Posts Tagged ‘Quarry TV’

R.I.Pee Wee, Mike Hammer at the Movies, E-Bay Deals

Tuesday, August 8th, 2023
Skyline and Mike Hammer banner

The big news this week should be that the long impending Mike Hammer movie deal with Skydance has solidified, and been announced in all the trades. The upside is that Skydance has purchased the film rights for the entire franchise, which includes the books I’ve co-authored. The downside is…things like this, announced or not, often do not come to pass.

Yes, I am an executive producer. That often simply means that when you come to make your set visits, a director’s chair with your name on the back is waiting. On the Cinemax Quarry set (where I was suffering, unknowingly, congestive heart failure) they didn’t let me near the director and other mucky-mucks till they needed me for photos. And I was, again, an executive producer.

I often have mentioned that I did not tell my parents about the Road to Perdition movie sale till Barb and I were on set watching Tom Hanks and Paul Newman shooting scenes under the direction of Sam Mendes.

The news this week that impacted me more, personally, was the loss of Paul Reubens, who had been privately battling cancer for half a dozen years.

Paul Reubens dressed in black with a Pee-Wee Herman Doll in his breast pocket. Art Streiber / August @aspictures

I have frequently commented here about the annual Christmas cards that Barb and I have received from Paul Reubens over many decades. To me it has not officially been Christmas until the Pee Wee card arrives from Paul.

Here’s what I wrote in December 2013:

For me, Christmas begins when I receive my yearly Christmas card from Paul Reubens. Sometimes Paul writes a personal note. The cards are always charming and even hilarious, and we have easily two dozen of them. This year Barb made a wreath out of some our favorites.

I went crazy over Pee-Wee with his HBO Special, The Pee-Wee Herman Show in 1981. I was doing the Dick Tracy strip at the time, and I put Pee-Wee in the strip – he was on television saying, “My name’s Pee-Wee – what’s yours?” And a TV-obsessed villain of mine replied, “Splitscreen!”

Paul Reubens phoned me shortly after that, delighted by the Tracy appearance, and we chatted. Shortly after that, taking time out from a San Diego con, Terry Beatty and I visited Paul in LA – he was in a small one-story brick house filled with funky toys and oddball memorabilia. We watched a version of The Pee-Wee Herman Show that the cast had looped with blue improv material. The Pee-Wee Herman suit was on a coat tree. I asked Paul how many of those suits he had, and he said, “Just the one.” Then, noting my surprised reaction, he added, “Sometimes Pee-Wee doesn’t smell so good up close.”

Paul knew that I was a movie buff, and he was working on getting a Pee-Wee film going. Late at night, we would talk on the phone and (at his request) I would send him Betamax copies of offbeat films like Eddie Cantor’s Roman Scandals and Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! He called once every month or two for a couple of years, sometimes when he was off shooting a movie. (One was a Meatballs sequel, and I asked him what it was about. He said, “A virgin sees her first dick.” I thought he was kidding till I saw the movie.) Barb and I (and sometimes Terry) would go to live shows of Paul’s, and we’d see him after – we did this in New York and Chicago.

When the Pee-Wee movies and TV show kicked in, Paul changed his phone number and I haven’t heard from him since…except at Christmas. Always a wonderful card, and sometimes a warm personal note. I still love Pee-Wee Herman, and it’s been a nice perk of my minor celebrity that I got to know Paul Reubens a little. It’s very thoughtful and generous of him to send me these fantastic cards every year.

Shortly after the above piece appeared, Paul got back in touch with me – someone had forwarded the posting about him – and we began occasionally exchanging e-mails. Knowing Paul, and having a small impact on his work (Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! had an obvious influence on a sequence in Pee Wee’s Big Holiday), is one of the most amazing things that has happened to me in an amazing life, despite never having moved from the small Iowa town where I was born.

This is my reflection on the passing of John Paragon, Paul’s partner in comedy – the great, much lamented Jambi.

Paul wrote me thanking me when he saw this tribute to his friend and collaborator.

I don’t know what else to say about Paul and Pee Wee. We weren’t close friends exactly, but we were real friends and the sadness I feel is hard to communicate. But he contributed a character, a concept, and point of view that I truly think will last until (as Paul Williams wrote) “the sun is just a bright spot in the nighttime.”

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A flurry of M.A.C. e-books sales at Amazon have hit and I will share them with you now.

First, True Crime will be $1.99 on August 8 only, the day this update/blog appears.

From now till August 31, Girl Can’t Help It will be on sale for $2.49. If you haven’t read this one yet, please pick it up – this is one of only two titles (the other being Girl Most Likely) that have not “earned out” at Amazon and have apparently impacted their decision not to publish anything else new by me.

From now till August 31, Million Dollar Wound (Nate Heller), What Doesn’t Kill Her (Matt Clemens and me doing our American riff on Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), and Midnight Haul (my Mallory-ish eco-thriller) will all be available at $1.99 at Amazon on e-book.

Also wading in to the e-book wars is Wolfpack, who are doing e-book boxed sets that are an opportunity to pick up a lot of my backlist (some of which is out of print) at a low price.

The Max Allan Collins Collection Volume Three collects all three Jack and Maggie Starr mysteries as well as the Westlake-ish Shoot the Moon for under four bucks (okay, a penny under…).

The Max Allan Collins Collection Volume Four collects Mommy, Mommy’s Day, No One Will Hear You (co-authored by Matt Clemens), and Reincarnal and Other Dark Tales. Get it here.

Reincarnal, by the way, is one of several indie movie projects we were developing (“we” being my pal Phil Dingeldein and I). Chad Bishop are starting pre-productions on Blue Christmas.

Again, these are e-book “box sets” that are at a $3.99 price point. Such a deal! (The Max Allan Collins Collection Volume One is the four Eliot Ness books, and The Max Allan Collins Collection Volume Two is the John Sand collection (the trilogy plus a short story, by Matt Clemens and me).

Now, some of you are not into e-books. You like physical media. Me, too.

Buy the hardcover Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher by M.A.C. and Brad Schwartz here (from Daedalus Books) at a mere $6.95 (originally $29.99).

Daedalus also has the previous Nathan Heller hardcover novel, which thus far does not have a paperback reprint, Do No Harm, with Nate tackling the Sam Sheppard murder case.

* * *

Early tomorrow morning [Monday, 8/7–Nate], I am going into the hospital for a procedure that, with any luck, will get me back home the same day. So by the time this appears, I should be able to post something about how it went.

This is what’s called an ablation, which is done to deal with a-fib, which has been slowing me down since before my heart surgery in 2016.

[Update: The procedure went smoothly, and Max is back home recovering.–Nate]

* * *

Here’s an interesting Tom Hanks article, suggesting he’s the reason the violence in the film version of Road to Perdition was dialed back some.

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The exciting Skydance announcement about Mike Hammer is all over the Net. Here’s an example from Deadline.

A few more (of many):
https://www.flickeringmyth.com/2023/08/skydance-bringing-mickey-spillanes-mike-hammer-back-to-the-big-screen/
https://www.thewrap.com/skydance-mike-hammer-franchise-ip-rights/
https://www.darkhorizons.com/skydance-planning-a-mike-hammer-film/
https://www.joblo.com/mike-hammer-movie-mickey-spillane/

M.A.C.

Long-Form TV, Bait Money, Paul Newman and More

Tuesday, January 5th, 2021

Skim Deep should be available by now, the coda to the Nolan series that I’ve written at the urging of Charles Ardai, the guru of Hard Case Crime. It is, as you may know if you’re a regular visitor here, a book in a series I began back in college with my novel Bait Money. That book has been reprinted with its sequel Blood Money as Two for the Money by Hard Case Crime, originally as the first book of mine HCC did, but with an uncharacteristically weak cover, though a new edition from them is coming soon.

Cover of the Skyboat audiobook edition of Bait Money
Audible: Amazon Purchase Link

An audio book – the first ever – of Bait Money is available now, read by the incredible Stefan Rudnicki.

I’m going to touch on Bait Money again, but first…

Over the holidays I found myself bingeing (usually in four-episode stints) on long-form TV. I have begun to think that long-form television is the new great storytelling art form, more satisfying than most movies and novels. When some unifying artistic force (person or persons) has an overriding vision to control and deploy, the long-form’s depth of character and ability to span time and events can give it appeal, impact and power.

Post-Christmas, I indulged in three true-crime mini-series, all of which made compelling viewing – Manhunt: Unabomber and its follow-up, Manhunt: Deadly Games; and Waco, which leaves Netflix (home of all three) in less than two weeks. I probably liked Deadly Games best, because it opened up the Richard Jewell case more completely than the Clint Eastwood-directed film was able to, and featured a fine performance by Arliss Howard as a crusty ATF bomb expert. Cameron Britton and Jack Huston (as the falsely accused Jewell and real Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph respectively) also were excellent. In Waco, Michael Shannon as the chief negotiator Gary Noesner is typically strong, but Taylor Kitsch’s turn as cult leader David Koresh is a shattering, out-of-left-field career best for the star of TV’s Friday Night Lights and the bewilderingly underrated film John Carter – he makes Koresh human and charismatic without minimizing his madness. No small feat.

All three series, however, share a common problem. They are accurate as to the core true-crime material, but play very fast and loose with fictitious material that surrounds it.

Waco places the Branch Davidian siege’s real-life negotiator at Ruby Ridge, which is not true, and goes out of its way to make the Waco cultists seem reasonable and the FBI unreasonable, when it’s fairly clear that both sides were culpable in the tragedy.

Deadly Games – faithful to the Jewell story – adds a car chase and a bunch of risible material about backwoods redneck militia guys helping track Rudolph and even being led by a young, bossy black female FBI agent; also it has the bomber murdering several people in the woods, which never happened.

The male Unabomber profiler is provided with a love-interest female profiler based on the profiler’s (second) wife, who he hadn’t met yet when the events really happened. In an even more questionable liberty, the profiler – who was largely responsible for identifying the bomber – is placed in a Silence of the Lambs relationship with the perp, sharing numerous scenes, when in fact they never met.

I have to deal with this kind of thing in the Nate Heller novels all the time – balancing the needs of the story against what really happened. It’s not easy to stay true to history without being ruled by it, which is why I employ time compression and composite characters, for example. But TV “true crime” has no compunctions about steam-rolling history.

That may be why, in part, the best long-form mini-series I watched (Barb skipped the others, but watched this one with me) is the wholly fictional The Queen’s Gambit. It’s basically a reworking of The Hustler with chess traded for pool, which is perhaps not surprising because Queen’s Gambit is taken from a novel by Walter Tevis, the author of The Hustler (on which the famous Paul Newman film was based).

Several things make the mini-series work, despite chess being something not every rube knows how to play, and that includes this Iowa rube (Barb, of course, can play chess, though does not claim mastery). The story itself works extremely well – we follow a chess-prodigy orphan girl (taught the game by the orphanage janitor) into her early teens she’s adopted by a couple who live in world out of a Douglas Sirk movie, if that movie were written by Tennessee Williams. The teen evolves into an adult as she climbs to the top of the chess world, one match at a time. The 1950s and 1960s are accurately if acidly depicted, with stellar art direction and a cunning soundtrack of popular music.

But what sells it – beyond the screenwriters and directors making chess games as compelling as any competitive sport, even for a checkers guy like me – is the stunning performance of Anya Taylor-Joy, strikingly beautiful and brilliantly understated in her role, equally convincing as a sheltered teen and worldly young woman, and the various stages between. She also credibly portrays the chess star’s descent into pills and alcohol abuse.

This gave Queen’s Gambit a special resonance to me, and here’s where Bait Money comes back in.

At the University of Iowa, from 1968 to 1970, at the Writers Workshop, I studied with the great mainstream novelist, Richard Yates. I’ve told numerous times the story of how Yates overcame his prejudice against crime/mystery fiction to recognize me as a serious-minded young writer already working at a professional level. Along the way, he became perhaps the key mentor of my writing life.

I would have been content to take all of my classes with Yates, but the program insisted on students experiencing a wider range of instructors. At the Workshop, all of the teachers were respected published authors, which was great, but problematic for a budding mystery writer in the late 1960s. To put things in context, at one point Donald E. Westlake applied for a position – well into his glorious career – and was turned down. Yup, it was a snobby, literary place. Things loosened up some, but when I was there, I was – but for Richard Yates – largely alone on my path.

I was anxious to get through the process and get on with my writing career – even though I hadn’t sold anything yet – and took summer sessions to speed things along. One summer instructor was George Cain, an African American author whose novel about drug addiction, Blueschild Baby, was highly regarded. One day he asked the entirely white class to name their favorite black authors, and the names offered up were predictable (James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright). Mine were Chester Himes and Willard Motley.

Cain was astonished by these choices, almost offended, and put them both down – Himes didn’t know a thing about the real Harlem, he said, and Motley didn’t count, because he wrote about white people, which made him a sellout. At the time, I didn’t know that Himes had based his Harlem on Cleveland’s Roaring Third Precinct; so I couldn’t defend him, except to say he was a great writer. As for Motley, I said the author was probably just trying to write for a mainstream audience in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the white characters in Knock on Any Door and Let Me No Man Write My Epitaph tackling the same kind of social problems facing African Americans.

Tragically, the talented Cain – who never wrote another book – died of drug addiction himself.

I had several instructors, good ones (Cain included), who were patient with me, despite my insistence on writing crime fiction. Then, in the summer of 1970, I had the opportunity to study with Walter Tevis. I was thrilled. Overjoyed. He was the author of one of my favorite novels! The Hustler was definitely in the hardboiled school, and what a great movie had been made out of it! Obviously Tevis would not share the prejudices toward me and my work that I had sometimes suffered at the Workshop.

And he didn’t. He was a very nice man. As a teacher, he seemed a little lost, and certainly preoccupied. He was, clearly, an alcoholic. He had the sleepy, rumpled manner and bleary eyes that went with it. Often he spoke of his Hollywood experiences and I frankly don’t remember anything else about his classroom approach. Of course, we were young writers in a workshop format and the classes were primarily critique sessions, students talking about each other’s work, the instructor a kind of referee.

Black and white photograph of Walter Tevis holding a lit cigarette.
Walter Tevis. Photo credit: E. Martin Jessee/Lexington Herald-Leader

I don’t remember what fiction I submitted that summer. I know that I had completed Bait Money, and that I was continuing my private sessions with Richard Yates, who had helped me get an agent. I was probably working on No Cure for Death. Anyway – I have no memory of how Tevis reacted to any of the student manuscripts we discussed in class.

I recall vividly him speaking of being approached by a Hollywood producer to write a book or film script about poker that would mirror The Hustler. He turned the opportunity down, but said the project became The Cincinnati Kid, about which he was dismissive and resentful. I managed not to tell him that The Cincinnati Kid was a terrific movie, and the book it was based on by Richard Jessup was another favorite of mine. And that I thought he’d made a big mistake not writing a poker version of The Hustler. But now and then I know when to shut up.

Another vivid memory is Tevis being late to class by a good fifteen minutes – we almost walked out, as a group, in his absence – because he’d been on the telephone talking about a movie deal. Someone was thinking about making a film of his novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, he said.

Now, at that time he’d only written two novels. And he admitted to us that he was having trouble writing fiction at all. In fact – and I thought this was very sad at the time, and a little irritating – he put a chapter of a science-fiction book he was trying to write in front of the class, as one of that week’s manuscripts. He wanted to know what we thought about his work-in-progress. I thought we were there so he could tell us what he thought about ours.

Nonetheless, I had bonded somewhat with him, because I’d told him I was a fan, and he was astounded that I had a copy of The Man Who Fell to Earth in its original edition – a Gold Medal paperback – and that I knew The Hustler began as a Playboy short story. We worked out a trade where he gave me a signed copy of a reprint edition of Man Who Fell (from Lancer Books, a minor league company of the day), as he was short copies. I made the trade. Later I found another Gold Medal edition.

The big thing about the summer session was a one-on-one with the instructor. I believe it was a half hour, and I’d been looking forward to it. I had given Tevis the Bait Money manuscript the first day and that’s what we would be discussing. My session with him was toward the end of the summer session – it’s the last time I saw him.

He said, with my manuscript in hand, “I read the first page of your book, and I read the last page. That’s all I needed to read. You’re going to sell it.”

He handed it to me. And that was the session.

Now he may have read more than that, but at the time I was quietly furious. I was driving eighty miles round trip to attend those classes; I was paying good money to attend. And he reads two pages? Hell, in his class, I’d read a whole chapter of his damn science-fiction novel!

On the other hand, he was a pro, and a writer whose work I admired, and he’d looked at my stuff and said I was going to get published – basically, “Don’t worry about it. It’s going to happen.” And, on Christmas eve 1971, it did happen – that’s when the letter came from my agent.

And I do think he may actually have read my whole book. Because his inscription on my signed copy of The Man Who Fell to Earth was: “To Allan – with great hopes for his good book. Walter, July 1970.”

So I had mixed feelings about Walter Tevis. I thought he was a nice, melancholy man with a drinking problem. I always bought his books, including three more science-fiction titles, the first of which didn’t appear till almost a decade later (Mockingbird). Alcoholics Anonymous had been a factor in an early ‘80s comeback, when in a period of about five years he wrote four of his six published novels.

I bought and read the last of these – his unexpected Hustler sequel, The Color of Money, and loved it. Read it in two sittings. I wrote him a letter telling him so, and reminiscing about my experiences as his student, going over much of what I’ve written here, being frank but also appreciative.

I had a stamp on the envelope and the letter was waiting to be mailed when a newspaper told me that Walter Tevis had died. Lung cancer. He’d struggled with a heart condition as well.

My instructor’s novel, The Queen’s Gambit, is – like so many novels by so many of us – a disguised memoir, chess champ Beth Harmon enjoying early success, succumbing to substance abuse, overcoming it, and making a stellar comeback.

As with Skim Deep to Bait Money, there’s a coda to my Walter Tevis story.

Whenever I meet someone famous, I endeavor to find some way I can connect with that person, as a person. With Tom Hanks, at the Chicago Road to Perdition after party, I talked to him about his directorial debut, That Thing You Do, and my having been in a combo much like the one in his film, opening for ‘60s era bands and so on. He lit up. We connected, however briefly.

I took a similar tack meeting Paul Newman at the New York Perdition premiere after party. I should say that of the famous people I’ve met, he was the most intimidating, with the most impenetrable wall up – not unpleasant or nasty in any way, but…he just seemed like a door that had been knocked on too often.

So I mentioned that I studied at the Writers Workshop with the author of The Hustler.

“We threw the whole book out,” Newman said. “Nothing made it into the film. We didn’t use anything.”

Now, I knew this not to be true. The film is a fairly faithful adaptation. So I was flustered. I said something like, “Well, I liked them both very much.”

We spoke a little bit longer, but I was really thrown. Was he sending me a coded message about how unimportant the source writer (me) was to a film like Road to Perdition? Nonetheless, I told him how honored I was to be part of a project of his, and that seemed to please him. We shook hands.

Much later I figured it out. Or anyway I think I did. Newman also starred in The Color of Money (1986), supposedly based on the Tevis sequel to The Hustler. And in that case, the novel really was thrown out, because the Tevis book had a lot to do with the return of Minnesota Fats.

The film version substituted a young pool player, portrayed by Tom Cruise, and the word in the Hollywood trades was that Newman didn’t like working with Jackie Gleason (nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of Minnesota Fats), and wouldn’t do the sequel with him in it. And Gleason was too associated with the role to recast, so a new story was written to go with the title of the Tevis book.

The press said Newman claimed he wanted Gleason in as a cameo, and Gleason said he passed after reading scripts that included small scenes with the character that he didn’t feel added to the story. On the other hand, Tevis apparently wrote a faithful adaptation of his book that included Fats as a key player in several senses of the word. The Tevis script was rejected.

In any event, I didn’t care for the film of The Color of Money. It seemed to pander after a young audience via Tom Cruise, and was not one of director Martin Scorcese’s best pictures, and is little talked of today. If you can find the novel, give that a read – it’s very good.

But I have to wonder about that book – did Newman even read the first and last page?

* * *

Here’s a lovely Skim Deep review by Ron Fortier.

Somebody has just discovered the Quarry TV show and likes it.

I made Today’s Word! [I had trouble getting a good link to this (for the time being, it should be the first result at the link above), but I think the newspaper got this from this page at Wordsmith, with some good comments too. — Nate]

Finally, that great podcast Paperback Warrior considers Killing Quarry one of the best ten books the co-host read in 2020.

M.A.C.

Ms. Tree Gets Hers Today

Tuesday, September 3rd, 2019

Paperback:
E-Book:

Today is the publication date of Ms Tree 1: One Mean Mother from Titan. I don’t know how much presence it will have in the graphic novel sections of Barnes & Noble, BAM! and so on, but it’s available from the usual online suspects (Amazon has it for $17.49, 30% off the retail price).

I’ve already gotten some complaints over my beginning the reprint series with material from the last iteration of the comic book, DC’s Ms. Tree Quarterly. We did ten graphic novellas there, and One Mean Mother gathers five of them, which together form a graphic novel, admittedly an episodic one.

The remaining DC graphic novellas are free-standing, and will make up the second of these five collections, which will comprise the complete Ms. Tree – almost. A few crossovers are not included (notably the P.I.s mini-series, which co-starred Mike Mauser) and the story in which Ms. Tree tracks down a certain long-missing private eye, which will appear next March in Craig Yoe’s Johnny Dynamite collection, which Terry Beatty and I are editing. (I am working on the intro today.)

But these five volumes are the body of work that I am very pleased to have in this format. Why start at the end? Well, I feel it’s our best work, and it was done in color, so I’m just putting our best foot forward. I have been told that when several volumes collecting a strip or comic book feature are published, the first volume sells the best and the sales gradually go down. Also – though it was many years ago – the first issues of Ms. Tree (and the serialized “origin” in Eclipse Magazine) have already been collected in three trade paperbacks.

Our celebrated letters column (SWAK!) will not appear or even be excerpted. They are so politically incorrect, I would probably be jailed, or at least shunned. Times have changed, although not enough to make our then topical subject matter seem dated. It’s a sad fact that most of the crimes and problems these continuities deal with – abortion clinic bombings, gay bashing, date rape – are still very much with us.

If you aren’t familiar with Ms. Tree, she is basically a take on what would have happened to Mike Hammer’s secretary/partner Velda had she and Mike married, and the groom been murdered on their wedding night. The answer is two-fold – she would take over the business, and her first case would be tracking down her husband’s killer. This does not mean Ms. Tree is Velda – each is her own woman. But that “what if” notion was our starting point.

The other thing you should know is that Ms. Tree was the first of the wave of tough female private eyes that became an ‘80s phenomenon in mystery fiction – pre-dating the great V.I. Warshawski and Kinsey Milhone by my friends Sara Paretsky and the late Sue Grafton respectively.

We’re proud of that fact, which was noted in a really nice three-part article here (Ms. Tree gets a lot of space in Part Two but the entire article is worth visiting).

Even if you have the original comics, this series of Ms. Tree volumes is something you need for your bookshelf. You also need to tell your friends about the books and urge them to get onboard. I’m just trying to be helpful.

Comics scripting has always been a secondary part of my career, and to some comics fan I’m still best known for my “abysmal” year of Batman (subject of a recent podcast by nimrods with nothing worthwhile to be doing). To most, Road to Perdition is my claim to fame (or anyway less infamy), and I do think that graphic novel, in many respects, is my best single work. Others might cite my fifteen years writing the Dick Tracy strip, and I’m of course proud of that. But I think the most influential and probably important work was what Terry and I did on Ms. Tree. We didn’t just jumpstart female private eyes, we re-introduced tough crime/mystery to comic books, and paved the way for a lot of people to do their own good work (some were fans of ours who frankly seem to have forgotten that).

So if you are a reader of my prose fiction, and think comic books are for the boids, you really should bite the bullet and buy these five books, as the volumes gradually emerge from Titan. No less an expert than Kevin Burton Smith of the great Thrilling Detective web site considers Ms. Tree my greatest creation, topping even Nate Heller and Quarry. I’m not sure he’s right, but I’m not sure he’s wrong, either.

One thing is indisputable – Ms. Tree was the longest running private eye comic book to date…sixty issues plus various “specials.”

Lots of coverage on the net about the first of the Ms. Tree collected volumes has popped up. Here’s just one.

Jerry House did something everyone should do: he read seven novels by me in a week and a half. See what a piker you are? Then he produced one of the coolest, and I will immodestly say insightful, pieces ever written about my work.

Finally, here’s a really nice look at the Cinemax version of Quarry.

M.A.C.

Unbiased Gift-Giving (and Book Collecting) Advice

Tuesday, December 4th, 2018

Just when I was thinking the last update’s self-aggrandizing gift list suggestions were as far as even I could shamelessly go, along comes an Amazon sale to give me a chance to outdo myself.

Half a dozen of my Nathan Heller books are on sale all throughout the month of December at Amazon. The Kindle e-books are a mere 99 cents, and the physical books (remember those…books you can hold in your hands?) are half-price.

This includes True Crime, True Detective, The Million-Dollar Wound, Neon Mirage, Stolen Away, Angel in Black, Chicago Lightning and Triple Play. The latter two are a short story collection and a trio of short novels (the rest are novels).

You can find them right here.

Earlier I thought that all of the Heller novels prior to the recent batch at Tor Forge were included, but it’s a little more limited than that.

At any rate, if you have holes to fill in your collections, or are looking to turn others on to Nate Heller and me (and by so doing help insure more Heller books will come along in the future), this is the place to make that Christmas miracle come true.

I have other gift suggestions, too, for books I didn’t write. Sounds like the Christmas spirit, huh? Not so fast. I want now to recommend several books that originally appeared in Japanese but were translated by someone calling himself Nathan A. Collins (he claims the “A” stands for “Allan”).

Seriously, though, Nate is a wonderful writer (I said “unbiased”) and these are good books. One of them has a peculiar title – I Want to Eat Your Pancreas () – which is not a horror novel but a very good book about an unusual and oddly touching friendship. It was a bestseller in Japan, which I believe is why the American publisher did not want to change the title.

Nate also translated a thriller that was made into a rather famous anime feature – Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis () – which explores the phenomenon of young female pop stars (rather a creepy if real thing), one of whom attracts a particularly nasty stalker. Nate also translated Perfect Blue: Awaken from a Dream (), a collection of three stories by the same author on the same subject.

The most famous of Nate’s translations is Battle Royale (), which was the “inspiration” for Hunger Games, and an internationally successful film. That’s been out a while. Most current novel is Zodiac War () (Nate also translated the manga version (). This is a science-fiction/fantasy adventure, a super-hero/villain variation on Battle Royale.

* * *

Some recent things on the Net that you may wish to check out….

This is a fun discussion of movie tie-in novels, and several of mine are included.

Be sure to take in this nice appreciation of the Quarry TV series, which includes a celebration of Quarry’s creator, whose name I’m too modest to mention.

Once again Road to Perdition (the film and the graphic novel) are mentioned prominently on a list called (wait for it)“10 Obscure Comic Books That Were Turned Into Movies.”

Here is an oral history of how I created the new Robin and then DC fans rose up and killed him.

Finally, here’s a very good review of my first Quarry novel, which is called Quarry (and not The First Quarry).

M.A.C.