbacks by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Spillane books were considered “dirty,” and for a while I satisfied my urge just reading the jaw-dropping endings. I researched Hammett, Chandler and Spillane, discovering the first two were admired and celebrated, whereas Spillane was attacked as juvenile delinquent-breeding trash. I loved all three, so this made no sense to me. So began a lifetime of reading, defending and eventually getting to know Mickey, and having the privilege of turning his unfinished material into books.

Mickey defies literary appraisal – he is an unpretentious blue-collar ex-comic book writer, his first seven novels (six Mike Hammer mysteries) his most popular, significant work. But his amazing first and last chapters, distinctive first-person voice, and noir poetry on every page makes him more than just a pop phenomenon. For reasons explored in Mickey Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction (2023, co-written by James L. Traylor and me), he stopped writing novels for ten years at his popular peak. Returning for a longer run in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, he was back on the bestseller lists but overshadowed by Ian Fleming, the obscure British thriller writer Mickey’s publisher promoted during their star’s absence. Much of Mickey’s later career was media-driven – he starred in two movies (as Hammer in The Girl Hunters, 1964) and spoofing himself in an eighteen-year (!) run of Miller Lite commercials. A household name in the 20th Century, Spillane demands reappraisal as the writer who re-invented private eye fiction, and whose success sparked the creation of paperback originals, with Hammer the template not just for Bond but Dirty Harry, John Shaft and every vigilante-tinged tough guy who came after.

* * *

Here’s a nice gallery of Hard Case Crime covers, including some of mine. [The site creates galleries from Tumblr hashtags and may contain NSFW content –Nate]

Here’s a mixed review from the somewhat accurately self-described B-Movie Enema. What this reviewer doesn’t understand is that reviewing a movie off You Tube is not the ideal place to judge its lighting, production values or audio (very hissy on You Tube, we’re told – like Gomer Pyle once said, “Surprise, surprise!”). Still, he makes some interesting points. But the major point he makes, inadvertently, is that we are lucky we found the original pre-Filmlook masters for a re-release of both Mommy movies next year.

By the way, the same reviewer liked Mommy a lot more. A lot. He really appreciates Rachel Lemieux’s terrific performance.

I do hope this reviewer will revisit the sequel when he realizes (a) you shouldn’t judge how a movie looks or sounds on You Tube, and (b) you shouldn’t expect the sequel to be exactly like the original.

M.A.C.

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Encore for “Encore”!

Tuesday, May 9th, 2023

It was a big weekend for the movie version of our Golden Age Radio-style play, Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder.


M.A.C. and Editor/Producer Chad Bishop introduce Encore for Murder

Friday evening at Muscatine Community College, with much of the cast in attendance, Encore received its first public screening at the college’s “Black Box” theater. The turnout was fine – around 75 humans, some of whom came a considerable distance.


Uber-fans Mike and Jackie White from Bloomington, Illinois — they attended the live performance back in September, too!

My son Nate came from up the street, but that was a trip much appreciated by his pop. Others, like my old bandmate Charlie Koenigsaecker and his sister Karlyn (and a friend), came from Iowa City.


M.A.C. and Karen Cooney, co-director of the stage play, answer questions from the audience at the Muscatine Community College ‘Black Box’ theater.

I had not seen our little movie in a theatrical setting – or on a big screen at all – and didn’t know what to expect or how I’d react. The intention of editing our considerable amount of footage – four HD cameras shooting two dress rehearsals and the one-time-only performance – was to create (a) a record of what we accomplished, and (b) a video presentation that could be enjoyed at home.

The latter is how Encore will likely be experienced almost exclusively, as we have not entered it in further film festivals (more about that below) much less plan to offer it for theatrical exhibition. The most significant aspect of our little flick’s big weekend was that Friday afternoon I signed a contract with VCI Home Entertainment for them to bring out Encore as a sort of double-feature with our recently expanded (from 47 minutes to 61 minutes) documentary, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane, which we shot and assembled back in 1998. Encore is essentially a bonus feature, although it is actually half an hour longer than the film it supports.

It’s possible Encore will be issued separately and may be offered to streaming services as well. Seeing how well it played to the audience at MCC’s Black Box theater on Friday night is certainly encouraging. From the start, I wasn’t sure what we had.

The VCI release may happen as early as next October, by the way. Stay, as they say, tuned.

As some of you know, Encore began as one-page synopsis Mickey wrote for a book that he never wrote (it may have been intended to be a Stacy Keach TV movie). In 2009 I was approached to write two Mike Hammer audio novels, each of which would be around three hours long, with Keach as Hammer supported by full casts drawing upon Chicago talent, including the likes of Saturday Night Live’s Tim Kazurinsky, and with my pal Mike Cornelison as Pat Chambers. The first, The Little Death, came out in 2010 and won the Audie for Best Original work. The second, Encore for Murder, came out in 2011, and was nominated for the same award.

In 2010, I was asked to stage Encore, in Golden Age Radio style, at a mystery festival in Owensboro, Kentucky. Gary Sandy, an area resident there in Kentucky, would play Mike Hammer – Gary had been one of the leads in my movie Mommy’s Day (1996) and we were old pals. The director and several cast members were veterans of the great comedy group Firesign Theater, so I would be in good hands.

Encore was well-received at Owensboro, although the production was strictly Golden Age Radio-style – actors with scripts at microphones, a Foley artist in the pit.

In 2018, Encore for Murder, again with Gary Sandy as Mike Hammer, was staged in the Murray Theater at Ruth Eckerd Hall by legendary Broadway producer, Zev Buffman. Zev presented it as a hybrid of a Golden Age Radio-style production (i.e., actors using scripts at microphones) but mixed in theatrical elements, including costuming, and a musical score, with the Foley table on stage and utilizing a big projection screen for scene-setting slides. I had been skeptical of this approach, but I was wrong.

Last year, when I was approached by local theater maven Karen Cooney about doing a Golden Age Radio Show-style play as a fund-raiser for the local Art Center, I offered Encore for that purpose. Karen pushed me to approach Gary to reprise Hammer, but I was reluctant, as we had zero budget. But I gently broached the subject with him…and he was immediately on board. And he had no intention of asking for a fee for a fund-raiser.

The cast rehearsed without him for several weeks – I sat in as Hammer. We had two Iowa-to-Kentucky phone calls with Gary and ran the script in our first run-throughs with our star. Privately, he gave me notes for the cast, but was overwhelmingly positive and, like me, was surprised by how on target they were. I had already dragged Barb to the second rehearsal to see if my judgment was correct – were these people good, or did I just want them to be? Barb, a tough critic, said they were indeed very good.

Gary showed up a day early for the two days and one performance he’d agreed to, and I got in touch with my longtime movie collaborator Phil Dingeldein. I convinced Phil to shoot the performance and encouraged him to grab the two dress rehearsals. I was starting to think we had something.

So the shooting was both spur-of-the-moment and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants. Fortunately Chad Bishop – our contact with the college, where we’d been rehearsing, and the very funny, skillful Foley artist who would be on stage throughout – was adept with camera himself, and collaborated with Phil in camera placement. We would have a surprising number of angles to choose from, since we were shooting two rehearsals.

The audience at the live performance was pretty much standing room only, and the whole cast was good, but Gary – a very skilled stage performer – owned the place. His Hammer struck me as just right – tongue-in-cheek when he needed to be, gently kidding the material (much as Darren McGavin and Stacy Keach both had) but tough as nails when necessary. The audience got on board quickly with the potentially off-putting format of actors using scripts in what split the difference between a performed play and a staged reading.

It’s a bit of blur how we edited it together, Chad and I. But we did and I enjoyed working with this imaginative and very skillful editor. And I loved being back in an editing suite again, which is where a movie is made. I shake my head when I hear about bigtime directors walking away while an editor does a “first assemblage.”

When we finished, I was well aware we had something that was neither fish nor fowl. Encore really required an audience to get on board with the Golden Age Radio format to enjoy it. Live, Gary’s infectiously enthusiastic performance swept up the crowd. I didn’t know whether that would be conveyed in a recorded version, and was too close to the material to tell.

One of the first things I did, when we completed the edit, was enter Encore in the Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival and the Iowa Motion Picture Awards, competitions where I have done very well in the past. Cedar Rapids did not nominate us and that was a blow. But the four categories we entered in the Iowa Motion Picture Awards resulted in three nominations. Ironically, the one category in which we were not nominated was Editing, and I knew that if Encore was anything, it was a triumph of editing over material that had not been intended for the purpose we were putting it to.

For example. We had four cameras going on performance night, and only two camera persons on them – Phil and Chad’s assistant Jeremy Ferguson. One of those cameras shut itself off – the crucial angle – and did not record the last fifteen minutes of the performance. So we had to create a new last fifteen minutes from the recordings of the two dress rehearsals and the remaining three camera angles from the performance.

Other times, where a line was flubbed on performance night, we had to loop in dialogue from a dress rehearsal. All the sound mixing (music included) was done live, on stage, by Foley artist Chad. We turned the two-act play into one continuous narrative, cutting about five minutes.

Really, we shouldn’t have been able to come up with anything at all…and maybe Cedar Rapids was right.

Saturday night, in Forest City, Iowa, at an event I could not attend (more later), I won the Award of Excellence for Direction and the feature itself won an Award of Achievement (essentially, second place in the feature film category).

In defense of any judge looking at Encore, they would be quite within their rights to squint at what we did and shake their heads and say, “What is that, anyway?” Because Encore is something of a unique animal.

It has a strong, even charismatic performance by an actor with a classic TV sitcom and Broadway starring roles on his CV. But the rest of the cast is unknown – semi-pros and amateurs, all from a little town in Iowa. The actors hold scripts. Mike Hammer’s gun is a pointing forefinger. Actors play several roles. It’s radio. But you can see it.

I will not likely enter Encore in any festivals because what happened at Cedar Rapids is likely to happen again. The judges either won’t know what it is they’re supposed to judge, or they will only sample the piece – watch the first five minutes or so – and dismiss it…when you have to take the ride to get anywhere. If you experience Gary’s performance, and my snappy, pretty funny script, which progressively builds, you will have a good time.

I am told some excellent films were shown at Cedar Rapids, and I don’t doubt that. It’s a fun festival and I wish we’d been in it, and I think their walk-in audience – the theater is on Collins Road, after all – would have got a kick out of Encore. But we will settle for our two IMPA awards, and a signed contract for home video and streaming release.


Iowa Motion Picture Association President Jim Brockholn accepts two awards for the absent M.A.C. for Encore for Murder.
* * *

I mentioned in passing that Barb and I weren’t able to drive to Forest City, Iowa, to attend the Iowa Motion Picture Awards. Though it’s a long drive (four hours one way), we were looking forward to it. Hotel booked and everything. But then last Sunday I had another episode with a-fib and wound up at the hospital on Tuesday.

I wasn’t in over night, but I had what I think is my fifth cardioversion procedure, and this one has been a bitch from which to recuperate. Today (Sunday again) I am finally feeling like me. I was fearful I wouldn’t be up for attending my own movie premiere Friday night (!), but I did fine. Nothing like laughter and applause to make an old ham’s aches and pains go away.

My future likely holds another procedure – ablation – and I must assure my friends and readers that considering the laundry list of things wrong with me, I feel fine and am doing fine. But this has finally slowed me down.

On the other hand, I am at my best when I’m working, so I think you’ll see more stuff flying out of my printer in the days, months and maybe even years ahead. Maybe not as much, but more than most.

* * *

At the Encore premiere, we did something of a pitch for support (financial and otherwise) for our next planned production, Blue Christmas. We should know this month if we get a piece of that Greenlight grant. If not, we’ll find a way to make it just the same.

But I continue to offer perks here that are not on the Indiegogo site. Depending on how much you pitch in, I will work with you to come up with things from your M.A.C. want list that I can fill. Write me at macphilms@hotmail.com. Make your donation at the Indiegogo site and then e-mail and let me know how much you’ve kicked in.

In the Q and A after Encore, Barb called out that she had paid $500 to be an Associate Producer. I responded, “Young lady, if you sleep with the director, you can be an Executive Producer.” Got a huge laugh, including from her.

We are past the half-way mark money-wise with about twenty days to go. Your name will be on screen and NOT in tiny letters, I promise.

M.A.C.

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