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Ms. Tree Gets Her Due

Tuesday, January 21st, 2025

Paperback: Bookshop Purchase Link
E-Book: Google Play

Paperback: Bookshop Purchase Link
E-Book: Google Play

At the Reading Is Fun, Not Mental website, “TL” wrote this terrific Ms. Tree – Heroine Withdrawal review, the fifth of the six Ms. Tree collections from Titan.

Ms. Tree – Heroine Withdrawal (The Fifth Ms. Tree Graphic Novel)

I can never get enough of Ms. Tree. Ever since I picked up that first issue of Ms. Tree’s Thrilling Detective Adventures (which I still love that title, even though I’m aware Ms. Tree’s creators do not – for me, it gave the book a pulp feel, which I think fit the character nicely), I’ve been hooked, and I was devastated when the series eventually ended after years at Eclipse, then Aardvark-Vanheim, then Renegade Press, and finally DC Comics. So, when Titan announced it would be collecting and reprinting the entire run, I was super-excited – sure, I had all the individual issues; but now I would have easy access to reading the stories again and again and again without having to dig through my comic boxes, unseal the bags, and pull out issue after issue to read them. Even though the collections are not telling the stories in order (they reprinted the ten DC issues first, then went back to the beginning to start with the Eclipse issues, before moving on to the AV and Renegade issues – and even those have been told somewhat out of order, collecting them by story relevance and not chronologically), I have absolutely loved curling up in my recliner and walking down memory lane with Ms. Tree, Dan, Effie, and the rest of the gang…

Ms. Tree: Heroine Withdrawal collects issues 18-27 and 29-31 (with the title having officially switched fully to Renegade Press by issue 19). These are some of my favorite issues, as they deal with Ms. Tree’s final confrontation with Dominic Muerta and the aftermath – as well as a two-part story that dealt with the topical issue of abortion. This is some of Max Allan Collins’ best writing in the series, as they give the readers a real sense of why Ms. Tree is who she is and why the world (well, her fictional world, anyway) needs a Ms. Tree in it. It’s also extremely character driving, as most of the series is anyway – but these issues in particular give readers a greater understanding of not just Ms. Tree, but also many of the supporting characters. Plus, we get our introduction to Dominique Muerta (gotta love Collins’ play on names in this series), who turns out to be a wonderful frenemy for our favorite gun-toting crime-fighter!

“Muerta Means Death,” the four-issue story that runs through issues 18, 19, 20, and 21, provides readers with a very satisfying conclusion to Ms. Tree’s vendetta against the man who had her husband killed. The title has a double meaning, since the word “muerta” is actually the Spanish word for “dead,” and at the same time, it refers to the fact that Dominic Muerta is a killer, and if you cross him, you die. I suppose it could also have a third meaning, since in the story, we learn Muerta has cancer and is on his death bed – and when Dan Green comes back to work (with a hook in place of the hand he lost in the explosion set by Muerta’s men in a previous story), he’s all set to take revenge on Muerta. It all gets confusing when Dan goes to Muerta’s house prepared to kill him – and when Ms. Tree and the police get there, they find Dan just waking up in the same room where Muerta and his nurse are both dead! Dan swears he did not do it, and Ms. Tree sets about proving his innocence. The story takes a few surprising twists, with the final one giving Ms. Tree the satisfaction she has been seeking – definitely a great read, and for astute readers (who have become accustomed to Collins’ playing with names), Muerta’s attorney, Dimitri A. Dopler, should give you a huge clue as to one of the biggest secrets in this story!

Following this big payoff, Collins gives readers a few shorter stories – the first being “Right to Die,” which addresses the issue of abortion and readers find out that Ms. Tree had an abortion when she was younger, an act she regrets now that Mike Tree is dead, and the only child she could have had with him is gone. The story addresses the issue without straying into preaching which side of the issue is “right” – instead, the story focuses on how various people deal with abortion and the doctors who perform the procedures. It has a sad ending, and let’s just say there are no real winners in this one – especially for Ms. Tree, as her actions in this story have serious repercussions…

Leading into the next two-parter, “Prisoner Cell Block Hell,” in which Ms. Tree does time in a women’s prison (with all the standard stereotypes you’d expect to see), and Ms. Tree has to face someone coming after her – after all, as the saying goes, the past always has a way of catching back up to you. After unveiling some very corrupt prison guards, Ms. Tree then gets transferred to a psychiatric facility in the two-part “Heroine Withdrawal.” For those who remember the very first Ms. Tree story in her own comic (after her origin in Eclipse Magazine), Ms. Tree has a reason to be wary of psychiatrists – and for good reason!. Only this time around, she manages to reveal the unscrupulous actions of a nurse and orderly, as well as a high-powered politician! And she makes a new friend who may or may not have been taken by aliens (let’s just say Collins leaves it up to the reader to decide at the end of the story…)

This collection concludes with the three-issue tale, “The Other Cheek,” which introduces us to a newly reformed Ms. Tree who has completed her psychiatric care and has decided to walk away from all of the violence, not even carrying a gun any more. This, of course, forces all of those who work with her – including Effie! – to step up their game, because when it comes to Ms. Tree, danger is never far away. It’s not until her stepson, Mike (named after his father), is kidnapped that Ms. Tree realizes she has no choice, and she throws off the new persona and steps back into the shoes she was made to fill – that of a female vigilante who fights for justice, and always wins! One thing I thought was a great choice for Beatty in this story (and I don’t know if it was his idea, or if Collins told him to do it), but I loved the fact that “reformed” Ms. Tree dressed so much differently – even wearing flower-print dresses! But when she goes back to her old self to rescue Mike, she once again dons that blue overcoat that give her such distinctive style! It makes for a nice visual aid to her change in character back and forth.

With only one more collection go to complete the reproduction of the entire run of Ms. Tree, I hope the sales on these collections have been such that Collins and Beatty will consider telling some more stories. With all of the controversies in the news today, they would literally have a plethora of topics to pick from to create some great tales! And who knows? Maybe they could even age the characters, so that Mike (her stepson) could be old enough to work along side her – what a story that would be! Any way you say it, we definitely need MORE MS. TREE!!!!!!

Rating: 10 old-fashioned dynamite bombs out of 10 for some truly dynamite story-telling, masterful twists and surprises, and some of the best artwork you will ever see in a comic! What more could you want?

When I read a review like this, two things come to mind: how wonderful! And, “Where were people like you when we were doing this title in the ‘80s and ‘90s”?

Terry Beatty and I began Ms. Tree as what we thought of as an exercise in coherence. Comic-book art was getting very complex and even impenetrable, and I wanted to return to the EC-style Johnny Craig school (derived from classic comic strips, chiefly by Milton Caniff) and Terry was wholeheartedly on board.

We’d been invited by Dean Mullaney to be part of his Eclipse magazine, which had a lot of top comics creators contributing new potential series. Also included in the mix were Terry and me. While Terry and I had done several projects together, we were only in this heady company because Dean was a Dick Tracy fan and I’d attracted some nice attention in the field when I took over the writing of that strip from creator Chester Gould in December 1977.

My basic concept was “Velda and Mike Hammer finally get married, and Hammer gets murdered on their wedding night and Velda takes over the PI agency…and seeks revenge.” I believe I pitched it off the top of my head when the surprise phone-call invitation came from Dean.

Another surprising thing happened after that: we were the dark-horse hit of the magazine and got spun off into our own comic book. Thanks to Dean, and later Dave Sim, Deni Loubert and Mike Gold, we continued through four publishers, ultimately DC. We had several movie options, and I did a little indie film, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market, based on a Ms. Tree prose story of mine, although we were in the midst of a movie option at the time and I had to change Ms. Tree’s name. But the character Brinke Stevens played was as close, to date, of Ms. Tree coming to life on screen. Brinke did a great job on our $10,000 (!) movie, which got national distribution (okay, Troma, but that counts).

The glowing review I share here does not reflect the critical response to Ms. Tree back in the day. A lot of folks, including some who liked our comic book series, thought we were crazy doing a crime/mystery comic book in a super-hero world. We probably were, but between me writing Dick Tracy (at the time) and my mystery novels, it made sense to us.

We did get our share of nice notices – we wouldn’t have survived so long if we hadn’t – but we were singled out for withering criticism from some, particularly the Fantagraphics crowd. That got nasty and rather acid on both sides, because Terry and I were both stupid enough to take Gary Groth and company on. It was a no-win situation, and a study of what a suicide note it is to respond to criticism. (Doing so is something I try desperately to avoid, but I still occasionally, misguidedly do. I should not. I hope at this age and stage I have finally learned that lesson.)


Terry Beatty and Max Allan Collins at San Diego Comic Con 1982 (with Cat Yronwode; photo by Alan Light)

Terry and I were a team for a long time. We did Wild Dog as a mini-series followed by a serialized run in Action Comics and one fat little one-shot. We put together a Johnny Dynamite mini-series (collected as a graphic novel) for Dark Horse. And finally I brought Terry into the Road to Perdition fold with the DC graphic novel, Return to Perdition.

During our team-up time, Terry and I had many failed projects, most of them having to do with pitching comic strips to my then-bosses at the Chicago Tribune Syndicate. Our “Comics Page” that we self-syndicated to weekly shoppers was a good idea whose time never came (it ran a struggling year or so).

We also pitched a retro version of Batman to DC that was rejected but (somewhat ironically) was close to what would soon be done on Batman: The Animated Series. I say somewhat ironically because Terry went on be one of the Eisner Award-winning artists on the comic book series inspired by that show. I also worked on Batman, too, mostly a disastrous year-long experience on the monthly comic, although my work on the syndicated comic strip (I was forced off by the Chicago Tribune Syndicate after the first story) and the graphic novel Batman: Child of Dreams (from Kia Asimiya’s manga) were better received by readers and, well, me.

Still, that Terry and I were both on Batman but never together is another unfortunate irony. We did get do Wild Dog for DC, which generated a character featured on the Arrow TV show (which I never bothered to watch) (and had to complain to get paid).

Another irony is that Terry and I both wound up doing something apart that we’d long tried to do together. When Dick Tracy artist Rick Fletcher passed away, I tried to get the Tribune syndicate to use Terry as my artist. They turned him down, despite samples that pleased me very much. And we suggested, and submitted samples (initially well-received), for a reboot of the Little Orphan Annie comic strip, taking advantage of the Broadway show’s success. We were ultimately turned down, but the great Leonard Starr was enlisted to do the re-boot we’d suggested.

So when “TL” above suggests Terry and I should do more Ms. Tree, the irony (there’s that word again) is that Terry is now too busy as he’s a successful writer/artist in the syndicated comic strip field. After a run on The Phantom Sunday page, Terry moved over to handling the Rex Morgan, MD, comic strip, where he has done and is doing a fine job.

Prior to that we’d kicked around reviving Ms. Tree. It was what held up the Titan archival reprint series of the original comics – we wanted to launch that reprint series with a new graphic novel. But that never came together, although I did some preliminary work.

The silver lining here is that Titan – thank you Nick Landau and Vivian Cheung – has collected the more-or-less complete Ms. Tree in six beautifully produced volumes, in all their color and two-color glory (a long run of Ms. Tree employed one color in various shades, to create a noir feel…and save money). I say “more or less” because a few odds-and-ends haven’t been gathered in these books, and those leftovers weren’t sufficient for another volume to be produced.

I haven’t talked about it here, at least not very much, but getting the complete run gathered in archival volumes, with Terry very much supervising, has been a goal I’ve long hoped Ms. Tree could reach. Terry and I put a great deal of hard work and love for the genre into Ms. Tree, for over a decade, and now it exists in more enduring format.

I will add that someone recently wrote in to my pal Robert Meyer Burnett on his fine YouTube show, Robservations, that someone should do a graphic-novel version of our Nathan Heller audio series, True Noir (based on Heller’s debut, True Detective. The talent suggested for the job (not by Rob!) were current crime-comics favorites, like Ed Brubaker. Nothing against Ed, but I think I could put any interested publisher in touch the (wait for it) writer of a fairly well-regarded graphic novel, Road to Perdition.

M.A.C.

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Movies Vs. Books and Collaboration

Tuesday, January 7th, 2025

I know I said I wouldn’t be talking about Blue Christmas again till next holiday season, but apparently I lied. My defense is that I hadn’t seen the nice review we got from one of my favorite magazines, Videoscope, written by editor Nancy Naglin herself. It’s on the stands now.

Videoscope Winter 2025 cover

Videoscope Winter 2025 Blue Christmas Review

Nancy really seems to “get” our little movie, and it’s another of the overwhelmingly favorable reviews Blue Christmas has received, despite a handful of lumps of coal in our stocking. I should (or anyway will) mention that her observation of there being a sentimental aspect to the film is valid and whether that’s a bad or good thing reflects the way mileage can vary (as they say) among audience members. I like to think of it as “sentiment,” though, and not “sentimentality.”

I have a vivid memory of my late filmmaking friend Steve Henke commenting to the effect of, “Max does something wonderfully nasty overall and then ends with something sentimental and there’s nothing that can be done about it.”

Steve was a grizzled, gruff but fantastic collaborator who I once had to bail out of jail while a production was going. At risk of insulting his memory by getting sentimental, I will say his absence from the planet is one of the things that kept me from getting back into indie filmmaking for close to twenty years. Another collaborator I miss to a painful degree is actor Mike Cornelison, who starred in Mommy, Mommy’s Day, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market, and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life, and who narrated both Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop and Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane.

The recent (and not officially released as yet) Death By Fruitcake is the only movie I’ve made recently that did not include any veterans from those earlier indie days. With the exception of my close pal and collaborator Phil Dingeldein, who was d.p. on Blue Christmas, the same was true of that production. (A notable exception on Fruitcake is the great Paula Sands, who appeared as herself in Mommy’s Day and as Vivian Borne in Fruitcake.)

There’s a moment in Mommy when Mrs. Sterling, who’s been committing murders, is about to book it out of town with her daughter Jessica Ann when the little girl complains about having to leave all her friends behind. To which Mommy replies, “You’ll make wonderful new friends, dear.”

And that’s true of both Blue Christmas and Death By Fruitcake (and Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder), which added a wonderful new raft of collaborators to my life, with a special nod to the versatile d.p./editor/producer Chad Bishop.

Collaboration has been an important part of my professional writing career, although at the heart of that career was my desire to control my work, to be in charge. I feared – with justification – that my personality and approach made taking the tempting path to Hollywood unwise. I made the decision to stay put – in Iowa – and just write my stories.

Not that writing fiction for a living doesn’t come with interference, but it’s minimal compared to what happens in the world of movies and TV. Wrestling with an editor or copy editor now and then is nothing compared to the problems Hollywood presents – the way money controls your ability to tell a story, and the crap you have to put up with from those who provide that money; the way directors can rewrite and screw up a script; the many uncontrollable factors including miscasting and all the other slings and arrows of the craft; and most of all the difficulty of getting anything produced.

I watched one of the greatest mystery writers who ever lived, Donald E. Westlake, who won an Academy Award for the screenplay of The Grifters, write seemingly countless scripts that generated option money but ultimately went into a drawer.

Throughout even a moderately successful career like mine you are fairly sure that any novel you write, unless you really miss the mark, can find a publisher.

And yet.

Collaboration is something I instinctively seek out. For years I wrote strictly alone, but at the same time I was playing music in my rock ‘n’ roll bands The Daybreakers and Crusin’, which were overflowing with talented collaborators, a list too long to get into. We got into the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame with both bands, and had a national record that, however absurd, became something of a cult classic. Those years of musical collaboration – 1966 through 2024 – were concurrent with my fiction-writing career.

The loneliness of telling lies for fun and profit, as Lawrence Block put it, was further minimized by my collaborations on the Dick Tracy comic strip with Rick Fletcher and Dick Locher. Those collaborations had some ups and downs, but my long partnership with cartoonist Terry Beatty, co-creator of Ms. Tree and Wild Dog, among much else, proved particularly rewarding.

The same can be said of Matthew V. Clemens, with whom I wrote something like thirty novels, including (but not limited to) the bestseller Supreme Justice and its two sequels, plus our very successful series of CSI tie-in novels.

During the Covid lockdown I got the opportunity to collaborate with an SCTV favorite of mine, Dave Thomas, on a novel you may not have read (but should): The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton. This one seems little known but I’m really, really proud of it. It’s a crime thriller with a science-fiction slant.

Most recently I have collaborated with Robert Meyer Burnett on True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, the ten-episode fully immersive audio production based on the first Nate Heller novel, True Detective. Rob directed an incredible cast incredibly well and this is also something I’m proud of. We haven’t got a Nathan Heller movie yet – Road to Perdition came close – but what Rob has created from my script is as good an example of effective collaboration as I can think of.

If any collaboration stands out, however, it has to be the one with my wife Barbara Collins – numerous short stories, a novella, two novels, and the Antiques series (aka The Trash ‘n’ Treasures mysteries), which are heading into their twentieth installment…there are more novels in that series than either Nate Heller or Quarry. To witness my smart, beautiful wife develop into a terrific writer is something I have experienced with great pride, often sitting on the sidelines, impressed. (And later this year I hope you’ll see just how well our Brandy and Vivian Borne have been transferred to the screen.)

Filmmaking is a special sort of collaboration, however, and on the indie level you don’t have the Hollywood baggage. It’s always been like going to summer camp for me (and I loved going to summer camp). I am well-aware that my skills as a filmmaker fall far less of what I like to think of as my mastery of fiction-writing, or even my years of playing rock ‘n’ roll for fun and money.

Being a competent film director, much less a good or great one, is one of the hardest trades that narrative storytelling can offer. I had no ambitions to be a film director – none. Never occurred to me. I wanted to write movies and have wonderful directors bring them to life. It’s happened now and then – Sam Mendes ain’t no slouch.

But mostly it doesn’t. Mostly scripts get written and wind up in a drawer, even if you’re Don Westlake…or Mickey Spillane, who had his heart broken by Hollywood and who died with several unproduced scripts among his papers (The Menace is a novel I fashioned from one of ‘em).

I became a director by necessity, when I had to take over Mommy after two weeks of a four-week shoot, which including reshooting much of what went before. When I completed the movie, worried that I hadn’t known what the hell I was doing, I binged on Alfred Hitchcock movies. Hitchcock is probably the greatest narrative storyteller in motion picture history. I kept watching those movies and being relieved when I saw Hitch doing things similar to what I had done (not talking about content here, but putting pieces of film together into an effective narrative – editing well, like in a novel but completely different).

I am well aware that I started too late to reach in film the level that my fiction-writing has, I think, achieved – writing fiction is a craft I started working at learning when I was in junior high and high school, sending novels to publishers who (thank God) kicked them back to me.

But I love movies as much as I love novels, in some ways more, and they ultimately yanked me in, like Michael Corleone in Godfather 3 (nobody seems to like that movie but everybody remembers that line, possibly second only to “An offer you can’t refuse” in the original film).

Filmmaking has an irresistible pull for me and many other sorry souls. Stephen King said it best, although I’m paraphrasing: “Movies are the most expensive, least efficient way of telling a story; but, unfortunately, also the coolest.”

Am I done with indie filmmaking? I’m still thinking, talking, hoping (Barb has had her fill). Several things are cooking, but the bigger ones probably need a director younger than me. If they stick to the script, I’ll be fine with that.

Which is the problem. My first produced script, The Expert, had a star who seemed to have read the script once and then tried to remember it, and a director who either walked off or was fired (I’ve never found out which) from the production late in the game. The Last Lullaby had a “co-writer” foisted on me who I never met and who rewrote my screenplay, though I did provide revisions that brought it back closer to what I had in mind. Still. I did one script for the Quarry series that got disassembled and spread between two episodes, stitched together like the Frankenstein Monster and about as attractive.

That kind of collaboration? I can do without.

And it’s why I made two micro-budget movies on my own terms.

* * *

Here’s a smart review of the sixth (and final) Titan collection of Ms. Tree.

This is a nice if brief YouTube piece on the writing of Road to Perdition, both graphic novel and film. It answers the question of who wrote which, but is unaware that a playwright friend of director Sam Mendes from the UK did an uncredited rewrite.

Here’s another piece on the film of Road to Perdition focusing on Tom Hanks (and somewhat on Daniel Craig).

The day this appears I will be working with Phil Dingedein at dphilms in Rock Island shooting the final episodes of History Behind the Mystery, each of which drops on YouTube in tandem with the episodes of True Noir.

M.A.C.

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Death by Fruitcake Begins Production, Thanks to Barb

Tuesday, August 20th, 2024
Death by Fruitcake, auditorium set with cast and crew at work.
Day one on the set of Death by Fruitcake.

When this update appears, we’ll be in our second day of shooting Death by Fruitcake. The week since I last posted found us heavily in post-production mode. It’s been intense but gratifying to see things coming together.

The real pleasure has been working so closely with my wife on this project. She had been intimately involved in my productions – really our productions – in the ten-plus years we did quite a little bit of indie filmmaking. Mommy and Mommy’s Day saw her filling a production manager role, and those productions would not have been possible without her. The same is true of Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market (2001) and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life (2005), as well as my two documentaries, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane (1998) and Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop (2005).

She has an unfailing eye for detail and a gift for dealing with all sorts of people. And her storytelling abilities are obvious to anyone who’s read her short stories or the novels we’ve done together, in particular the Antiques (Trash ‘n’ Treasures) mystery series.

But there were travails involved with all of those productions, proud as I am (and I think she is too) of all of them. Mommy was a baptism by fire. Difficulties with the director led to letting him go after the first two weeks of a four-week shoot (I was producer and writer), meaning I had to fill the director’s role without any experience or prep, just years of being a movie buff. When I lost the Dick Tracy scripting gig after fifteen years, indie filmmaking was another way to make some money…I thought.

And we had some success, particularly with the two Mommy movies, but my co-producer – my best friend since high school – stole a good deal of the money (he was convicted of a felony for doing so). Nonetheless, we did get a sale to Lifetime where Mommy aired in primetime, and both it and the sequel were chainwide Blockbuster buys (a big deal in those days). I was deeply involved in filmmaking during those years, which included the Road to Perdition (2002) sale and the Quarry movie, The Last Lullaby (2008), which I co-scripted. Several short films happened during that period as well.

But the betrayal by my former best friend and the many difficulties of indie filmmaking – getting the money to make even modest productions was (and is) a nightmare – had me walking away from that pursuit, though there have been some screenplays produced (by others) and, thankfully, occasional options on my books for TV and movies (and on screenplays). CBS Films has Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher (2020, by Brad Schwartz and me) under option right now, and I think Nolan is still under option, too. Might have run out while I wasn’t looking, though.

Anyway, indie filmmaking was a past pursuit. The closest I came to it was writing two Mike Hammer audio books for Stacy Keach and a full cast, one of which won an Audie for Best Original Work (The Little Death) and the other (Encore for Murder) was similarly nominated, and produced as a play starring Gary Sandy in venues at Owensboro, Kentucky, and Clearwater, Florida. Then I was asked to allow Encore to be produced, radio-play-style, here in Muscatine, Iowa, as a fund raiser for the local Art Center.

I consented, as some of you know, and brought in my Mommy’s Day co-star Gary Sandy (WKRP in Cincinnati, of course) to play Mike Hammer. When I attended the first rehearsal (Gary would be coming in a few days in advance of the actual production), I was pleasantly surprised to find the local cast very good.

Barb had endorsed my involvement (I was co-director as well as writer) but wanted no participation. She was retired from movies and anything vaguely related. The theft of the Mommy money had threatened our house and she remained understandably bitter. But I encouraged her to come to the next rehearsal to see if I was kidding myself thinking these local thespians were pretty darn good. She came and agreed.

Then when Gary Sandy came in and did a terrific job as Hammer in rehearsal, I contacted my longtime collaborator, Phil Dingeldein (director of photographer on all of my features), and convinced him to come to Muscatine to shoot the one live performance. He did this (and shot a dress rehearsal, too, to give us extra coverage). The idea was to use it as a bonus feature on our revised updated version of Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane, which we did (it’s available from VCI at Amazon right now).

Barb stayed pretty much aloof from that production, for which Chad Bishop (who was a cast member) worked with Phil on the Encore shoot and edited it into a movie or a program or some damn thing. It came out pretty well, I think, and is available on DVD separately from VCI as well as on the Spillane documentary.

Anyway, that experience got the indie filmmaking juices flowing again and Chad and I (with Phil onboard as d.p.) decided to do Blue Christmas, which I’ve been discussing here quite a bit. Barb gave her blessing but refused to be a part of it. She’d had enough of the hard work and misery that accompanies any kind of filmmaking.

But a few days out from the production (this was last October), I had some very stressful situations relating to the production that sent me back into a-fib. And Barb got on board. She again made the production run smoothly. Ask anyone who the MVP on Blue Christmas was and they’ll say Barb.

Now we’re doing one more – Death by Fruitcake. I tricked her into being part of it by basing this one on our Antiques series, specifically a novella, Antiques Fruitcake in Antiques Ho Ho Homicides. She is caught up in it, with me, and doing a stellar job. It’s unimaginable without her.

Ask anybody in the cast or on the crew.

Again, she has made it clear this is her last production. I believe her. I always do. So this is probably my last indie movie, too – unless somebody gives me enough money to hire a production manager as good as Barbara Collins. Which is itself a long shot for more than one reason….


Barbara Allan

Blue Christmas, by the way, is already available for pre-order at Amazon (it’s a November 11, 2024 release).

And you can read about Blue Christmas at Blu-ray.com, right here.

* * *

Just in case I haven’t given you enough reasons to spend money on me this time around, keep in mind the clock is ticking on the Kickstarter effort to back True Noir: the Assassination of Anton Cermak, based on my novel True Detective in a fully immersive audio drama in ten parts and written by (again) me. It has an amazing cast, and a great director (Robert Meyer Burnett).

Scroll down a ways in this Digital Bits column and get the skinny on True Noir.

True Noir logo

M.A.C.

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Blue Christmas Is a Wrap!

Tuesday, October 31st, 2023

Jake Marley (Chris Causey) and Richard Stone (Rob Merritt) in the private eye’s office.

We completed production on Blue Christmas last evening, and will be picking up various things and stuff at Muscatine Community College (our gracious host) this afternoon. Before I discuss the shoot, let me provide some background, requesting patience from those of you who have heard this story before (perhaps more than once).

The day before Thanksgiving 1992, I was notified by mail in a letter from a particularly odious editor at Tribune Media Services that my services as writer of the Dick Tracy strip were no longer required. I had done the writing of the strip, taking over for creator Chester Gould, since late 1977 – a fifteen-year run plus a few months.

Actually, they had already picked up my contract by not notifying me into I was three months into the new contract period, which was an automatic pick-up. But when I called the gracious Robert Reed, the recently retired head of the TMS, he talked me out of suing the Trib. He had hired me, and he deplored the decision of the editor (who had not hired me), but reminded me how many lawyers the Trib had, and how costly it would be for me to fight a battle even in the right. Then he said something I will always appreciate him for.

“You don’t need to worry about your next job,” he said. “You’re Max Allan Collins.”

I had needed reminding on that point. My friend and future DC Comics editor, Mike Gold, had already told me, “You really should have moved on after ten years. It stopped serving your career at that point.”

Nonetheless, it was a blow. And the same day, my agent informed me that – just a few weeks after winning the Best Novel Shamus award for Stolen Away – my Nate Heller contract had been dropped by Bantam Books, who had screwed up the series by publishing the hardcover and trade edition simultaneously, and making my hardcover sales on that title look like shit in the computers.

So I had lost everything, career-wise – both Tracy and Heller. I scrambled and did a few short stories for my pals Ed Gorman and Marty Greenberg, God bless their memories, but mostly I was at a loss. Untethered. And as close to a writing block as I had ever got. Thanks to Ed and Marty I kept going. But other than those assignments (writing for their theme anthologies), I had hit the wall.

Then on Christmas Eve 1992, after the festivities were over (my family has always celebrated Christmas Eve, rather than Christmas Day), I had an idea and began to write. A Christmas Carol was one of my favorite stories, the Alistair Sim film of it in particular, and my favorite single detective novel was The Maltese Falcon. I had the stray thought that the two stories might be effectively combined, and began to type. I have no idea how long I worked – most of the night, as it was a single session – but the result was a fifty-page novella, “A Wreath for Marley.”

I am not by inclination a short story writer, but as soon as I’d finished it, I knew “Marley” was special. Maybe not to anybody else, but to me. And over the years it’s been in several anthologies and ultimately the lead story in a holiday-themed collection of my shorter stories, Blue Christmas (available from Wolfpack in the collection’s most current incarnation).

The writing of “Marley” ended my creative logjam. Soon I had sold Carnal Hours, one of the best Heller novels, to Dutton in a multiple-book contract; and – on the fly, at WonderCon – sold the idea of Road to Perdition to a DC editor who wondered if I might be interested in writing a noir graphic novel. Mike Gold and Robert Reed had been right – losing Dick Tracy was like Dean Martin breaking up with Jerry Lewis – teaming with Jerry was the best thing that ever happened to Dino (Martin said) and the next best thing had been breaking up with Jerry.

Another result of losing the Tracy strip was finally pursuing my interest in filmmaking. In 1994 I wrote The Expert in Hollywood for director William Lustig, and wrote and directed Mommy here in Iowa. The latter feature – in which Patty McCormack portrayed a grown-up variation on her famous evil kid role in The Bad Seed – became a video store hit and sold to Lifetime as a movie of the week. Its success led to my scripting a feature film version of “A Wreath for Marley,” which I called Blue Christmas. We were in pre-production of that project when the success of Mommy made it necessary to follow up with a sequel, Mommy’s Day, causing us to temporarily shelve Blue Christmas. The thought was to do it next.

That did not happen. While Mommy’s Day was also a video store hit, we did not get a cable TV sale, and then my producer – only my best friend from high school days and the best man at Barb and my wedding – stole our money. I was never able to mount a full-throated production again. Our budgets of half a million and a quarter million for Mommy 1 and 2 respectively were never to be repeated.

I managed to stay active in indie filmmaking for another decade. I served three terms as president of the Iowa Motion Picture Association. I was able to get funded for two documentaries (Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop) and did three short films with my Mommy director of photography, Phil Dingeldein. Phil and I mounted Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market for around $10,000 (shooting mostly on security cameras) and had a similar budget (thanks to a Humanities Iowa grant) with Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life. I wrote numerous screenplays and sold a few, including some that were never produced, with a short Quarry film, “A Matter of Principal” leading to the feature The Last Lullaby, which I co-wrote.

Then, of course, there was Road to Perdition with its big-name cast and Academy Award nominations and so on, which led to Phil and me trying to get the sequel, Road to Purgatory, off the ground. Much time was spent on that and we came heart-breakingly close several times. While various screenwriting projects continued (and still do), gradually I came to accept that my film directing days were over.

I did not consider this a tragedy as my fiction writing was trucking along. A Quarry TV series was produced by HBO for their Cinemax network and I was able to do a couple of scripts for it (one for the never-produced second season). Filmmaking was a part of my credentials and that was nice but nothing I was actively pursuing any longer.

Then last year I co-produced the “Mike Hammer” Golden Age Radio-style play, Encore for Murder, originally an audio full-cast production with Stacy Keach. I had done the play twice before (in Owensboro, Kentucky, and Clearwater, Florida) with Gary Sandy as Hammer. Gary and I were friends going back to his co-starring role in Mommy’s Day. This latest Encore production was a fundraiser for the local art center/museum, and Gary generously donated his time.

The play came together so well that literally a few days before its single performance, I called Phil Dingeldein and asked, “Do you want to make a movie this weekend?”

As some of you already know, Phil came down and he and Chad Bishop (who was the on-stage foley guy in the play) pooled their resources to shoot two dress rehearsals and our one performance. Then Chad and I spent a month or so editing the footage into a movie of sorts – or maybe it’s a television program, hard to say exactly what animal it is.

At any rate, the result, like the performance itself, was surprisingly good. Phil and I were already mounting an expanded version of the Spillane documentary as a 75th anniversary (of Mike Hammer) release for VCI. We showed Encore for Murder to Bob Blair, the president of VCI, pitching it as a Blu-ray bonus feature for the expanded documentary. Bob not only snatched it right up for that purpose, he planned a release on DVD of Encore itself. Both will be out well before year’s end.

So my filmmaking juices were flowing again. I proposed to Chad Bishop that we mount a follow-up Golden Age radio-style production of Blue Christmas. This morphed into a stage play that I planned to shoot much as we had Encore, only with more elaborate pre-production.

Finally I decided just to shoot it as a movie.

The script needed to be reworked from one that had half a dozen locations to one location in which all the the Scrooge-like visions take place in the private eye hero’s office – a single realistic set that would serve surrealistic purposes.

Phil came on board, taking a week’s vacation to shoot it (with his sometime accomplice, the talented and skilled Liz Toal), meaning we had to mount the principal photography in a single week. I approached Muscatine Community College about using their black box theater as, essentially, a film sound stage for the week-long shoot, and they got on board.

We had been led to believe we had a good shot at a Greenlight Iowa grant for $50,000, which would have been tight but sufficient. We mounted an Indie Go Go campaign to raise supplemental funding and reached our $7000 goal. But the grant did not come to us – although frankly we were never contacted about that after jumping through many an official hoop (never even informed we weren’t getting it, which stalled us while we waited for news that never arrived).

So finally we built upon the Indie Go Go money, took our own payment completely out of the budget (Chad, Phil and me), and got one $5000 investor and a few more donations, coming up with a princely $14,000 to produce the equivalent of a $300,000 to $500,000 indie. This was a big part of planning to do the film in (choke) six days.

For a long time, Gary Sandy was going to play Marley, but other commitments and a reluctance to work during the actor’s strike (although our micro-budgeted production was not a target of the strike) caused Gary to drop out a few weeks before shooting began. That left us with a cast consisting of talent from the Quad Cities, Cedar Rapids and Muscatine, with almost everyone from Encore for Murder back again.

So how did the shoot go?

The professionalism of Phil and Liz was a breathtaking thing to watch. Chad Bishop wore more hats than Barthlomew Cubbins – lighting, audio, producer, actor. I had caught Covid about a month out and got cleared to work weeks before the production would begin; so I was tired and exhausted going in…but that didn’t stop me. I would say I got my stride back by the second or at the latest third day.


Barb and Max on set at Blue Christmas.

Our set was a thing of beauty thanks to Bill Turner, a veteran of local theater; and Bill took on a role in the production as well, doing a fine job. Our lead was the remarkable Rob Merritt from Cedar Rapids, who has many movie roles under his belt and held up under the burden of being in virtually every scene. Among his co-stars was national celebrity Alisabeth Von Presley, who looks like something out of a Russ Meyer dream and performed like a dream, period. The entire cast did stellar work, including Encore veterans Chris Causey, Rene Mauck, Cassidy Probasco, Brian Linderman, Keith Porter, Judy Wilson, and Evan Maynard. Tommy Ratkiewicz-Stierwalt, Chase Bishop, Kim Furness, Dave Juehring, Tracy Pelzer-Timm and Scot Gehre, among others, were also in a very talented cast of twenty-four. Corey Ruby did the special effects, and my old Seduction of the Innocent pal Chris Christensen has signed on to do the score.


Director of Photography Phil Dingeldein gets a role…

…and lead actor Rob Merritt films a scene.

We worked long days – seven a.m. till at least seven p.m. On all but one day, I went home on the lunch hour and took a nap. The production was both brutal and rewarding, and it’s doubtful I’ll ever be foolish enough to put myself through something like this again…although I’m glad to have done this one last time.


Special effects man Corey Ruby takes pride in applying bullet holes to lovely Alisabeth Von Presley.

Barb had sworn not to be part of this crazy effort, but she was right there with me on the first day and thereafter. She ran craft services and did so very much more. Nathan Collins and Matt Clemens were there every day running security (MCC was in session). Nate did everything from man a boom pole to shoot footage on a high-end camera.

Of course, we’re not finished. Chad and I (and Chad’s cohort Jeremy Ferguson) will be shooting Second Unit material, chiefly establishing shots (once the snow starts to fall here). And right away we will begin editing, a process I enjoy a great deal.

I will report here as we move forward, but I can say that at long last, the promise of Blue Christmas is being fulfilled. If we’re not the best goddamn fourteen-thousand dollar movie ever made, I defy you to show me one that is.

* * *

Despite some stellar reviews on Amazon, Too Many Bullets remains mostly ignored by critics elsewhere. As I mentioned previously, none of the trades – Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal or Booklist – had reviewed it.

I am going to get the book into some reviewers’ hands, but in the meantime, if you’ve read and enjoyed the novel, please review it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads and elsewhere, and if you have your own blog, talk it up there.

There have been a few notices, like this one.

And this.

M.A.C.

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