Posts Tagged ‘Nolan’

Damn Fool Crusader, Dick Tracy, Wayne Dundee R.I.P.

Tuesday, June 10th, 2025

Through my dalliances with YouTube, I’ve been able to connect with some interesting people, who have become my friends or at least friendly acquaintances. I spend a little more time watching YouTube than I should, because my wife Barb and I almost always watch a movie in the evening, and sometimes my son Nate comes over (after he helps his wife Abby get his two kids to bed) (Sam and Lucy), making it a double feature. My beddy-bye time is, roughly, midnight and I sometimes have an hour or so to fill before closing out my day. The morsels of entertainment I encounter on YouTube are fun, often informative and, usually, not demanding.

This past week I did a commentary with Heath Holland of the respected Cereal at Midnight on the Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes, which is one of my favorite movies but not a terribly well-regarded film. It was my opportunity to defend the film and explain myself. This commentary was for the upcoming 4K Blu-ray to be released by Kino Lorber.

Heath is a knowledgeable pop culture expert with an emphasis on film and music, as well as a winning presence on Cereal at Midnight, which appears sporadically but frequently on YouTube. We’ve done several movie commentaries together for Kino, and have several more to do. He’s a pleasure to work with.

I of course have a great creative relationship and friendship with Robert Meyer Burnett. Here’s him talking about our collaboration, True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, as a guest on a YouTube show dating back a few months (we hadn’t announced Michael Rosenbaum as our Nate Heller yet). The passion, talent and skill that director Rob Meyer Burnett brings to True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak is on full display in this interview (done while we were stilling working on the True Detective adaptation – available at truenoir.co). (Not “com” – “co”!)

More recently I connected with one of the most unique presences on YouTube, Spencer Draper, who calls himself The Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader. He discusses pop culture with an emphasis on genre movies (and books), but has become known, well outside YouTube circles, as a watchdog for flaws on DVDs, Blu-rays and 4K discs. He points out mastering problems and particularly hones in on audio blunders. He is focused, relentless and very, very smart.

I reached out to him to inquire about his experiences on the Warner Bros “DVD rot” problem, which has to do with a batch of 2007-2008 DVDs that are out there rotting even as we speak. He’s been key in alerting collectors and a sometimes (sometimes) cooperative Warner Bros customer service about the problem, and the need – moral responsibility for – replacing defective discs.

There’s a spooky aspect to the contact between Spencer and me. I’ve never gotten in touch with him before, and I don’t believe he’s ever covered anything of mine on his YouTube offerings. I had no reason to think I was on his radar.

But it turns out he was, at that moment, doing a deep dive into my involvement with the Dick Tracy movie, studying my novelization and doing his general thorough digging job. We have now corresponded several times and the experience has been pleasant, even if the Warner Bros aspect hasn’t been. (I am definitely not talking about Warner Archive!)

For Spencer, and for those of you who are new here (even relatively so), I am reprinting an article about how I intersected with the Dick Tracy movie, Warren Beatty’s people, and the Good Folks at Disney. It’s an excerpt from an article I wrote for Lee Goldberg’s Tied In – The Business, History and Craft of Media Tie-In Writing. It is the behind-the-scenes amusing and horrifying story of my writing of the movie tie-in novelization of Dick Tracy.

I wanted to write the Dick Tracy tie-in novel because I’d been the writer of the syndicated strip since 1977, plus I was a mystery novelist. Landing the Dick Tracy strip was my first really big career break. I got the job after trying out for it, writing a sample continuity. I got the opportunity to try out chiefly because of some mystery novels I’d written as a kid that had a strong comics element (Bait Money and Blood Money, both 1973).

My re-boot of the strip got a lot of positive attention, and I loved the job, having been a stone Dick Tracy fanatic since childhood. Before getting the strip, I had even developed a friendship with creator Chester Gould – a rarity, because he was very private – although Chet played no role in my landing this plum assignment.

Some time in the ’80s, I was shown a potential screenplay for Dick Tracy, shared with me by my Chicago Tribune Syndicate editor. I thought it was lousy, and told him so, and he agreed. I figured that was the end of it.

But the Dick Tracy film was a project that wouldn’t die – Clint Eastwood was going to be the square-jawed dick for a while, which was exciting, and then finally Warren Beatty got obsessed with it, and it became a Disney project and a very big deal. I offered to do the novel version and, thanks to my credentials as the writer of the strip, got the gig. I was thrilled.

Then they sent me the screenplay – it was virtually the same lousy one I’d read seven or eight years before! I was shocked and dismayed. Lots of the classic characters, villains and good guys alike, some good situations…but no story. Not really.

I asked my agent what to do about it, wondering what kind of novel I could fashion from such weak material, and he said, “Just do whatever you want with it. Nobody’s going to read it at Disney – this is just small change to them.” Did I mention that my usually very savvy agent had never sold a tie-in before? And that this was the worst advice he ever gave me?

So I wrote a novel very loosely based on the screenplay. I added more characters from the strip, provided a story, even replaced what seemed to me to be unimaginative death traps with my own better ones. It was a terrific little novel, designed by and for a Dick Tracy fan like me.

I sent it in, went on about my business, and several months later my wife Barb and I were preparing to go on a research trip to Nassau (for my Nate Heller novel Carnal Hours) when my agent called with bad news. The Disney people hadn’t even made it through my book – got maybe a third of the way – before saying a faithful-to-the-screenplay page one rewrite was needed.

In seven days.

Dick Tracy is legendarily a movie that Warren Beatty micro-managed. Every tie-in aspect was overseen by Beatty and his top people. The novel I’d written was inappropriate for any film. To have taken these liberties on Dick Tracy was a blundering piece of farcical arrogance on my part that makes Fawlty Towers look like a documentary.

So with a 1989-era laptop (think about it), I went to Nassau and spent 70% of my time in the hotel room salvaging what little I could from my first version. Maybe 25% of it was workable. Actually, some of my non-screenplay stuff made it in, because it didn’t contradict anything (Vitamin Flintheart is in my novel, for instance, but not in the film, not even deleted scenes).

Barb and I were in Nassau four or five days, and I came home and wrote the rest of it, just blazing. What I came up with was pretty good. I was as happy with it as possible, considering the weak screenplay that was my source. But that, as they say, was just the beginning….

I spent many, many hours on the phone with the producer of the film, Barry Osborne (later involved in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy), a gracious, intelligent man, and way too far up the food chain to be giving a lowly tie-in writer such instructions as, “The chair on page 223? It’s green not red,” and, “You have 88 Keyes standing up from the piano too soon on page 187.” Most of the changes I was asked to make had to do with such surface things, and many substantial changes I had made in character motivation and dialogue were overlooked.

This was perhaps the most instructive thing I learned from the experience – if you follow the screenplay out the door, and do the surface of it accurately, you can slip in all kinds of substance where characterization and fleshing out of scenes are concerned.

Osborne actually liked the novel a lot, and he told me on several occasions that I had solved plot problems for them, which they had fixed by way of dialogue looping – and indeed the film has five or six lines I wrote.

Also, he asked me about a scene involving Tracy’s girl friend Tess and her mother, where Mrs. Trueheart says a lot of negative stuff about Dick, how she is delighted that Tess and Dick have broken up and how selfish the detective is, etc. I had softened this scene, making Tess’s mother much more positive about her potential son-in-law. The producer asked me why I’d done that.

“Because,” I said, “Tracy joined the police force to avenge the death of Mrs. Trueheart’s husband – Tess’s father, who ran a deli and got shot by robbers. Mrs. Trueheart adores Dick Tracy. Every Dick Tracy fan knows that.”

And they re-shot the scene along my lines.

So I take a certain pride in knowing that Dick Tracy is a film in part based upon its own novelization. The final battle, however, reached new heights of absurdity, and involved phone calls with high-level folks at Disney. How high level? How about Jeffrey Katzenberg? The “surprise” ending of Dick Tracy is that the mysterious masked bad guy called the Blank is actually Breathless Mahoney. Sorry to ruin it for you, but, yes, Madonna did it.

This surprise seemed painfully obvious to me, the kind of shocker you can damn near figure out in the opening credits. But Beatty, Disney and all associated were convinced they had a surprise on the level of The Sixth Sense (I figured that out, too, about five minutes in). So I was instructed to remove it from the novel.

Wait a minute, you’re saying. Remove what? The identity of the masked bad guy. The solution to the mystery. You know…who the killer is.

This surprise ending, the Disney folks told me, had to be guarded like the Coca Cola recipe or the unretouched Zapruder film. And when I pointed out that Dick Tracy was a mystery story, and that leaving the ending off a mystery story just might disappoint a few readers, this seemed of no particular import.

I did half a dozen rewrites of the ending, sneaking in hints of the Blank’s identity, such as, “Why, look who it is under the mask…” said Tess, breathlessly. No sale. About a page was cut from the book.

I won only one small concession – that any printings after the film came out would include the full ending. Only one small print run represents the complete novel (the sixth, distributed to school book clubs).

There can be no doubt that I hold a singular honor among mystery writers – I wrote a bestselling whodunit… without revealing whodunit.

Perhaps by way of apology, the Disney people flew my wife, son, mother and father and me to the film’s premiere at Disneyworld in Florida. They treated us great. Everybody attached to the movie treated us great, including Warren Beatty. We did a big press get-together with many of the stars. I was doing a Mumbles continuity in the Dick Tracy strip at the time, and Dustin Hoffman (who played Mumbles in the film) read me that day’s strip from a local paper, doing Mumbles’ dialogue in character. Doesn’t get much better than that.

Two postscripts: in our Disneyworld hotel, a coloring book on sale – an item that (it turned out) had been available to the public for several weeks – included the Breathless-is-the-Blank ending. As we say in the funnies, “Sigh….”

Also, the wonderful actress Estelle Parsons (who played Mrs. Truehart in the film) wandered into a bookstore at Disneyworld, where I was signing copies of my open-ended novel. We spoke, and she was very sweet, and I said to her, “You had to re-shoot your big scene, didn’t you?”

She looked at me, amazed. “How did you know that?”

And I told her.

* * *

I have no idea how long I’ve been writing these Update/Blog entries, but it’s been long enough that I’ve had to mark the passing of friends and heroes, as well as friends who were heroes.


Wayne Dundee

I can’t say Wayne Dundee, who passed away recently, was a close friend. There was a time when we were. Seeing him gone does make me feel like the Last Man Standing – of my closest mystery crew, we’ve lost Ed Gorman, Bob Randisi, Steve Mertz, John Lutz, Bill Crider and probably more that I am criminally forgetting.

Wayne was the founding editor of the long-running fan/prozine Hardboiled (more “pro” than “fan” because it was always a paying market). He was one of the first fans who reached out to me, and he specifically wondered if I had anything in my drawer that he might print in his ‘zine, which ran mostly to (as you might imagine) hardboiled crime and detective fiction. As it happened, I did. A novel called Mourn the Living with a character initially called Cord and later Logan and even later (and permanently) Nolan had been stored away long ago.

I got the moldering manuscript (literally, not figuratively) out of a box in the basement and talked Barb into retyping it for me. She did this, gracious partner and writer that she is; and I did a light edit, not wanting to interfere with what the young writer (I’d been 19 when I wrote it) had in mind. Wayne, who specifically described himself as a Nolan fan, eagerly took it and had me break it into several parts for serialization.

Eventually it was collected into a book, and it was recently a bonus feature of sorts in Mad Money, the latest reprint of my Nolan-heists-a-shopping-mall novel, Spree.

Thanks, Wayne.

I vaguely recall reading Wayne’s early work in manuscript, and providing some notes and encouragement; but that memory is vague. I do know he went on to do nine Joe Hannibal mysteries, wracking up several Shamus nominations. A career as a private eye writer is hard to maintain (tell me about it!) and he eased quite naturally into becoming a highly regarded western writer. The last time I heard from him, and it was a post here, was him encouraging me to show my grandson western movies, and to agree that Costner’s Horizon was woefully under-appreciated.

Wayne also appeared in one of my movies! He was the hulking, bearded prison guard who backed up the great Del Close in the scenes regarding the botched attempt to execute Mrs. Sterling (aka Mommy).

James Reasoner, one of the other last men standing, writes a brief but lovely tribute to Wayne here.

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I seem to be a more or less contributor of a segment to Rob and Dieter Bastian’s infectious YouTube show, Let’s Get Physical Media. I’m on as a noir/crime/mystery expert. The weekly episodes usually are on Sunday afternoon, and I have been coming on around 2 pm Central for half an hour or so.

M.A.C.

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.

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.

Nate Heller Wraps, Perdition Is Praised, and a Giant Passes

Tuesday, October 8th, 2024

The last recording session with Michael Rosenbaum playing Nate Heller in True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak is scheduled for the day this update appears. Director Robert Meyer Burnett is doing a terrific job editing this ten-part audio drama (written by me), handling to perfection the huge cast of name performers in bringing the first Nate Heller novel, True Detective, to life.

First episodes will be available SOON.

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The Putnam Museum in Davenport, Iowa, did a special event on this past Sunday (Oct. 6) centering on Road to Perdition, both the book(s) and film. The 2002 film, which Barb and I hadn’t seen for some time, was shown on the museum’s massive I-Max screen. Following this impressive presentation, which played to a nearly full house approaching 300, I participated in a Q and A with Roger Ruthhart, co-author of Citadel of Sin, a non-fiction account of the John Looney gangster story.

I fielded a lot of questions about the differences between the actual history and my graphic novel (and its prose follow-ups), including why John Looney as portrayed by Paul Newman became John Rooney, and why I moved Looney’s story up a decade or so in time. The deft questioning was handled by Truth First Film Alliance’s Travis Shepherd. The Alliance is the work of well-known documentary filmmakers Kelly and Tammy Rundle, perhaps best known for Villisca: Living with a Mystery, focusing on my mysterious Iowa crime in the Lizzie Borden mode. The Rundles put this event together and were gracious hosts.

And the audience had any number of good questions for both Mr. Ruthhart and myself (including a couple of Quarry and Ms. Tree ones!).

The movie looked great on the big screen, but could have looked better if Paramount would get around to releasing Road to Perdition on 4K.


Tammy and Kelly Rundle, Emmy-winning documentarians
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Robert J. Randisi

Many of you have already heard the sad news of Bob Randisi’s passing.

Robert J. Randisi was undoubtedly the last of the Old School pulp writers. He wrote over 500 entries in his adult western series, the enormously successful Gunsmith. He was an instrumental figure in celebrating genre fiction, receiving a Lifetime Achievement award from The Private Eye Writers of America; and another Lifetime Achievement award from Western Fictioneers. He was a founder of both groups. He also began the influential, much-missed Mystery Scene Magazine with another late friend of mine, the great Ed Gorman.

Do not assume Bob received those lifetime achievement awards because he founded the groups that honored him with them. He had made it clear he had no interest in awards of that nature. I am proud to have been instrumental in getting him the Private Eye Writers of America award and made sure it focused on his work as a writer of private eye fiction, which was his real true love in genre fiction. His series P.I. novels included the characters Miles Jacoby, Joe Keough, Nick Delvecchio, Gil and Claire Hunt, Truxton Lewis, and Eddie G. with The Rat Pack. Whew! He was nominated several times for Shamus awards, the honor given to the best private eye novels of the year.

Bob was my oldest and dearest friend in the writing game. He and Ed Gorman were together the friends I most valued in this business, and I miss them both (they were great friends to each other as well – Ed referred to Bob as his “little brother). To say Bob and I go way back is an understatement.

Bob was the first fan – and at that time he was a fan, just breaking into the business with some short stories – not from my home town area who had read my first two novels, Bait Money and Blood Money, and professed to love them and the Nolan series. He sought me out at the first Bouchercon I ever attended (decades ago in Chicago) and we sat deep into the night with him making me tell him the plots of the three more Nolan novels I’d written that had been shelved by Popular Library when they swallowed up Curtis Books, who had published Bait and Blood. Eventually those books were published by Pinnacle, but Bob heard the stories from the horse’s mouth that night in Chicago.

When I wrote True Detective in 1981 (or was it ‘82?) my then-agent Knox Burger was so unenthusiastic about it I fired him on the phone. Knox was influential and important in the genre – he’d been the editor at Gold Medal Books and the fiction editor of Collier’s before that – and he’d seemed stunned when an upstart kid in Iowa fired him. I was stunned, too, and called Bob desperate for advice.

Bob sent me to his agent, Dominick Abel, having paved the way with this already influential agent, and Dominick has been my friend and representative ever since. Dominick called me with the sad news about Bob, who had been his client till the end. Bob probably wrote and sold more books than the rest of Dominick’s clients put together, myself included.

Bob never called just to chat. He had a business-like side, was doggedly unsentimental, but also blessed with a great sense of humor. And when we got together, usually at a Bouchercon, we almost always sat side by side at the dinners and various events. He was the kind of friend you don’t see for a while, but then when you do, no time has passed at all.

The best compliment I can pay him is that he was a pro. A consummate pro. But the compliment I really want to pay him is to simply say thanks for being a friend to me and to every private eye writer of the mid-Twentieth Century until, well, right now.

Let be clarify that, because it might seem like hyperbole. If anything it’s an understatement. I can only speak from personal experience and forgive me for what may seem over the top or self-aggrandizing. My novel True Detective was a breakthrough for me, but it was ignored by the Mystery Writers of America despite its stellar reviews and general success. Because Bob created the Private Eye Writers of America, I got a second chance at winning (as the Old Man in A Christmas Story put it) a major award. I beat a bunch of big names – James Crumley, Loren D. Estleman, Stanley Ellin, and Robert B. Parker, no less. The Shamus award – Bob’s creation – put me on the map.

Mickey Spillane received several awards from the PWA – the first ever in a long career that had given the entire Private Eye genre a second lease on life. Numerous writers, now celebrated, got their start because of Bob’s organization’s boost. For decades, the Shamus was second only to the Edgar in importance in the genre. Perhaps it still is.

But it’s faded a tad, largely because Bob’s declining health (and Covid played a role) chipped away at the annual (and great fun) awards dinners that were held in conjunction with Bouchercon every year. He and his incredible significant other Marthayn Pelegrimas always put on a great dinner and a fun show. Unless someone picks up the banner, the Shamus would appear to have become just another of the various awards given in a group at Bouchercon. Nothing wrong with that, I guess.

But those days were wonderful. And I hope the significance of the Shamus awards remains strong, perhaps even makes a comeback that would include the restoration of an annual awards dinner. That would be the best tribute possible to the writing legend that was Robert J. Randisi.

M.A.C.