Posts Tagged ‘Ms. Tree: Fallen Tree’

A Quarry Discussion Plus a Book Giveaway!

Tuesday, April 1st, 2025

It’s book giveaway time, with the new trade paperback edition from Hard Case Crime of The Last Quarry on offer to the first ten of you who ask for it.

As usual, if you’re interested, you write me directly at macphilms@hotmail.com. If you receive a copy, you agree to write a review at Amazon and/or Barnes & Noble, and/or your own (or someone else’s) blog. If you hate the book, you’re relieved of this obligation. Mixed reviews are fine, and only mildly resented. USA only, due to postal restrictions. Be sure to include your snail-mail address.

This trade paperback includes two of the four Quarry short stories as in-the-back-of-the-book bonuses: “Guest Services” and “Quarry’s Luck.” The other two short stories, “A Matter of Principal” and the fourth (the name of which escapes me – it appeared in The Strand) [“Quarry’s Gamble”, The Strand #52 — Nate] were swallowed up in the novels for use in The Last Quarry and Quarry’s Climax respectively.

The cover of this new book is particularly handsome. It’s by the great Robert McGinnis, one of the premiere paperback cover artists of the golden age of noir paperback originals and the guy who did some of the most iconic James Bond movie posters. I’ve told the story frequently, but I’ll go into it briefly here for you newer comers.

When Charles Ardai started up Hard Case Crime, I was one of the authors he approached (most of the others were dead, so it was their estates Charles approached). He did a reprint (in one volume) of the first two Nolan novels (Bait Money and Blood Money) called Two for the Money. He came back for more reprints and I said I’d rather do an original, even if it was just for reprint-level money. I believe he at first wanted a new Nolan, but I preferred doing a Quarry, the character having always been one of my favorites, and the series one I thought should have lasted and received more recognition.

The final negotiating point between Charles and me was my saying essentially, “I’ll do the novel if you get me a McGinnis cover.” And I’ll be damned if he didn’t.

At this point I’d written one more Quarry novel (Primary Target, aka Quarry’s Vote) in the wake of the initial Nate Heller success, and a nifty little Quarry short film that was burning up the festival circuit. I used that film in an anthology of my other short films as well as the Spillane documentary; this was called Shades of Noir, and the original paperback of The Last Quarry was sort of the movie tie-in to that boxed set of DVD’s.

Quarry was inspired by three things – well, two people and one thing. The thing was the Parker series by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) that I loved then and love now; and Nolan was my direct take on Parker, humanizing him with a young sidekick. But I always thought there was a cop-out nature to that series, and my own – Parker was a thief and when he was forced to kill somebody, that somebody was another bad guy. Same was pretty much true of Nolan. It occurred to me nobody had really done this kind of novel – a “crook book” where the heroic protagonist (okay, anti-heroic) was a hitman. I wanted the reader to have to deal with the point of view character being, unapologetically, a hired killer.

I did not have a series in mind but did leave the door open for a follow-up novel or two. (Nolan had not been conceived as a series either, and even died in the original draft of Bait Money.)

The two people impacting the creation of Quarry were Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier in the European Theater in World War Two, and later a movie star, mostly in westerns. I’d read enough about him to know he had been traumatized – had PTSD, though nobody was calling it that yet – which I found interesting. A normal kid who became a cold-blooded killer (of the enemy, but that counts).

The other inspiration was Jon McRae, a high school pal of mine who went on to several very bloody tours in Vietnam. Unlike some friends of mine, he came home recognizably his eccentric self, but he was nonetheless clearly traumatized by what were then still ongoing experiences. To give you the idea, he was the machine gunner in the tail of a rescue ‘copter.

Stir my Mickey Spillane obsession into the mix, and my admiration for “Richard Stark,” and you have Quarry. I was approached by Berkley Books to do three more novels about him and snapped up the chance. The subsequent three novels were increasingly violent and black humor-tinged. I was, frankly, worried about the direction they were taking – not the four books I’d done, but what the fifth book might be, and any future ones. I feared I’d gone down a road of having to top myself with some terrible thing Quarry did toward the end of a given novel – the basic idea having been to lure the reader into accepting Quarry as a narrator and even identifying with him, then getting slammed with something awful he does, and making readers question their own ease in going along with Quarry, to accept him as a “hero.”

That became no problem when Berkley Books asked for no further Quarry entries.

Over the years, however, I had more mail about Quarry than any other character of mine (pre-Heller). That, and my feeling that Quarry was an original creation, served poorly by the original publisher, made the series an itch that called out for scratching.

So when Charles gave me the opportunity to write The Last Quarry, an opportunity to answer whatever-happened-to-Quarry and wrap up the series, I grabbed it. When the book became a surprise success, both in terms of sales and reviews, this old war horse didn’t have to hear the bell ring twice. I was off and running with The First Quarry and my series of novels about the missing years in the character’s life between already written books.

Series have a way of knowing when they are either over or evolving, and Quarry is no exception. Almost from the start, the concept of Quarry evolved into him using the list of his dead Broker (murdered by Quarry) to approach targeted victims and taking out assassins…a kind of prolonged metaphorical self-suicide…which eclipsed the hitman aspect. Some of the flashback books depict Quarry in his hitman years, but the initial novel (The Broker aka Quarry) is essentially his last job before his transition to the “list” approach.

Killing Quarry emerged from somewhere in my subconscious to conclude the “list” cycle. The next book, Quarry’s Blood, in part returned to hitman days and then mostly was about Quarry at a much older age – essentially mine, maybe a couple of years younger – and I found that interesting enough to pick that up again in the more recent Quarry’s Return.

Now I will soon be embarking on Quarry’s Reunion, which will almost certainly be another of the Quarry-in-old-age novels. I had promised a while back that any further novels would revert to the “list” days, most likely; but if you’re expecting consistency from me, it’s only to be found in my ability to write readable books.

I realize much of what I’ve just shared is already known to some of you – maybe many of you – but it seemed like returning to the evolution of this series was appropriate with a Last Quarry book giveaway.

Here’s another story you may have already heard from me. I was so thrilled with McGinnis cover to The Last Quarry that I coaxed the artist’s phone number out of Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai. I called Bob McGinnis and told him what a career high it was for me to have a cover by him on a novel of mine. I was undoubtedly effusive and he took my fannish enthusiasm with grace. Then he asked me if I’d like the original art of the cover. That threw me, because I was next expecting him to offer it to me at a price I could not afford.

But I could afford it, all right. All he wanted was my address to send me the art.

It hangs near my desk now, an incredible reminder of how lucky I’ve been to have this career of mine, getting everything I ever wanted out of it (except getting rich). I have four other original covers from Quarry novels on my walls, by various artists, and all of those I did find a way to buy. One I particularly like, The Wrong Quarry painted by Tyler Jacobson, hangs near my desk, as well. Not all the covers (and I like them all) for Quarry novels have depicted him. But the ones that do that also match the image in my mind’s eye are the McGinnis and Jacobson ones.

When I’m asked who my favorite is among the heroes (and heroines) of my various book and comics series, it always comes down to Quarry and Nate Heller. Don’t ask me to choose between them, because they are both me.

* * *

Here is a particularly good YouTube video about the film version of Road to Perdition, provided to me by Terry Beatty himself.

* * *

Here is info and pre-ordering for Law and Order, the 1932 Wyatt Earp movie starring Walter Huston and Harry Carey derived from the hard-to-find 1930 W.R. Burnett novel. This has the commentary by me and the great Heath Holland of Cereal at Midnight, a recording I mentioned last week that I was about to do.

It’s a terrific movie. Don’t miss it.

* * *

I also teased last week about working on a screenplay. I can’t (or anyway won’t) give any details, but I’ve just completed my first Nathan Heller feature film screenplay, which will tie in with True Noir, the ten-episode audio adaptation of True Detective written by me and directed by Robert Meyer Burnett. The producers include Mike Bawden, Phil Dingeldein and Christine Sheaks.

This screenplay is not an adaptation of True Detective, however – it’s from another published work in the series. It’s a speculative effort but one that I think has a good shot at paying off. The only previous Heller screenplay I wrote was the pilot episode for FX of a Stolen Away mini-series that never happened (I did, however, get paid).

Speaking of True Noir, the last two episodes will be dropping soon. Then you can order it all at once. The almost five-hour production, starring Michael Rosenbaum as Nate Heller, will eventually be available on Blu-ray. A Blu-ray of an audio? Yes! This production with its incredible cast (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32507868/) will be on a disc that will also have all ten episodes of my History Behind the Mystery series (one per episode of the audio production) and a lengthy interview with me by Rob Burnett. A book of my ten scripts will also be available around the same time.

If this audio production is successful, our next productions of True Noir movies-for-the-mind will be the other two books in the Frank Nitti Trilogy, True Crime and The Million-Dollar Wound.

You can help make that happen, if you haven’t already, by going to truenoir.co and buying the entire ten-episode series for a modest $29.95.

Eventually there will be a soundtrack CD available of the excellent Alexander Bornstein score.

* * *

You may have already seen this nice little article about Ms. Tree, but it’s worth another look, anyway, particularly in the wake of the recent publication of the sixth and final volume of the archival series from Titan, Ms. Tree: Fallen Tree.

* * *

The Quarry movie, The Last Lullaby, is available on YouTube now. Tom Sizemore is “Price” (aka Quarry). I wrote the first drafts of the script and did a final punch-up, but another writer wrote a draft, too…so it’s not pure Quarry, but it’s pretty good.

M.A.C.

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Another Giveaway – Free Ms. Tree!

Tuesday, February 25th, 2025

We had a nice response to our book giveaway last week, especially considering The Last Quarry is a reprint (albeit a nice, bigger physically – and content-wise – edition, including as it does two Quarry short stories).

So why not do another giveaway this week?


Paperback: Bookshop Purchase Link
E-Book: Google Play

I’m not sure I’ve ever done a giveaway on any of the Ms. Tree archival volumes. I haven’t been sent anything more than a few author’s comp copies of any of ‘em, and the books are rather weighty – you might say heavy, and I’m not talking about the stories.

But this time around I got a nice box of comps and I’m going to offer copies to the first ten of you people blessed enough with sublime taste to request one. This is the final of six volumes of MS. TREE, Fallen Tree, and like all of the preceding volumes from Titan and Hard Case Crime, it’s a beauty. The covers are strong and evocative by various artists, and all of Terry Beatty’s great covers are present in cover galleries spread out across the books.

[All copies have been claimed. Thank you for your support! –Nate]

You agree to write a review at Amazon and/or Barnes and Noble, and/or any comics-oriented web site. Mystery fiction web sites count, too. If you hate the book, you are released from the obligation of writing a review.

This particular volume features a number of stories where Terry was assisted by cartoonist Gary Kato, who is (I am embarrassed to say) an unsung hero of (particularly the later) Ms. Tree tales. Working out of Honolulu, often in tandem with the talented Ron Fortier on the lively comic book Mr. Jigsaw (among others), Gary continues to draw comics in a career that includes working on Elfquest and children’s books (the Barry Baskerville series) and the recent The Eternal Sword: A Tale of Arthur. He has also illustrated children’s books by Fortier and others, and his collaborators include Barbara Doran.

Gary is a big part of how we were able to keep Ms. Tree going as long as we did. It became necessary for Terry to take on Gary’s assistance when deadlines crushed us, in part because we had other projects come along that could, frankly, keep “starving artists” an expression and not a reality.

And I must salute my friend Terry Beatty, whose talent I’ve believed in from the start and who has proven me right on various non-Collins projects, including becoming the primary inker (and occasional penciller) of DC Comics’ “animated-style” Batman comics, and of course his work on the famous syndicated strips The Phantom and Rex Morgan, MD (he also writes the latter).

When you sit down with one of these archival volumes, you frankly have no idea how difficult it was to keep the ship from taking on water over our nearly decade and a half, sometimes staying barely afloat. The independent comics market exploded in those years, but we were writing the only mystery/crime title out there, pretty much, and we watched sales figures through squinted eyes and with our breaths held. Without Dean Mullaney, Dave Sim, Deni Loubert and Mike Gold we would never have made our record-breaking run.

I must also single out Titan’s Nick Landau and Vivian Cheung (with an assist from Andrew Sumner) for staying after Terry and me to collect this material. Nick, Vivian and I took many breakfast meetings at San Diego Comic Con over the years, discussing collecting Ms. Tree in this format (as well as continuing the Mike Hammer novels). Archival volumes like these – and Terry had to do a lot of work on them, as our materials were not always in good shape – were always a dream of mine, and I think of my collaborator. But we could hardly have imagined what a lovely job Titan would make of it.

Terry and I probably missed the boat a bit, not taking advantage of the Road to Perdition buzz that would have boosted the sales of such archival Ms. Tree volumes. But as I’ve mentioned here before, we had hoped to launch the series with a new Ms. Tree graphic novel. That never happened and is unlikely at this point ever to happen.

I had a pretty good idea for what the graphic novel would be, but I’m not sure doing one would have been a good idea. Ms. Tree – who inspired a layout in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine – was very much of her time, an ‘80s/’90s phenomenon. Toward the end of the run (in the early ‘90s), a reader dinged me for having Ms. Tree use a key in a hotel room door. Didn’t I know hotels only used key cards now? Well, I suppose on some level I did know. But just as Ms. Tree was a throwback to the 1950s world of Mickey Spillane, I was in co-creating the Ms. Tree feature of a different era myself.

When I was in college in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, my great instructor Richard Yates sent my novel Bait Money to agent Knox Burger, who had a storied career as a Collier’s magazine editor and (more pertinently) the editor at Gold Medal Books, where among other things he encouraged John D. MacDonald to stop writing one-offs and create a series character (Travis McGee, anyone?). Burger took me on as a client, but a bit grudgingly, writing to Yates, “I’m afraid young Collins is a blacksmith in an automotive age.”

I’m afraid I still am.

And yet somehow I’ve managed to find a way to write about characters in novels, comics, and even films, who resonate with the child of the 1950s in me – the kid who scrounged used book stores for copies of the forbidden EC comics, who watched George Reeves as Superman loving every (sometimes silly) second of it, and who somehow – unbelievably – got to write Dick Tracy after Chester Gould’s retirement, and Mike Hammer after Mickey Spillane’s passing.

That would seem more than enough. But I’m a greedy cuss (get to my age you start using words like “cuss”) and am currently luxuriating in seeing – well, hearing – my own Nate Heller brought to life from my scripts in the immersive audio drama, True Noir, thanks to director Robert Meyer Burnett and star Michael Rosenbaum.

The moral of all this? Even if you are talented and hardworking, and I immodestly think I am those things, you are nothing without collaborators who are also talented and hardworking. Like Terry Beatty. Like Gary Kato. Like Rob Burnett.

* * *

Here’s an article on the best 7 performances in comic book movies – it’s Paul Newman in Road to Perdition.

M.A.C.

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Movies Vs. Books and Collaboration

Tuesday, January 7th, 2025

I know I said I wouldn’t be talking about Blue Christmas again till next holiday season, but apparently I lied. My defense is that I hadn’t seen the nice review we got from one of my favorite magazines, Videoscope, written by editor Nancy Naglin herself. It’s on the stands now.

Videoscope Winter 2025 cover

Videoscope Winter 2025 Blue Christmas Review

Nancy really seems to “get” our little movie, and it’s another of the overwhelmingly favorable reviews Blue Christmas has received, despite a handful of lumps of coal in our stocking. I should (or anyway will) mention that her observation of there being a sentimental aspect to the film is valid and whether that’s a bad or good thing reflects the way mileage can vary (as they say) among audience members. I like to think of it as “sentiment,” though, and not “sentimentality.”

I have a vivid memory of my late filmmaking friend Steve Henke commenting to the effect of, “Max does something wonderfully nasty overall and then ends with something sentimental and there’s nothing that can be done about it.”

Steve was a grizzled, gruff but fantastic collaborator who I once had to bail out of jail while a production was going. At risk of insulting his memory by getting sentimental, I will say his absence from the planet is one of the things that kept me from getting back into indie filmmaking for close to twenty years. Another collaborator I miss to a painful degree is actor Mike Cornelison, who starred in Mommy, Mommy’s Day, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market, and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life, and who narrated both Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop and Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane.

The recent (and not officially released as yet) Death By Fruitcake is the only movie I’ve made recently that did not include any veterans from those earlier indie days. With the exception of my close pal and collaborator Phil Dingeldein, who was d.p. on Blue Christmas, the same was true of that production. (A notable exception on Fruitcake is the great Paula Sands, who appeared as herself in Mommy’s Day and as Vivian Borne in Fruitcake.)

There’s a moment in Mommy when Mrs. Sterling, who’s been committing murders, is about to book it out of town with her daughter Jessica Ann when the little girl complains about having to leave all her friends behind. To which Mommy replies, “You’ll make wonderful new friends, dear.”

And that’s true of both Blue Christmas and Death By Fruitcake (and Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder), which added a wonderful new raft of collaborators to my life, with a special nod to the versatile d.p./editor/producer Chad Bishop.

Collaboration has been an important part of my professional writing career, although at the heart of that career was my desire to control my work, to be in charge. I feared – with justification – that my personality and approach made taking the tempting path to Hollywood unwise. I made the decision to stay put – in Iowa – and just write my stories.

Not that writing fiction for a living doesn’t come with interference, but it’s minimal compared to what happens in the world of movies and TV. Wrestling with an editor or copy editor now and then is nothing compared to the problems Hollywood presents – the way money controls your ability to tell a story, and the crap you have to put up with from those who provide that money; the way directors can rewrite and screw up a script; the many uncontrollable factors including miscasting and all the other slings and arrows of the craft; and most of all the difficulty of getting anything produced.

I watched one of the greatest mystery writers who ever lived, Donald E. Westlake, who won an Academy Award for the screenplay of The Grifters, write seemingly countless scripts that generated option money but ultimately went into a drawer.

Throughout even a moderately successful career like mine you are fairly sure that any novel you write, unless you really miss the mark, can find a publisher.

And yet.

Collaboration is something I instinctively seek out. For years I wrote strictly alone, but at the same time I was playing music in my rock ‘n’ roll bands The Daybreakers and Crusin’, which were overflowing with talented collaborators, a list too long to get into. We got into the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame with both bands, and had a national record that, however absurd, became something of a cult classic. Those years of musical collaboration – 1966 through 2024 – were concurrent with my fiction-writing career.

The loneliness of telling lies for fun and profit, as Lawrence Block put it, was further minimized by my collaborations on the Dick Tracy comic strip with Rick Fletcher and Dick Locher. Those collaborations had some ups and downs, but my long partnership with cartoonist Terry Beatty, co-creator of Ms. Tree and Wild Dog, among much else, proved particularly rewarding.

The same can be said of Matthew V. Clemens, with whom I wrote something like thirty novels, including (but not limited to) the bestseller Supreme Justice and its two sequels, plus our very successful series of CSI tie-in novels.

During the Covid lockdown I got the opportunity to collaborate with an SCTV favorite of mine, Dave Thomas, on a novel you may not have read (but should): The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton. This one seems little known but I’m really, really proud of it. It’s a crime thriller with a science-fiction slant.

Most recently I have collaborated with Robert Meyer Burnett on True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, the ten-episode fully immersive audio production based on the first Nate Heller novel, True Detective. Rob directed an incredible cast incredibly well and this is also something I’m proud of. We haven’t got a Nathan Heller movie yet – Road to Perdition came close – but what Rob has created from my script is as good an example of effective collaboration as I can think of.

If any collaboration stands out, however, it has to be the one with my wife Barbara Collins – numerous short stories, a novella, two novels, and the Antiques series (aka The Trash ‘n’ Treasures mysteries), which are heading into their twentieth installment…there are more novels in that series than either Nate Heller or Quarry. To witness my smart, beautiful wife develop into a terrific writer is something I have experienced with great pride, often sitting on the sidelines, impressed. (And later this year I hope you’ll see just how well our Brandy and Vivian Borne have been transferred to the screen.)

Filmmaking is a special sort of collaboration, however, and on the indie level you don’t have the Hollywood baggage. It’s always been like going to summer camp for me (and I loved going to summer camp). I am well-aware that my skills as a filmmaker fall far less of what I like to think of as my mastery of fiction-writing, or even my years of playing rock ‘n’ roll for fun and money.

Being a competent film director, much less a good or great one, is one of the hardest trades that narrative storytelling can offer. I had no ambitions to be a film director – none. Never occurred to me. I wanted to write movies and have wonderful directors bring them to life. It’s happened now and then – Sam Mendes ain’t no slouch.

But mostly it doesn’t. Mostly scripts get written and wind up in a drawer, even if you’re Don Westlake…or Mickey Spillane, who had his heart broken by Hollywood and who died with several unproduced scripts among his papers (The Menace is a novel I fashioned from one of ‘em).

I became a director by necessity, when I had to take over Mommy after two weeks of a four-week shoot, which including reshooting much of what went before. When I completed the movie, worried that I hadn’t known what the hell I was doing, I binged on Alfred Hitchcock movies. Hitchcock is probably the greatest narrative storyteller in motion picture history. I kept watching those movies and being relieved when I saw Hitch doing things similar to what I had done (not talking about content here, but putting pieces of film together into an effective narrative – editing well, like in a novel but completely different).

I am well aware that I started too late to reach in film the level that my fiction-writing has, I think, achieved – writing fiction is a craft I started working at learning when I was in junior high and high school, sending novels to publishers who (thank God) kicked them back to me.

But I love movies as much as I love novels, in some ways more, and they ultimately yanked me in, like Michael Corleone in Godfather 3 (nobody seems to like that movie but everybody remembers that line, possibly second only to “An offer you can’t refuse” in the original film).

Filmmaking has an irresistible pull for me and many other sorry souls. Stephen King said it best, although I’m paraphrasing: “Movies are the most expensive, least efficient way of telling a story; but, unfortunately, also the coolest.”

Am I done with indie filmmaking? I’m still thinking, talking, hoping (Barb has had her fill). Several things are cooking, but the bigger ones probably need a director younger than me. If they stick to the script, I’ll be fine with that.

Which is the problem. My first produced script, The Expert, had a star who seemed to have read the script once and then tried to remember it, and a director who either walked off or was fired (I’ve never found out which) from the production late in the game. The Last Lullaby had a “co-writer” foisted on me who I never met and who rewrote my screenplay, though I did provide revisions that brought it back closer to what I had in mind. Still. I did one script for the Quarry series that got disassembled and spread between two episodes, stitched together like the Frankenstein Monster and about as attractive.

That kind of collaboration? I can do without.

And it’s why I made two micro-budget movies on my own terms.

* * *

Here’s a smart review of the sixth (and final) Titan collection of Ms. Tree.

This is a nice if brief YouTube piece on the writing of Road to Perdition, both graphic novel and film. It answers the question of who wrote which, but is unaware that a playwright friend of director Sam Mendes from the UK did an uncredited rewrite.

Here’s another piece on the film of Road to Perdition focusing on Tom Hanks (and somewhat on Daniel Craig).

The day this appears I will be working with Phil Dingedein at dphilms in Rock Island shooting the final episodes of History Behind the Mystery, each of which drops on YouTube in tandem with the episodes of True Noir.

M.A.C.

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Reviews Discussed…and Shared!

Tuesday, December 10th, 2024

Barb and I did a book signing at Greenpoint Mercantile, as part of the annual holiday stroll here in Muscatine. Thanks to this new bookstore and to those who dropped by to chat…and to buy and chat especially.

Just around the corner, our Blue Christmas/Death by Fruitcake star Alisabeth Von Presley was doing her thing, with my film-making crony Chad Bishop at the controls.

Alisabeth is a force of nature!

Alisabeth Von Presley performing at the 2024 Muscatine holiday stroll.
Alisabeth Von Presley performing at the 2024 Muscatine holiday stroll.
* * *

Let’s discuss reviews.

The baseline of this one-sided discussion is a truism: no two people experience a work of art the same way. A book is the author plus the reader. A film is the movie plus the audience member. A painting is the canvas plus the viewer. This, like all truisms, should be obvious. And yet people argue about whether a novel, say, is a masterpiece or stinks on ice, and every stop in between.

Several things have occurred in recent years that have frustrated any worthwhile discussion of (let’s say for the sake of argument) a novel or a feature film. Reviews used to be the domain of professional reviewers – individuals who worked for a newspaper or perhaps a radio or television station, and presumably had credentials for such work. In recent years – starting with the Internet and careening into the Social Media era – anyone, everyone, is a critic. This is democracy. But democracy is sloppy. And the end result seems to be that everything is judged, minus nuance or context, as either good or bad.

I am thinner-skinned than a professional writer should be. I will brood over a bad review – not long, but enough to make it hard to get to sleep for one night. However. My thin skin has less to do with criticism and more to do with marketing. In other words, I view a good review as something that generates sales, and a bad review as something that lessens sales. The audience, or I should say potential audience, doesn’t necessarily know the difference between an informed review and an unprofessional one.

Which is not to say informed reviews are necessarily “right” – but they are opinions that might reasonably be taken more seriously. And that is largely lost.

Anthony Boucher, probably the greatest reviewer of mystery fiction who ever lived (and a fiction writer of some skill himself), hated Mickey Spillane’s work on the initial publication and success of the Mike Hammer novels. But as the years passed, he re-evaluated Mickey, and came to (somewhat grudgingly) revise that opinion and become an advocate of Spillane as the last of the great pulp fiction writers. That indicates thought, and growth, and yes nuance, on Boucher’s part.

I distrust reviews as they pertain to my potential growth as a writer. That may seem counter-intuitive, as if I want to improve, listening to criticism makes sense. But writers of fiction must have confidence and conviction in what they are creating. Allowing a bad review to undermine you – or a good review to give you a swelled head – is not productive.

There’s an argument, and not a bad one, that if you allow yourself to believe the good reviews, you have to believe the bad ones, too. That however, it seems to me, would lead to mental whiplash or maybe the onset of a bipolar condition. A more nuanced approach would be for a writer (or filmmaker) to consider each opinion on its own merits, and while this makes sense, it can get in the way of the creative process – it leads not to creativity but to second-guessing yourself.

When my first two novels came out in January 1973, I was fairly well-known in small-town Muscatine (pop. 25,000) largely due to my father, Max Allan Collins Sr., who was the director of a national-championship men’s chorus, a beloved former high school music teacher and a choir director at the Methodist Church. If I am half the writer he was a musician, I must be pretty damn, excuse me darn, good.

So eyes were on me when I published Bait Money and Blood Money. And I expected praise. And I got some. But mostly I got dirty looks and dirtier comments because my novels were considered by local residents as, yup, dirty. Should I have taken this criticism to heart and cleaned up my act? Fuck no. Did it hurt my feelings? A bit. Surprised me, more than anything.

My attitude toward reviews, good and bad (few are in between in these black-and-white times) is, “Is there a nice quote that can be pulled from here?” Not that I am either a genius or a fraud. Bad reviews are worthless because you can’t pull a quote for promotional purposes. There was a time, when a mixed review was more common, that you could pull a quote and leave the rest behind, including negatives.

Do I ever allow myself to be seduced by a really terrific review? You bet. Briefly. Do I ever allow myself to be hurt by a really cruel review? Sure. Briefly. But mostly it’s, “That’s going to be helpful!” Or, “That’s not going to be bring some new readers in!”

None of this means that a thoughtful, well-written negative review can’t be helpful. There’s less of that these days because of the this-book-is-fantastic, this book-sucks-donkey-dick dynamic. Also, politics has started to enter in. I first noticed that when Matt Clemens and I got negative Amazon reviews from far-right readers about Supreme Justice – when the book wasn’t available yet, not even advance reviewer copies.

As absurd as that is, it does come back to the point that a book, a movie, a painting, is the artist plus the recipient. That’s especially true with a novel – with a movie, everybody sees the same narrative; they take it in differently, but it’s a shared visual experience. A novel is a movie that plays in the head of a single reader. And sometimes you play at an arthouse, sometimes the local multi-plex, and other times at the Three Mile Island Community Playhouse.

Movies are hostage to their budgets. The most money I’ve ever had to make a movie is half a million dollars. Most recently, I’ve had eight grand to make Blue Christmas and twenty-four grand to make Death By Fruitcake. Before that, Encore for Murder had zero budget – it was strictly a local production I recorded and edited (with Phil Dingeldein and Chad Bishop respectively).

And yet.

I recall back in the early ‘80s when I’d hear from Paul Reubens with a late-night phone call where we’d discuss the Pee-Wee Herman movie he was trying to get off the ground. When he got Warners Bros on board, he was concerned about budget. I told him, “The more money they give you, the more trouble you’ll have.” He said he agreed with me, but not to tell Warner’s. As it was Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure had a modest budget and a terrific unknown director and did just fine.

If a reviewer – a viewer – doesn’t have a sense of scale, of making an effort to meet a movie on its own level, the filmmaker is screwed. Last week, I shared with you a wonderful review of Blue Christmas from a professional critic whose work I admire. Getting that review, I admit, felt great.

But a day later we got a review that dismissed us as low-budget bilge. The reviewer was nobody I’d ever heard of, but I’m sure he has an audience. And I get that when you are used to seeing movies made for hundreds of millions of dollars, or for just a paltry five or ten million, an eight-thousand-buck “blockbuster” like Blue Christmas may be difficult to meet on its own terms.

But a reviewer should try. We all should meet art on its own terms (and I use the word “art” to cover a lot of ground, and perhaps “craft” would be more appropriate). Blue Christmas, a little micro-budget movie that I am pleased with, was worth making. I have been trying to get it done, in various ways, on assorted levels, since 1994. Finally, with my own clock winding down, I came up with a way to do it on a very limited budget, and now – for better or worse (and I obviously feel it’s better) – Blue Christmas exists. (It’s still available as I write this for under two bucks at Amazon Prime; and the Blu-ray release from VCI is pretty nifty, by my biased standards.)

Allow me, if you will, a sidebar about the cast of my little movie. It’s a large cast for a micro-budget production – twenty-four – and consists of professionals, semi-pros (day-job folks who appear in, for example, regional dinner theater), and community theater amateurs. I am grateful to them, every one of them. Our top-billed duo, Rob Merritt and Alisabeth Von Presley, are both well-known in this corner of the world and are film-festival award-winners for their performances in Blue Christmas.

I am pleased and proud to say that we’ve had mostly good reviews for Blue Christmas, a few of which have been raves or nearly so, outnumbering a handful of bad ones.

Now after all that, I’m going to share a really good review with you, our first, for True Noir (based on the first three episodes), the budget for which was around $250,000 and whose cast is overwhelmingly stellar. The review is written by a professional fiction writer and literary critic, by the way.

Here it is:

Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Richard Diamond, Nero Wolfe, Pat Novak, Johnny Dollar – at the height of their popularity in the 1940s and 1950s, when radio was the primary means of home entertainment in the United States, detective story serials drew tens of millions of listeners. These serialized private eye dramas, which hypnotized audiences with crackling writing, stirring voice acting, gripping plots, colorful characters, and atmospheric sound effects, were gradually relegated to silence as the art form of immersive audio storytelling went extinct–until now. Enter True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, a spellbinding sonic re-imagining of the first installment in Max Allan Collins’ most celebrated series, the Nathan Heller casebooks.

Crisply directed and impeccably edited by Robert Meyer Burnett, based on Collins’ excellent screenplay treatment of his own novel, the audio drama drops listeners into an aurally vibrant and thoroughly realized 1932 Chicago, where we follow the shady power plays of characters both fictional and historical. Michael Rosenbaum brings Nate Heller to life with a captivating blend of playful gusto and sensitivity, pulling double duty with a voiceover simultaneously dynamic and velvety. The stacked supporting cast, which includes Bill Smitrovich, David Strathairn, and Katee Sackhoff, unfailingly deliver performances that pop with nuance and flavor. Michael J. McDonald’s phenomenal sound design, which expertly suggests spatial relationships through the subtle manipulation of audio channel elements, such as floating wisps of background dialog, further orchestrates the drama’s heightened sense of reality. Ingenious transitional effects, like traveling through a telephone wire or experiencing a sensory flashback, invent a whole new vocabulary of acoustic alchemy. Alexander Bornstein’s tastefully interspersed original score, with its sultry jazz influences, smoky sax tones and melancholy piano chords, evokes the best retro-noir scores of the twentieth century, like Jerry Goldsmith’s Chinatown, John Williams’ The Long Goodbye, and John Barry’s Body Heat. We can only hope for its eventual release as a standalone presentation.

World-building is a term commonly applied to literary and visual media – but True Noir proves that with the right team at the conductor’s podium, it can be equally batoned to mesmerizing effect just through sound. In a smoky netherworld somewhere between bitter memory and bygone dream, the ambiance-drenched True Noir is the perfect marriage of our past’s most beloved tried-and-true storytelling tradition with the latest cutting-edge technologies of creative soundscaping. The play’s still the thing, and this one hits all the right notes.
—-Author & critic Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

I will add only one slight correction – I’ve never written a screenplay version of True Detective. My adaptation was based on the novel itself, and is to a degree screenplay-style.

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro is the author of the well-regarded 2024 novel, Equimedian.

True Noir promotional banner
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Here is a great review of the new Ms. Tree collection by Terry Beatty and me, Ms. Tree: Fallen Tree. (Scroll down a bit.)

Never heard my punk classic (let’s make that “classic”), “Psychedelic Siren”? Now’s your chance.

There’s some interesting stuff about Road to Perdition as a graphic novel that inspired a big-time Hollywood movie right here.

Never mind what I said above about reviews – this one from Paperback Warrior about the current Quarry’s Return is a honey! Exactly what I wanted for Christmas.

M.A.C.

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