Posts Tagged ‘Passings’

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Nate Heller, Mike Hammer and a Friend of Theirs Passes

Tuesday, July 7th, 2026

If you’re a fan of my Nathan Heller books – or just a dedicated reader of mine – and you have not yet ordered True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, well…you are missing out. Director Robert Meyer Burnett directs an amazingly stellar cast with full sound effects and a terrific score by Alexander Bornstein, all in service of a script by me from my novel True Detective. It’s just under five hours.

I think this is the best dramatic adaptation of my work, ever. You can get the download, the Audio CD (four CD’s) and an MP3 CD right here.

The portrayal of Nate Heller by Michael Rosenbaum is key to the enterprise. He totally “gets” Nate Heller. If you don’t recognize the name, here’s a pic he sent me the other day after I sent him the physical media version (the 4-CD set).

Michael Rosenbaum, True Noir

Michael is probably best-known for his iconic portrayal of Lex Luthor on the hit CW series Smallville, but also his and his voice work as The Flash in the DC Animated Universe. Beyond his numerous acting roles, as in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Vol. 3, Michael is also the host and creator of the celebrity interview show Inside of You – one of the most entertaining podcasts around with a star-studded array of guests. He also happens to be a genuinely nice guy.

Here’s some of the rest of the cast, by the way:
David Strathairn; Anthony LaPaglia; Jeffrey Combs; Thomas Howell; Adam Arkin; Katee Sackhoff; Vincent Pastore; William Sadler; Jesse Spencer; P.J. Byrne; Saverio Guerra; Louis Lombardi; Bill Smitrovich; Patton Oswalt; Curtis Armstrong; Barry Bostwick; Bill Mumy; Renée Taylor, Don McManus; Devon Conrad; and Richard Portnow. And that’s not everybody.

What are you waiting for?

* * *

Last week I discussed, somewhat off the top of my head, my favorite portrayals of Mike Hammer on TV and in the movies. I made an egregious omission: Armand Assante in the 1982 version of I, the Jury. I am a big fan of Assante’s Mike Hammer and, in general, of the film itself, which is violent and sexy in a way no previous version had attempted (or any since, for that matter). Hammer’s relationship with Velda (Laurene Landon, whose blondeness we’ll forgive) is spot on, and the classic ending (and last line) is restored.

The movie got lost in the shuffle because the production company behind it went bankrupt. Terry Beatty and I drove from Muscatine, Iowa, to Chicago, Illinois to see it – driving in and back the same day/night. A six-hour round trip, not factoring in bathroom breaks and food. Later, to get the 1982 I, the Jury on physical media, I paid over a hundred bucks (a kajillion dollars in today’s money) for a Japanese laser disc (I owned the VHS, too, and of course the later blu-ray.) I wrote rather glowingly about it in Spillane on Film and Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction.

I, The Jury (1982)

So why, other than feeble-minded old age, could I forget about it last week?

It was easy. I, the Jury (1982) was a (at the time) modern take on Mike Hammer and his debut novel. It holds a unique place in the Hammer filmography. The earlier TV and movie renditions were fifties and early sixties animals. When Hammer was done on TV in the ‘80s and ‘90s, he was done in a contemporary fashion but as a man out of time – as if Mike Hammer had jumped into a time machine around 1952 and emerged in that later era, where he was presented as a glorious dinosaur. (It’s not unlike what I did with Hammer’s protype Mike Danger, having him wake up in a politically correct future in the comic book Mickey and I developed for Big Entertainment.)

How to do Hammer on film – whether to make him a version of Mike in modern day (whatever modern day that happens to be) or to approach him in period, for example adapting one of the early novels with a ‘50s setting – is a conundrum Hollywood is still facing. Much discussion among movie folk has gone on about how to present Hammer today, including the notion of doing him in his original time frame. I see some real advantages to doing that, but usually the discussion comes around to the need (for all sorts of reasons) to do him modern-day. The Keach version managed to split the difference, in a way – but that was in the ‘80s; now the man-out-of-time approach would have a 1940s/1950s character operating over 70 years later.

A new Hammer movie is still percolating and the most recent script I saw worked pretty well, but the political mood of the country makes the character problematic. Even back in the day critics saw Hammer (wrongly) as a fascistic figure; today, if he mirrored (for example) Donald Trump’s world view, that would put him on the side of ICE agents. Yet Mickey’s Mike Hammer has friends of all sorts of ethnicities.

Hammer’s vigilante tendencies don’t transfer well to today. So it’s at best tricky, and at worst impossible, to do the urban avenger in any way that isn’t offensive to somebody. Ironically, Spillane was never really political with Hammer. Take One Lonely Night: the bad guys are “Commies,” but the top Commie turned out to be the Senator Joe McCarthy figure! Mickey always went for the surprise.

Yes, Mickey leaned into Ayn Rand territory in his Tiger Mann books; but political themes were rare in the Hammer novels.

I would vote for a period Hammer, but it will almost certainly not happen.

Anyway, Assante’s Hammer was a glorious success (artistically speaking) of bringing him effectively into the early 1980s. But, due in part to the meager release the movie got, that version didn’t get anywhere near the pop cultural purchase of Stacy Keach’s Mike Hammer.

Let’s talk, for a moment, about lists of favorites – whether it’s candy bars or movies. There is a difference between “best” and “favorite.” My favorite Hammer (not counting Mickey) is Darren McGavin. Why? Largely because he was my introduction to the character. Also, that TV show was set in – produced in! – the 1950s. Mike Hammer’s era.

Who was the best Hammer? Mickey wouldn’t agree, but Assante would be a contender on the big screen – he was the most authentic in terms of sexuality and violence and a genuinely conveyed thirst for vengeance.

An argument could be made for Biff Elliott because, again, he was operating in the 1950s and was a hot-headed roughneck right out of the original novels.

But the best Mike Hammer? Even Mickey came to think Ralph Meeker was the best movie Hammer, despite the film turning its source on its head. Meeker was a terrific actor in the Method mode whose best role was Hammer, and he inhabited the best Hammer movie, which is even fairly faithful to the novel. No movie, to date, has captured Spillane better, despite its agenda to criticize Mickey.

As far as TV goes, I would say “best” has to be shared by Keach and McGavin.

But my favorite? I told you last week.

* * *

My pal and sometime collaborator Matt Clemens interviewed me on his podcast recently about Return of the Maltese Falcon. Here it is.

And here Road to Perdition makes a list of the six “darkest comic book masterpieces.”

* * *

I lost a colleague last week. You meet all sorts of people in publishing, and many of them are worth knowing, but few have been as delightful to deal with as Titan’s publicist, Katharine Carroll.

Only the most financially successful writers – at least those of my generation and the one or two after it – could afford to hire publicists. So a writer is dependent on the publisher’s publicist, and this is very much a hit-and-miss affair. Frequently only the most successful writers get the kind of attention from a publisher’s publicist that proves fruitful.

Katharine was an exception. She was always open to considering my wildest suggestions. For example, she got us enormous attention for Mike Hammer’s 75th anniversary and Mickey Spillane’s 100th birthday. She would kick ideas around with me and then follow through. I had many wonderful, positive conversations with her. We were just starting work on Quarry’s 50th anniversary.

But that’s business. In the lonely writing game, the friendly voice on a telephone and the lighting-fast e-mails in reply to whatever screwy notion I might have, these are things that can’t be measured.

I’ll share a little about her below. But it’s not enough.

Katharine Trowbridge
Katharine Trowbridge
U.S. Publicist for Titan Publishing, Dies at 68
Jim Milliot/Jul 06, 2026

Katharine Trowbridge, who oversaw the U.K.-based Titan Publishing Group’s U.S. publicity effort for 18 years, died on June 28. She was 68.

Known professionally as Katharine T. Carroll, Trowbridge began her publicity career with Time Inc. in 1980, spending a decade working across campaigns with Time, Life, People, and Entertainment Weekly. In 1990, she launched her own publicity firm, KTCommunications, where she worked with a range of magazines, authors, and publishing companies.

She joined Titan in 2008 and is credited by the company owners with helping to grow the publisher in the U.S. She was particularly instrumental in helping to revive the respected Hard Case Crime imprint founded by Dorchester Publishing and acquired by Titan in 2011. A native New Yorker, Trowbridge was a regular at New York Comic Con, where she connected U.S. journalists and booksellers with Titan titles such as Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis, Titan’s first-ever U.S. original fiction title to hit the New York Times bestseller list.

“We are devastated by the loss of Katharine,” said Titan Entertainment Group co-owners Nick Landau and Vivian Cheung in a statement. “She had the warmest of personalities and cared deeply for all her authors as well as her colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. Her contribution to Titan enabled us to grow far faster in the U.S. than we ever thought possible. We will miss her dearly.”

Trowbridge is survived by her three children and her mother.

M.A.C.

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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.

* * *

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.

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

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poster Art for You Only Live Twice

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

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

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

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

Quarry Hard Case Crim cover

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

Astonishing.

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

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

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

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

How about – thank you.

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

Go to truenoir.co and hear for yourself.

M.A.C.

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We All Have It Coming

Tuesday, March 4th, 2025

Today’s update/blog will be very stream of consciousness.

I am writing it on March 3, 2025, my 77th birthday. My father died on his 78th birthday, so I sense the clock ticking. Loudly. Memories are flooding in like the water of the terribly tepid bath I took this morning. My memory is selective – I have few vivid memories, rather many more sketchy ones. Ask Terry Beatty, my longtime collaborator, who has had to put up with my smear of a memory more than most. My wife Barb is probably relieved she doesn’t have to hear more about what little I remember.

This will be about loss. The list of key players in the drama of my life who’ve already had a final curtain call is a long one. Bruce Peters, the greatest rock ‘n’ roll showman I ever had the honor and difficulty of appearing with. Paul Thomas, my closest friend in the many years of playing rock ‘n’ roll. Michael Cornelison, the actor who was at times a troubled soul but usually a smart, positive one who starred in four of my indie movies and narrated my two documentaries. There are others, too many others; but these three stand out.

I am going to give myself a present. I rarely talk politics here. It’s a combination of respecting the opinions of others and cravenly not wanting to lose any readers. But I am allowing myself the following little joke:

Farkus and Dill in A Christmas story
President Donald Trump and V.P. J.D. Vance prepare to welcome President Zelensky

If this offends you deeply, we are so on opposite pages that you are invited never to read me again. I have, on several occasions, requested that disgruntled readers not put my words into their brain, even temporarily. I hate to see you go but don’t let the screen door (you know the rest).

Before I start rambling on this and that, I will pause to say how much I love my wife Barb and what an incredible partner in every phase of my adult life she has been – beautiful, smart, funny, and supportive. When I was in the hospital in 2016 for open-heart surgery, for two-and-a-half weeks, she was there every day. The follow-up surgery a year later, she was there. Every procedure that followed, she was there. She also is excellent at putting me in my place.

Plus she gave me my son Nate, who gave me my grandson Sam and granddaughter Lucy, all three gifts that keep on giving.

Well, that’s out of the way, so let’s talk about Larry Coven.

Larry passed away recently. I met him under unusual circumstances. Barb and I loved Second City in Chicago, the great improv comedy theater where we once saw the cast that largely became that of SCTV. Larry was in the strongest cast I ever saw at Second City, including that storied Canadian one. He shared the stage with George Wendt, Tim Kazurinsky, Mary Gross, Jim Belushi and Danny Breen, all of whom went on to later fame in movies and television, from Cheers to Saturday Night Live and many movie and national TV appearances.

At one of these performances, Barb and I were in Chicago for an early comics convention at the Congress Hotel…I think it was still the Pick-Congress then. To my astonishment, Larry Coven was there. He turned out to be a book and comics dealer, and was a little wary of me because my Second City enthusiasm was on the psychotic side.

But we hit it off and stayed in touch – not regularly though more than just an acquaintance sort of thing. He was amused by my Spillane enthusiasm but respected my right to have it. I asked him, in 1995, to take a small role for me in my Mommy sequel, Mommy’s Day. He appeared as an ominous doctor who gave Patty McCormack as Mommy a dose of something to curtail her homicidal tendencies. This appearance was a generous one, but so was Larry’s delivering the legendary Del Close to me for another role in the film.

Close turned out to be a book enthusiast and a (I can’t believe this even today) fan of mine. Whenever a true Chicagoan endorsed Nate Heller, that was a big deal to me. Del took the role in Mommy’s Day in part because Mickey Spillane was in it and Del wanted to meet this very famous writer and get his Spillane books signed.

Larry took on a much bigger role in my little indie Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market, playing the upbeat clerk whose quiet evening was disrupted by armed robbers. He brought an improvisational touch to the proceedings (“We have some fine Hostess products”) and true professionalism. He had appeared in several other films and on lots of TV. His presence in the cast, which otherwise included mostly inexperienced or local actors, set a high standard and encouraged good performances around him.

If you haven’t seen Real Time: Siege at Lucas Market (and there are enthusiasts of that odd little production), it was my first but not last attempt to get a movie made on spit and chewing gum. Our budget was $10,000. I presented it as a found-footage movie, but it was really tightly scripted, with room for Larry to work a little magic. It came to be after the success of the two Mommy movies was scuttled by a “friend” who was also my producer, and who stole most of the money.

This led to my two documentaries, and the $10,000 production of Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life (with Mike Cornelison, who had considerable Hollywood success for about a decade, appearing on Hill Street Blues, World’s Greatest American Hero and helming three pilot movies, among much else, including a memorable role in Albert Brooks’ Lost in America). Two more recent movies of mine have also been micro-budget affairs (Blue Christmas, also a ten-grand wonder, and the slightly higher budgeted Death By Fruitcake). It was tough getting through both of them without Mike Cornelison in the mix.

Larry would call me whenever I had a novel out – which is often! – and requested that he might send me books of mine to sign, one for himself and another batch for his customers (he was a book dealer, remember). What a bright, funny presence he was. Hearing from him was always a joy. I was lucky to have known him.

Another passing is less personal but has a resonance I’ll share with you (and, yes, I’ve written about this before).

The film Bonnie and Clyde was extraordinarily influential on me. It re-sparked my interest in Prohibition-era crime, initially created by the Untouchables TV series. All of this, plus my Dick Tracy interest, led me down the path to writing historical crime fiction, notably True Detective, currently getting a new lease on life thanks to director Rob Burnett’s True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, the fully immersive audio drama written by me.

Bonnie and Clyde was, and is, a great movie. But I was particularly taken, as were so many others, by an unknown actor’s portrayal of Clyde’s brother Buck. As much as I loved virtually every element of director Arthur Penn’s film, it was Gene Hackman’s performance as Buck that really stole the show for me. The real-life Buck died by police gunfire in my home state of Iowa, and a famous photo of the crime scene, including the bloodied Buck, was recreated in the film.

As I’ve said here and elsewhere before, my father was no huge movie buff. Max Allan Collins, Sr., was a gifted musician but his movie interest was negligible, and he seemed only to put up with my mother’s keen interest in movies, and his son’s. Dad was a sports fan and I was a disappointment in my preference for going to movie matinees on the weekend and not watching sports with him.

But at my urging he went with me to Bonnie and Clyde, which at that point I’d seen half a dozen times. When the Iowa-set scene with the recreation of Buck’s bloody death came on the screen, he was visibly shaken. An ex-WW 2-era Naval veteran, Dad had never reacted to a movie in this fashion, even one as bloody as Bonnie and Clyde. I asked him afterward why it had affected him so, and he reported that his father (my grandfather) had driven him to the bloody crime scene (not far from their Grand Junction, Iowa, home) to witness the aftermath of what a life in crime could bring. The bloody garments were strewn around in the sort of grove where the gun battle had taken place, as was a bullet-pocked car or two. Dad would have been a young boy when he saw this, but he hadn’t thought of it in years till Arthur Penn put it on screen. That Buck Barrow had been brought to life, and then to die, so effectively, so memorably, had an impact.

Hackman was always a favorite actor of mine, but I couldn’t see him without thinking of Buck Barrow and my youngster-age father. I realize that Hackman’s death, at least as I write this, is shrouded in mystery and unfortunate circumstances. But as Clint Eastwood said in The Unforgiven, a movie with an Oscar-winning performance by Gene Hackman, “We all have it coming, kid.”

At 77 I am very aware that the end is coming for all of us. Some are lucky enough, and hard-working enough, to leave behind them a legacy of work, if not one of the magnitude of movies and novels that Gene Hackman did. And all of us who love great acting are lucky to have been on the planet when Hackman was around.

I should leave it at that, but I can’t help but comment that Barb and I watched, this past weekend, a Hackman film, Bite the Bullet, a terrific, under-appreciated movie that co-stars James Coburn. Seeing those two working together is a master class in film acting.

What I love about this pairing is how Hackman is an actor who learned to be a movie star, and Coburn is a movie star who leaned to be an actor.

I’m glad I was around to see them both.

* * *

If you’re wondering what I want for my birthday, it’s for you to go to truenoir.co and order True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak.

M.A.C.

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