Posts Tagged ‘Quarry’s Reunion’

The Writing Life

Tuesday, September 16th, 2025

A box arrived from the UK with a few advance copies of our new Antiques/Trash ‘n’ Treasures mystery, Antiques Round-Up. When I say “our,” of course, I mean Barb and my latest novel in the now long-running series.

Barbara Allan and Antiques Round-Up

I have watched, I guess it’s been for decades now, Barb developing into a terrific writer. She was good out of the gate, and like most of us, her improvements are somewhat incremental and don’t make themselves clear until some time has passed and those improvements have accumulated.

I know I still think I’m improving as a fiction writer even at this late date. I’ve been writing long enough to have no doubt lost my fast ball here and there, but certain craft things have improved. Or at least I’m still trying to have them improved.

Barb and I have different approaches. She is slow-and-steady wins the race. Even now, I may not spend more than two months writing a novel (depends on the novel of course), but she spends most of her writing year on one book in the series. Fiction writing is a love/hate affair, but I have always loved it more than hated, and often Barb seems to be the other way around. She always talks about the current book being the last one she’s willing to do, while I’m always looking for more books to write, as if as long as I have a book contract, that God or the Grim Reaper or whatever will wait for me to finish the current novel.

If there’s a point to this ramble, it’s how proud I am of the way Barb has risen to a truly professional level, and this latest book – which will be published a couple of weeks from now – is evidence of that.

We were published for years by Kensington, but our current home is Severn House, a UK publisher that puts a lot of their emphasis on the United States market. But we do hear from readers who dropped away at the point Kensington stopped publishing us, largely because – thus far – the series has been tricky to find in Barnes and Noble, and BAM and other of the surviving brick-and-mortar book stores.

Some of these readers don’t even know the series is continuing, and when they find out it is, want to know where they can get back onboard. Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have the Severn House books in hardcover and e-book; and all of them eventually become available from those sellers in handsome trade paperback editions.

We have had a lot of Hollywood interest in the Antiques novels – specifically for TV – over the last fifteen years. It’s gotten very close – very – but as yet no cigar. That’s why we made an Antiques movie ourselves, Death By Fruitcake, with Paula Sands (legendary Midwestern broadcaster) as Vivian Borne and Alisabeth Von Presley (Midwest pop superstar) as Brandy Borne. We’re proud of our little movie – I scripted it from a Barbara Allan novella (Antiques Fruitcake) and Barb co-produced and served as production manager.

This past week Chad Bishop, our co-producer (and Director of Photography and Editor) and I began dealing with the “deliverables” (the things a distributor requires) for Twin Engines Global. This ranges from getting trailers and the film itself to them and making closed-captioning happen and taking lawyer meetings about getting an LLC put together and a hundred other things.

Certainly easier to just write a damn book. It was however a fun, hard, unforgettable experience, shooting and editing it and all, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Meanwhile, I am almost half-way through the new Quarry novel, Quarry’s Reunion, which will be the 50th anniversary book in a series that I thought Berkley Books had killed 49 years ago…but thankfully Hard Case Crime unexpectedly resuscitated it in 2006 with the help of filmmaker Jeffrey Goodman, who made a short film from my script (A Matter of Principal) and a film version of The Last Quarry (The Last Lullaby). Fans also helped keep it alive.

I mentioned that fiction writing is a love/hate affair. Though she seldom grouses, I know Barb finds writing difficult. Funny thing is, after all this time, so do I.

I will spend a full day writing two or three pages of description and set-up for a chapter, or an hour on one paragraph; fortunately for me, the rest goes a lot faster, and dialogue scenes fly, as they need to when readers encounter them. Most of my novels are mysteries, obviously, and I re-plot them constantly as I go. Quarry’s Reunion had five or six preliminary overview outlines, and I’m on the fifth or six chapter breakdown now.

Part of this is my approach being half planning, half improvisation. I try to know enough about the story I am about to tell without mounting my horse and riding in all directions. So I know major things – like who-dun-it and why. Then I come up with a plan, a road map, a structure, that may be twenty pages long. But I try to keep it loose enough to make discoveries as I go. This has me revising the plan, changing and tweaking the trip I’m taking, as I go.

Here’s another difference between writers. Though we come up with the “Barbara Allan” basic ideas together, Barb rarely asks me for an opinion or plot help or anything while she’s writing her draft. I’m willing to help, and often offer – but I have too many ideas, too many ways to solve a problem, to do anything but frustrate her, throw her off-track. So except in cases of emergencies, I keep tabs on what she’s doing on her draft, but don’t interfere. And when I do my draft, she gets out of my way. She does read my chapters as I go, so can catch anything I’m doing that will upset the plot applecart.

I mentioned above that I sometimes spend a day on a few scene-setting opening paragraphs, or an hour or more on a transitional paragraph between breaks within a chapter. And in recent years – due, I’m afraid, to all the media around us dumbing everybody down – I get some (not a lot) of readers and reviewers complaining about what they see as needless description. I will defend that only with this: I have to see a scene in my mind before I write it; and in description – yes, even clothing – I am writing about character as much as anything.

Still, as I said to Barb the other day, “It’s frustrating to spend so much time on the stuff some readers skip.”

Here’s where you can pre-order Antiques Round-Up; it’s out on Oct. 7. It’s likely also available via the Net at anywhere else you like to buy your books.


Hardcover:
E-Book: Nook Kobo Google PLay
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Here’s a review of The Two Jakes 4-K Blu-ray (from Kino Lorber) that is a comprehensive look at the film and the disc, and includes the commentary by Heath Holland and myself about the film. You have to scroll down to read that, but the whole review (my opinion is higher than the reviewer’s of the film itself, but the review is thoughtful and fair, even when I don’t entirely agree with it).

The Two Jakes poster excerpt

This a new bio of me at a Dick Tracy Wiki site. Looks extensive, though I admit not reading it yet.

M.A.C.

A Quarry Discussion Plus a Book Giveaway!

Tuesday, April 1st, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a terrific movie. Don’t miss it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

M.A.C.