Posts Tagged ‘Quarry’

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M.A.C. Whines & James Bond Rules (Plus Quarry!)

Tuesday, October 27th, 2026

Yes, I am going to whine a little.

We’re at the year’s end for “best of” lists and award nominations, and the best-reviewed book of my nearly 60-year career isn’t showing up. Deadly Pleasures presented its list of best novels and, despite Return of the Maltese Falcon receiving an astonishing three raves in those pages, it is conspicuous in its absence. Even the Scribes, the awards of the tie-in organization I co-founded with Lee Goldberg, ignored the book. No Edgar nom, of course. Nothin’ so far.

I have to wonder if the fact that I’m dealing with another writer’s characters and concepts ruled me out. What is clear is this: a lot of you liked it. The book has sold well and generated a contract from Hard Case Crime for two more in a trilogy following Sam Spade through the years.

So if the awards committees think that’s a faint raspberry they hear, that’s applause my readers hear echoing.

Thank you.


Me, Barb, Jackie & Mike White.
* * *

The 50th anniversary Quarry novel, Quarry’s Reunion, is out on Nov. 10. Both giveaways have been completed and everyone who requested a book is getting one (we’re out of copies now, however).

Heath Holland, mastermind of Cereal at Midnight on YouTube, will be interviewing me about the new book and the long-running (albeit start-and-stop) series very soon. I will announce the YouTube showing here as soon as it’s scheduled. Heath is great, not only familiar with the series but also the gent who interviewed The Last Lullaby director, Jeffrey Goodman, and me (the writer), for the December Blu-ray release from Kino Lorber. It will appear as a commentary on the disc. The only Quarry feature film to date, it’s something fans of the novels won’t want to miss – it’s based on The Last Quarry. Also it will have the Quarry short film “A Matter of Principal” in HD.

I’ll keep you posted.

* * *

I am dealing with a health situation that I will go into here at a later date, but it’s a good time to acknowledge the most important person in my life, Barbara Collins. She is smart and funny and beautiful and unfailingly supportive; my rock. Pretty damn good writer, too.

We recently made a day trip to Galena, Illinois, to celebrate being together 60 years. We won’t have been married that staggering amount of time until two more blissful years pass, but we started going together (at Muscatine Community College) in October 1966. Here’s a shot of what’s left of me and also of the incredibly well-preserved Barbara Mull at Vinnie Vanucchi’s Restaurant in Galena, our favorite getaway.


Barb and me at Vinnie Vanucchi’s restaurant in Galena, Illinois

Our new book together, Antiques Web, is worth celebrating, too. Order it at Amazon in hardcover and on Kindle.

* * *

Mickey Spillane led me to James Bond.

I know, I know – Mickey Spillane seems to have led me everywhere; but he inadvertently made an Ian Fleming fan out of me.

Some of this you may have heard, but stick around.

By 1961, when I was 13, I had inhaled everything by Spillane I could lay my hands on – in particular, his six Mike Hammer novels – I, the Jury; My Gun Is Quick; Vengeance Is Mine; One Lonely Night; The Big Kill; and Kiss Me, Deadly.

Mickey’s paperback publisher, Signet, repackaged those six books again and again during the decade-long break between Hammer novels (the private eye would return in 1962 with The Girl Hunters). Covers by the top artists in the field adorned those reprints, including Barye Phillips.

At the time, Ian Fleming was hot in the UK and getting hot in America, as JFK has listed From Russia With Love (1957) as a favorite novel of his. Fleming was often called (on book jackets and in reviews) the British Spillane, and Bond the British Hammer. In years to come it would be played down, but Bond began as a UK variant on Hammer – taking advantage of the sex and violence quotient Spillane introduced, and sometimes the abrupt endings.

The Bond novels through the 1950s had bounced around American paperback publishers, never taking hold. When the character was adapted for a one-hour TV presentation, he was Americanized as (shudder) Jimmy Bond. The character was a certified flop in America for all of the decade.

But, with Spillane not writing, Signet saw the possibilities in a British Mike Hammer. They used Phillips again as the cover artist and played up the Spillane similarities and had a modest success.

Meanwhile, back in Iowa, I was reading anything that anybody said had anything to do with Mickey Spillane. If Signet Books said Bond was the Brit Bond, I was all in. I read everything they put out, which was a fairly sizeable backlog of books written through the 1950s. I really liked Fleming. He was next-best-to-Spillane.

So when the UK success of Bond, amplified by the paperback success of the Signet reprints and the JFK publicity, led to a movie being made, I was an eager beaver. It debuted in my part of the world in early May 1962 on a Wednesday night – a school night.

I was going to be there (at, I believe, the Capitol Theater).

Of course I was 14 years old and several years away from getting my hands on a car. So it was up to me to convince my parents to take me to the movies in Davenport (thirty miles away!) on a school night. How I accomplished this feat I do not recall. I know begging was involved. God knows what I agreed to do for those people. I may have even agreed to mow the lawn.

But I was there, in the audience, when an actor I didn’t remember ever seeing before said his name was, “Bond. James Bond.”

That moment was the equivalent of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan – it was really part of the same movement, where America was forced to try to be as hip as Great Britain (unsuccessfully, but still).

It’s difficult to explain to young people (which is to say people who aren’t in their seventies) what the impact of Connery’s Bond was. Nothing on TV or the movies compared before or since.

Nothing.

He simply was James Bond. He had crawled off the page even cooler. Connery would play many characters, most of them well, some of them very well; but his style as Bond was unique to the character and himself. The quiet contempt for most of humanity. The light humor in inappropriate situations. The coldness of his attack – “That’s a Smith & Wesson, and you’ve had your six.”

I like Roger Moore. He was an interesting Maverick (didn’t hold a candle, though, to James Garner or even Jack Kelly) and a good Saint, but a most uneven Bond. If the script behaved, he could manage. Otherwise, what the fuck does that have to do with Ian Fleming’s James Bond?

Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan, both fine actors, play Bond well, and I love them both, but neither is Bond. Daniel Craig, the only Bond I’ve met, is fine within the bubble of his variant world. He is more an agent with the code name “James Bond” than James Bond.

Now somebody new is going to be Bond. I’ll be there if I’m on the planet. But he won’t be Bond, because there is only one Bond – Sean Connery. Put the Beatles back together with replacements for Lennon and Harrison, it’s not the Beatles. I don’t care if it’s Bob Dylan and Buddy Holly Back From The Grave. Sorry.

There would be no Lazenby/Moore/Dalton/Brosnan/Craig Bonds without Connery, because if any other actor had been cast in Dr. No, there wouldn’t have been a From Russia With Love much less a Goldfinger.

It’s always been ridiculous to me that the Bond producers have never embraced Never Say Never Again as a Bond film because, after all, it has the only James Bond in it, and he’s wonderful. Despite not being from a major studio, it held its own with the concurrent Moore title (the indefensible Octopussy). And it succeeded without many of the trappings of the Brocccoli-era Bond movies – no gun barrel opening, no James Bond theme, no music at all worth listening to.

And, brother, is that music awful. So inappropriate and disappointing. For some, it ruins Never Say Never Again. For most, it damages it.

But it’s better than the supremely disappointing Diamonds Are Forever. Some say Connery is at his worst in that, and I follow – but really it’s the material. The lyrics in Never Say Never Again are worthy of Connery – it’s the music that lets him down.

A number of fan edits have been done using John Barry music and at least one of these is worth seeking out. I do not generally endorse bootlegs, but for you physical media collectors out there, if you have purchased the Blu-ray of Never Say Never Again, you are justified in going after what is known as the EON edit. It can also be downloaded from somewhere by people smarter than me.

This edit substitutes a certain amount of Barry’s most familiar Bond music – but doesn’t overdo – and the opening titles (which are very Maurice Binder-like) are under Thunderball’s rejected “Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” vocal by Shirley Bassey. Yes, Never Say Never Again is a remake of that film, but it’s significantly different, and – in this form at least – arguably better. The rest of the music is appropriate material from other Barry scores and all of it works well. Both female leads are good, a winsome Kim Bassinger and particularly luscious Barbara Carrera as Fatima Blush. This means Carrera played the femme fatale to both Bond and Mike Hammer (in I, the Jury, 1982). Fatima Blush and Charlotte! Wow.

It’s a tighter edit, too. Much less Rowan Atkinson comedy relief, deleted scenes restored and generally better pacing. Strangely, it actually improves the performances. Klaus Maria Brandauer suddenly seems one of the best Bond villains.

Amazon/MGM holds the rights to the “official” Bond series but also Never Say Never Again. They could have it re-cut and re-scored (in the Barry style) and slap on the gun barrel opening and get the Barry Bond themes in. Tighten the edit up while you’re at it. A fortune could be made and it would do nothing but promote the Bond franchise. Limited theatrical run, big-time streaming and, yes, physical media. What’s wrong with you people? Don’t you stop to pick up money in the street?

I can’t lead you to this bootleg – I can aid but not abet – but the set that I, uh, came in contact with is a doozy: three discs, the original version of Never Say Never Again on both 4K and Blu-ray, and the Eon fan-edit on a bonus disc.

And I hear the same folks have an edit of The Rock as a Bond film under way…in case you were wondering what became of the real James Bond.

M.A.C.

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Quarry Book Giveaway – Quarry’s Reunion (Pub Date Nov. 10)

Tuesday, October 20th, 2026

And now for the published novel, Quarry’s Reunion, the 50th anniversary Quarry no less, we offer this book giveaway. We have copies for the first ten of you who write me at macphilms@hotmail.com and request one. You agree to post (if you enjoyed the book) a review for Amazon and/or Barnes & Noble, and/or Goodreads (or similar sites). American entries only (postage elsewhere is prohibitive). A must: include your snail mail address. [All copies have been claimed! Thank you for your support!! –Nate]

This is our second book giveaway for this title – the first dealt with Advanced Reading Copies and this one is the actual book. The little differences between the ARC and the actual book, as physical objects, are a few typos corrected.

The Quarry movie, The Last Lullaby (2008), is coming soon from Kino-Lorber on Blu-ray. Heath Holland of Cereal at Midnight, Jeffrey Goodman the film’s director, and I got together for an interview (Heath asking the questions) that will serve as the commentary for the Blu-ray. The session went very well. It’s a good one, I think.

Kino-Lorber has been great. They allowed me to contribute to the description of the film on the back of the (slipcased) disc. The details for this jam-packed Blu-ray (and how to preorder it) are at this link.

* * *

This is a wonderful array of noir detectives, albeit not perfect (no Mickey Spillane as Mike Hammer, for example), but still a sheer pleasure to behold. Glad to see Biff Eliott acknowledged!

Discussions of classic detectives like Mike Hammer and Phillip Marlowe often omit a screen or TV portrayal or two. Among Hammers, Brian Keith, Armand Assante and Rob Estes (the latter rightfully) frequently get forgotten. Sometimes people aren’t aware of Gary Sandy in my Encore for Murder, who really was terrific.

Marlowe has forgotten portrayals to spare. George Montgomery’s bland Marlowe in The Brasher Doubloon (1947) skips a lot of people’s minds. An appropriate Philip Carey starred in the 1959–1960 ABC television series Philip Marlowe. The great Powers Boothe was Marlowe in the HBO/ITV neo-noir series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye (1983–1986); Danny Glover in a 1995 episode of the anthology series Fallen Angels; James Caan in the 1998 HBO movie adaptation Poodle Springs; and Zachary Scott on Robert Montgomery Presents – ironic since Robert Montgomery played Marlowe in Lady in the Lake.

Worst of all (though he coulda been a contender) was Liam Neeson in the abysmal Marlowe (2023).

* * *

Here is a nice review of Mickey’s last completed novel, The Last Stand.

It does not mention the novella included in the book: A Bullet for Satisfaction, begun by Mickey and completed by me…and the basis of the indie film I wrote not long ago, Cap City. It has a distributor and I’ll pass along news as I get it.

* * *

Antiques Web is available now! The latest Brandy and Vivian Borne mystery (from Barbara Allan, aka Barb and me) is from Sevren House, our publisher who is located in the UK. This makes finding us in a brick-and-mortar outlet stateside hit or miss (although we’re told that situation will soon improve). For now your best bet is Amazon, where it’s available in hardcover and on Kindle.

Reviews have been so good Vivian hasn’t had to lie about them.

M.A.C.

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It’s a Quarry and Death by Fruitcake Christmas!

Tuesday, October 13th, 2026

I apologize for the emphasis on hawking my wares here for the last few weeks, but it’s not often I have two books out at essentially the same time.

And, at least in the Collins household, the 50th anniversary of Quarry is kind of a big deal (specifically of the publication of the first novel about him, The Broker, available from Hard Case Crime as Quarry, my intended title). The imminent publication of Quarry’s Reunion – sporting a fantastic Paul Mann cover – is the official 50th Anniversary Release. But there’s something else that’s exciting, at least to me.

As some of you know, I do a certain amount of work for Kino Lorber doing commentaries with my buddy Heath Holland. A few months ago I contacted Jeffrey Goodman, the director of the 2008 movie The Last Lullaby, based on my short story “A Matter of Principal” and the novel it spawned, The Last Quarry…a novel that itself spawned this whole raft of Quarry novels I never expected to get to write.

As a collector of DVDs, Blu-rays and 4K discs, I asked Jeffrey if the film’s physical media rights were available (I knew its distributor had placed The Last Lullaby with some streaming services). I wanted to see if we could get The Last Lullaby released on Blu-ray as part of the 50th Anniversary of Quarry.

Jeffrey loved the idea and acquired the go-ahead from his distributor. Next, I approached Frank Tarzi, head honcho of Kino. Lightning fast, Frank got on board. I got Heath involved, so that we could do a commentary where he would interview Jeffrey and me together.

I am very fond of the short film, “A Matter of Principal,” made in the early 2000s by Jeffrey from my script, and hoped we could include it on the Blu-ray as a bonus feature. I felt it would be a particularly nice touch, because first of all, it’s a good little film; and second, the character is called Quarry, whereas in The Last Lullaby he had been renamed Price (a name I kind of like) to protect my sequel rights.

I wanted to make it clear Lullaby was a Quarry movie.

Just last week I learned that we would indeed be able to include the short film on the Blu-ray. And another significant piece of news came in shortly after that: The Last Lullaby will have a December 2026 release! That gives us a Quarry novel in November and a Quarry Blu-ray in December.

Some of you may recall I had some issues with the film because a second writer worked on the script after my initial two drafts (and of course I was the source writer). But I did give notes after the rewrite, which Jeffrey largely paid heed to, and anyway it’s a good film, which is all the source writer can ask, beyond being paid (which I was, rather handsomely).

I’ve always liked the film. Looking at it for the first time in many years, I’ve warmed to it even more. The late Tom Sizemore makes an excellent latterday Quarry, and librarian Sasha Alexander is a terrific unlikely target for a hitman. The direction is excellent and should have led to more Goodman films. It has its own distinct approach and mood. And I am particularly fond of the Midwest setting.

There’s some irony in that. As some will recall, the single season of the HBO/Cinemax Quarry TV series was set in Louisiana and leaned into that setting, as if it were a key element of the Quarry stories. Now the truth is that the series was shot there simply to take advantage of generous tax credits. My Quarry yarns are not steeped in swamp blues.

Jeffrey is a longtime Louisiana resident, and he went out of his way to make his film (shot perhaps half an hour from his house) look like Quarry’s Midwest. My early books in particular, written at the Iowa Writers Workshop (Bait Money, No Cure for Death, Quarry) were in part my effort to show that hardboiled crime fiction didn’t have to be set in New York or Los Angeles. Much of my Iowa upbringing is in those books (Quarry himself is an Ohio boy, and the first book takes place in Port City, Iowa, a lightly fictionalized Muscatine).

This is one of the reasons why I consider The Last Lullaby a better representation of what I am up to in the Quarry novels than the TV series – and why I prefer it.

* * *

We had a book giveaway (of Quarry’s Reunion) last week and the copies went fast. These were ARC’s, advanced copies although they are in the same format as the actual books will be and differ little. When that book hits print, and I can access some copies, we’ll do another book giveaway.

* * *

Antiques Web is now available, the latest in our long-running Trash ‘n’ Treasures comic cozy series. The “our” in the previous sentence is my wife Barb and me – “Barbara Allan.”

Our novels used to be carried regularly by Barnes & Noble, and in fact often made their cozy mystery bestseller lists. But our current publisher, Severn House, is based in the UK and our penetration into B & B and some other brick-and-mortar stores can be spotty.

Severn recently joined up with Joffe in the UK and we anticipate our bookstore availability will improve quite a bit. In the meantime, please send for Antiques Web at Amazon and other favorite online booksellers of yours; you should be able to get the hardcover and e-books as well. If you’ve missed some of the other Severn House Antiques titles, those are available in trade as well as hardcover. The series numbering has started over at Amazon with the Severn-published titles, omitting the many Kensington titles.

We’ve had nice comments about Death by Fruitcake, our Antiques/Trash ‘n’ Treasures movie, a micro-budget affair we made ourselves. It can be found on Tubi and various other services, sometimes for a fee, now and then not. YouTube has it free, for example, from the service Free Time Movies.

Now for physical media fans like me, here’s something interesting: Amazon has been bouncing around the price for the DVD of Death by Fruitcake from $22.98 to (gasp!) $4.83 and various points in between. Right now, it’s at its 90-day low!

And the Blue Christmas DVD – our 2024 micro-budget but acclaimed mash-up of A Christmas Carol and The Maltese Falcon – is Amazon at an almost equally astonishing $7.49. The blu-ray is $12.70.

These are perfect stocking stuffers at this price, so please take advantage. Do be aware that while these micro-budget productions have been mostly well-received, you will find occasional condescending coal among the candy-cane opinions.

Here is a review that should tell you whether or not you would enjoy Blue Christmas. It’s from Patrick J. Regal at Letterboxd.

The Under 700 Club started three years ago with a holiday recommendation, Edward Burns’ story of familial forgiveness, The Fitzgerald Family Christmas. The next year, a Christmas entry became an annual tradition with a review of the CW’s 2021 version of The Waltons’ Homecoming, a remake that was much better than I expected it to be. Last year, I reviewed another television film, BET’s ridiculous comedy Christmas Party Crashers. My annual gift to you, an underseen and underrated holiday film, returns this year with another offering, 2024’s noir Blue Christmas.

Marley was dead, to begin with. It’s Christmas Eve in 1941, and Jake Marley (Chris Causey) was murdered one year ago tonight. His private dick partner, Richard Stone (Rob Merritt), never bothered to solve the murder because, well, he’s just kind of an asshole – a draft dodger who didn’t choose the most noble of careers. In this take on Charles Dickens’ immortal A Christmas Carol, Stone is visited by Marley, as well as the ensuing three ghosts, in his Chicago office after everyone else has cleared out for the holidays. Unlike the top review on Letterboxd, I wouldn’t spoil anything about the ghosts, so I’ll just say that two of them are recognizable historical figures, and the title does reference something specific about one of them.

The film is written and directed by Max Allan Collins, one of the finest writers of crime fiction over the past few decades. Carrying the torch from the likes of writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett (Collins’ next book is a sequel to Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon), Mickey Spillane (the two collaborated toward the end of Spillane’s life, and Spillane chose Collins to finish his incomplete manuscripts after his death), Collins was of the next generation of hardboiled storytellers. With a career that has lasted five decades, he’s written over 100 novels (I’m working my way through his Quarry series), comics (Ms. Tree and Dick Tracy, though he’s probably best known for Road to Perdition), and screenplays, both produced and unproduced.

But low-budget filmmaking is the great equalizer, and Blue Christmas is as micro-budget as it gets. It does look and feel like it was shot for roughly $10,000 in six days in a community college’s black box theatre, and that’s because it was. However, that’s what I find so impressive about it. Very few people understand how hard that is to pull off, and it’s a shame that so many folks are unable to look past that, as several of the reviews have been harsh and unfair. After all, the movie’s most recognizable actor is Alisabeth Von Presley, a golden ticket recipient on American Idol ten years ago and a competitor on the short-lived American Song Contest, but I think you’d have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of reality competition shows to pull those out. The rest of the cast is populated with actors local to Collins’ home state of Iowa.

But when I see a play or musical at a community theatre, I don’t expect Broadway quality. When one of those amateur troupes does Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it’s still a play by William freaking Shakespeare. And made by amateurs, this is not. A Chicago crime version of A Christmas Carol is still just that, and Collins, adapting his own short story “A Wreath for Marley,” writes dime novel dialogue with the best of ‘em. Hell, he’s one of the best of ‘em. He slings the lingo. The one-liners are quick and witty. I mean, come on, the movie features the phrase “ho-ho-ho-homicide,” and it doesn’t get any better than that. And the credits roll at the 73-minute mark – it really doesn’t get any better than that.

You can watch this one for free in all of the usual free movie places (which is how I watched it), but I’d like to check out the special edition Blu-ray, which features over two hours of bonus materials, as well as a commentary with Collins and producer/editor Chad Bishop. If you wanted to get me a present this year…

A note to Patrick Regal, who I do not know. If you e-mail me at macphilms@hotmail.com, I will send you a Christmas present: Death by Fruitcake. Yes, I am incredibly generous, but hey, it’s only gonna cost me $4.83.

M.A.C.

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Quarry 50th Anniversary (Plus Last Lullaby Blu-Ray!)

Tuesday, October 6th, 2026

I have ten advance copies of Quarry’s Reunion to offer. The first ten of you to respond will receive a signed copy, in exchange for your promise to write a review at Amazon and or Barnes & Noble (if you have a blog, even better). Be sure to include your snail mail address! One thing: you can’t submit Amazon reviews until the book is out – publication day is Nov. 10. So hold up sending your review in till then. Write me at macphilms@hotmail.com to request the book. [All copies have been claimed! Thank you for your support! –Nate] If you don’t like the book, you are released from any obligation to review it. [Open to U.S. addresses only, due to shipping costs. Sorry! –Nate]

As this is the 50th anniversary of Quarry (the first novel, The Broker which is now known as Quarry) was published in 1976. I’ll be doing some interviews (a good one with Andrew Sumner of Titan Books is linked below) and with luck there’ll be some fuss. Turns out Quarry is the longest-running character in American mystery fiction, and world-wide second only Agatha Christie’s Poirot.

Now Quarry’s long run is deceiving. I’ve told this story in various ways, but here it is again, with a few details not previously shared.

Quarry developed out of my desire, after writing the first few Nolan books and being an acolyte of Donald E. Westlake in his Richard Stark persona, to see if the third-person approach enjoyed by both Nolan and Parker could be replaced with a first-person narrator. My notion was that professional thieves Parker and Nolan did not kill civilians, which protected and distanced the reader. I wanted to see if readers could identify with a hired killer. Specifically, I would show Quarry’s killing ways in the early chapters and then he would ease into a sort of detective role, solving the murder he committed, and would have a relationship with a woman that seemed to stir his more human and humane side. We’d forgot who we were identifying with.

Then, toward the end of the book, I would pull the rug out from under the reader and remind them what a naughty boy Quarry really was.

So it was a kind of literary experiment. Hey, I was in college. I wrote the first two chapters. In chapter one, Quarry killed a priest (apparent priest) and chapter two, he has meaningless sex with a pick-up at a motel. The idea was: bang bang.

At the University of Iowa we would share our latest work with the class (and the Writers Workshop instructor), and it would be discussed. With the exception of one bright young man who loved it, everybody hated what I’d written. The instructor, William Price Fox, was not impressed, either. About two weeks later, my first novel Bait Money, sold, and Fox reevaluated me, as I was the only student in the Workshop that year to sell a novel.

I worked on the first Quarry book until I was given the opportunity to write Nolan sequels (and Mallory, as the first one of those, No Cure for Death, sold a week after Bait Money). So Quarry was put aside, as I recall, until I’d delivered those sequels. I did use what I’d written of that book as part of what I called my Port City Trilogy, which was my thesis.

The Port City Trilogy was designed to show hardboiled crime novels could be written not about New York or Los Angeles but using a small Midwestern town as the setting. Bait Money takes place in Port City, as does No Cure For Death and also Quarry.

Somewhere along the line I finished Quarry and my agent began trying to market it. My Nolan and Mallory contracts for multiple books were all delivered, and luckily Quarry sold not long after. And Berkley Books wanted three more Quarry novels, and I was glad to comply.

The Quarry character, who’d first reared his head at the University of Iowa Workshop in 1972, finally saw print in 1976 as The Broker (a title I still despise). Hence the 50th anniversary occurring in 2026, my math skills being second to none.

But the story almost ends there. Berkley Books did not request more Quarry novels, which disappointed me (of course) because I really thought I had something with the character, something unique that my generation could relate to where an old-fashioned private eye might not. So I put Quarry behind me and was involved with Dick Tracy and various other projects, including Nolan relaunching by Pinnacle in the early ‘80s.

One of those projects was True Detective, in which I found a way to write a private eye novel by going the historical route. Chinatown and Stuart Kaminsky had demonstrated doing a period private eye story was a workable path, and to that I added doing actual historical crimes – after True Detective unintentionally launched another series, my PI would solve just about every damn real mystery of the 20th Century.

True Detective was a success and that led to me having the opportunity to write anything I wanted to for a change, and I chose to do another Quarry. A surprising amount of fan mail had come in during the ten years since the series began, after its apparent demise in 1977. The first four books were reprinted (with the books receiving my preferred titles) and Primary Target (later retitled Quarry’s Vote) a new novel, appeared. These were well-received but did not lead, immediately, to more.

In the ‘90s I wrote occasional Quarry short stories, one of which attracted the attention of young filmmaker Jeffrey Goodman. Jeffrey wanted to do a short film based on “A Matter of Principal,” the most anthologized of the Quarry short stories. I resisted his efforts but he ground me down, and I agreed to let him make the film as long as I was the writer.

That film came out and did well on the festival circuit. After Road to Perdition put me briefly on the map, the idea of doing a Quarry feature followed. Simultaneously (more or less) publisher/editor Charles Ardai – after Hard Case Crime had done a combined reprint of the first two Nolan novels as Two for the Money – gave me the opportunity to do an original novel. I chose to do a Quarry – specifically to end the series with The Last Quarry. I felt the hardcore fans deserved that.

Shockingly, that book did very well. Finally a Quarry novel was a success! Nice sales and great reviews. In a buffet line at a Bouchercon, Charles said, “It’s too bad you wrote The Last Quarry and ended the series.” And, a plate in my hand, I said, “How about doing The First Quarry?”

Now Quarry’s Reunion is eleven novels later, adding up to 18 books.

Here is that interview with Andrew Sumner, my favorite interviewer.

* * *

A big part of the 50th anniversary celebration is the release on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber of The Last Lullaby, the feature film based on The Last Quarry. The bonus features will include the award-winning short, “A Matter of Principal,” directed by Jeffrey and written by me from my short story. My buddy Heath Holland of Cereal at Midnight moderated the director and myself in a commentary for this release – in December!

* * *

Death By Fruitcake is still available at Amazon at a sale price of $5.68! Our little micro-budget feature based on the ANTIQUES series by Barbara Allan (Barb and me) is the perfect stocking-stuffer or just as an addition to your shelf. It had been listed at over $22, so this is a great buy if you’re at all interested.

* * *

Back in the ‘70s when I was young and beautiful (well, young) I was on a popular game show. Check it out.

* * *

This weekend, a reading of a play by Barb’s sister is being performed in Amana, IA:

The Iowa Play: A Gentle Comedy in Two Acts
Amana Heritage Society and TKM Theatrical Productions present Kathe Mull’s gentle, two-act comedy about friendship, community, and the heart of Iowa

DATE/TIME:
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Doors will open at 2:30 p.m., with the performance beginning at 3:00 p.m.

LOCATION:
The Amana Performing Arts Center
39 38th Ave, Amana, IA

ABOUT THE SHOW:
What happens when an Iowa-born theatre artist spends a lifetime on and behind the stage, makes New York City her home, and then turns back to Iowa for inspiration? The result is The Iowa Play—a gentle comedy in two acts by playwright Kathe Mull, receiving its first public reading.

FEATURING:
Tom Milligan, Marty Norton, & Adam Burnham

Presented by:
Amana Heritage Society and
TKM Theatrical Productions.

Tickets $25 per person

Admission includes an intermission menu featuring an “Amana-rite” sandwich, Amana’s playful homage to Iowa’s famous Maid-Rite sandwich.

Kathe Mull was born and raised in Muscatine, Iowa, where she graduated from Muscatine High School. She went on to attend Muscatine Community College on a drama scholarship.

Following college, Kathe joined The Old Creamery Theatre Company, where she performed as an actress for several seasons. Later, she also directed On Golden Pond, starring Tom Milligan and Deb Kennedy.

Kathe later became a member of the resident acting company at Charlie’s Showplace in Des Moines, Iowa, where she performed for eight years before relocating to New York City.

More than 45 years later, Kathe continues to call Manhattan home, where she has enjoyed a diverse and rewarding career in the theatre. Her work has included acting, directing, serving as a Broadway star dresser, and, most recently, playwrighting. Drawing on decades of experience both onstage and behind the scenes, she brings authenticity, wit, and a deep love of theatre to her writing.

Kathe is thrilled to join TKM Productions and the Amana Heritage Society in presenting The Iowa Plays in its first public reading. It is a special privilege to share these stories—celebrating the people, history, humor, and heart of Iowa—with audiences for the very first time. She hopes audiences find a little of themselves in these Iowa stories.

She is especially looking forward to enjoying her first Maid-Rite (without ketchup, of course) since 1974.

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More Quarry Anniversary stuff next week!

M.A.C.

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