Posts Tagged ‘Return of the Maltese Falcon’

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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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Return of the Maltese Falcon, Nate Heller & Nolan Get Some YouTube Love

Tuesday, August 4th, 2026

This week is a YouTube fest, and we begin with a fan of The Maltese Falcon taking a smart look at Return of the Maltese Falcon.

There’s something on You Tube called Private Eye July, and Mystery and Mayhem host Jim (don’t know his last name) took a look at both True Detective (and the Nathan Heller series) and Return of the Maltese Falcon.

First, on what appears to be a regular show, Jim offers Mystery and Mayhem recommendations.

Second, he offers a wrap-up of this year’s Private Eye July, including a look at Return of the Maltese Falcon.

Finally the Book Graveyard has a review of my first published book, Bait Money.

Though the Graveyard host is knowledgeable, and apparently a big fan of my work, he is unaware that the 1981 edition from Pinnacle of Bait Money is a somewhat revised reprint of the Curtis Books original that had appeared in 1973. A Nolan book preceded it, Mourn the Living, but it didn’t see publication till much later (this early work is included with Spree in the Hard Case Crime title, Mad Money).

The Book Graveyard host is obviously an enthusiast of paperback originals in the men’s adventure and Executioner-type crime vein, and I admit to being delighted for my early ‘70s self when he talks about my writing being on a whole other level than what he regularly reads.

M.A.C.

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Nate Heller, Mike Hammer and a Friend of Theirs Passes

Tuesday, July 7th, 2026

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

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

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

Michael Rosenbaum, True Noir

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

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

What are you waiting for?

* * *

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

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

I, The Jury (1982)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But my favorite? I told you last week.

* * *

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trowbridge is survived by her three children and her mother.

M.A.C.

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Sam Spade and Me

Tuesday, June 9th, 2026

This week, or at the latest next, I will likely complete Prey for the Maltese Falcon, my follow-up to Return of the Maltese Falcon. It takes place in 1939 and posits what Sam Spade might have been up to around ten years later.

It’s an honor, and frankly a relief, to have had Return so warmly received. My wife Barb warned me I was really sticking my neck out this time – who was I to be writing a sequel to what many (including me) consider the best the best tough mystery novel ever written – the book that can be viewed as the paradigm for the entire sub-genre of the private eye novel?

I tried to answer that by respecting Dashiell Hammett and his creation, and honoring him with something more than just a pastiche. Readers coming to the book will always have to judge that for themselves.

A perhaps more interesting question is: why had I been thinking about doing a sequel to The Maltese Falcon for something like twenty years? When the novel was decades away from going into the public domain, making any such effort even possible? Prior to the novel gaining public domain status, I thought it highly unlikely the Hammett estate would come to me for the job.

Sam Spade got on my little-kid radar by way of advertisements in comic-strip form that appeared in Sunday newspapers and occasionally comic books. My discovering those strips was in the mid-1950s and even then those ads/comics were old news – literally, old newspapers and comic books that had somehow gotten into my grubby little hands (and psyche).

It was common for advertisements in the Sunday funnies to disguise themselves as just another comic strip, or a page of comics in a comic. Sometimes such strips invented their own recurring characters, the better to fool readers into thinking they weren’t reading an ad at all (particularly kids). Sometimes advertisers went so far as to license existing comics characters to hawk their goods – famously, Al Capp’s Li’l Abner (for Cream of Wheat) and Fearless Fosdick (for Wildroot Cream-Oil) appeared in mini-comics in the pages of slick magazines like Look and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as comic books and Sunday comics sections.

Like Fosdick, Sam Spade appeared on behalf of Wild Root Cream-Oil (a hair tonic) in a strip called The Adventures of Sam Spade, tying in with a popular radio show of that name starring Howard Duff. The strip took up a lot of real estate in the funnies – a half- or even full-page – and each was a short mystery, solved usually in a way that (you’re ahead of me) had to do with Wild Root Cream-Oil.

They were lively strips, many of them beautifully drawn by Golden Age comics great, Lou Fine, a Will Eisner crony. Over a three-year period, at least 25 strips were published. This link will take you to some nice examples.

Because of these strips, I knew about the Sam Spade radio show, but missed out on those, because The Adventures of Sam Spade aired before my time, from 1946 to 1951 (on NBC). The series was enormously popular and made a star out of Howard Duff, who graduated to movies (and later TV) but never was as big a star as he’d been in radio. Another popular radio series, Suspense, did two episodes with Duff as Spade, one of which (“The Kandy Tooth Caper”) was a 60-minute sequel to The Maltese Falcon.


Howard Duff as Sam Spade

The series was a spoofy take on the genre not at all in keeping with Hammett’s original approach, but its success having almost as much to do with establishing Sam Spade as the iconic private eye character (maybe the ironic private eye character) as Bogart’s Spade had with the John Huston classic film.

The series might have lasted longer, and perhaps made the transition to TV, but the anti-Communist witch-hunt led to creator Dashiell Hammett, known for his association with left-wing causes, becoming a ripe target for Senator Joe McCarthy. Hammett, who had served his country in two wars, even did hard time when he refused to name names in the HUAC hearings. McCarthy’s odious assistant Roy Cohn even tried to have Hammett’s five novels banned from U.S. Information Service (USIS) overseas libraries. Cohn failed when Hammett fan, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, intervened.

In the witch hunt’s wake, the radio show was re-tooled as Charlie Wild, Private Detective (1951), with a new detective taking Spade’s place, although secretary Effie Perine stayed on board; the radio series didn’t last long, although it did make a shaky transition to TV (1950-1952). Effie came along (the setting now New York) played by young Iowa gal Cloris Leachman (later picked up by Mike Hammer at the start of the film Kiss Me Deadly).

I’m not sure when it was that I first saw the Bogart/Huston Maltese Falcon. I vaguely remember faking a stomach ache so I could stay home from church and see it on the Sunday Morning Movie. I loved it, of course. The likes of the Saint and Sherlock Holmes, two of my previous obsessions, couldn’t hold a candle to Bogie’s Sam.

Finally I caught up with the original Sam Spade in the Permabooks 35-cent edition of The Maltese Falcon with a great cover by Harry Bennett (a very ‘60s rendition of Brigid, Wilmer and Caspar Gutman). And at some point I discovered a Dell paperback of A Man Called Spade, with the three Hammett-published Spade short stories.

In my teens I was inhaling all the Hammett I could find, usually in ill-lit old secondhand bookstores; same with Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane – the Big Three, as far as I was concerned (and still am).

Periodically I discovered other Spade oddities, like the 1946 David McKay “Feature Book” adaptation of The Maltese Falcon in comic-book form, with funky art by Rodlow Willard; and one or two of the record albums of the several Falcon radio adaptations starring Bogart and other original cast members.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I have never watched an episode of the AMC series, Monsieur Spade, not wanting to be influenced; and I have not revisited Spade & Archer by the late Joe Gores. I frankly recall not being taken with it, and thinking I’d like to have a crack at the character myself someday (though I am otherwise a Gores fan).

It’s clear that Hammett did something very special in The Maltese Falcon, and a lot of it was Sam Spade, who despite appearing in one novel remains for many of us the quintessential private eye. The imprint of the author and his character on me was such that I could become intrigued with them both just by reading a comic strip advertising hair oil tonic.

* * *

Guess what movie is considered one of the best Irish mob movies ever?

M.A.C.

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