Posts Tagged ‘Road to Perdition’

55 Is Not the Limit! Barb and Me

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2023

Our wedding anniversary is coming up on June 1. It’s our 55th, a number that sounds more like a speed limit than a designation of how long two people have been together in a marital partnership. Barb and I have been a couple longer even than that – the fall of 1966 – and have known each other since childhood.

Barbara Collins

In the West Junior High band, here in Muscatine, Iowa, Barb was first chair trumpet and I was second chair. I was okay (not false modesty) but she was excellent. I tried several times to “challenge” her, the process by which you could unseat the person occupying the chair above yours. I failed miserably, and I would even say trying to play “Golden Gate” (the difficult piece she sadistically chose) was one of my more humiliating experiences, even in junior high terms, which is basically one humiliating experience after another. The band director actually interrupted my performance, saying, “I lost you somewhere, Mr. Collins.” Barb had already completed the impossible number flawlessly.

And yet I wound up marrying the girl who had visited upon me the most withering humiliation of my youth. This only goes to show how weak a male can be when a beautiful blonde is willing to go out with him. (I should also note that I quit band after junior high, concentrating on chorus.)

We were thrown together, in a way, because we were the only two of our extended crowds who had, after high school graduation, wound up at Muscatine Community College and not at the University of Iowa or some other institution of higher learning. Our first date in MCC days was to Wild Cat Den as part of a group that may have been a church one – I don’t recall. I only know I made clear to Barb how little I enjoyed the Great Out of Doors. Despite her lovely company, I had a terrible time, looking out for snakes and other small creatures bent on my destruction.

How we wound up on a second date, I will never know. We went to the nearby Quad Cities to a movie – possibly a drive-in – and I was trying to impress her with my brilliant gift of gab. She was quiet, occasionally nodding, and doing her best not to look glazed (she still does this when I am off on some verbal tear, which is frequent). She states that the moment she fell in love with me was when I put my hand in a water glass (during some brilliant monologue) and she had smiled and thought to herself, “He’s not so smart. I can put up with this.”

We were an item by Thanksgiving, disgusting our fellow students with our lovey-dovey behavior. It became obvious to me that, within this quiet lovely girl, was a smart, funny human being worth hanging out with forever. A crisis having to do with her mentally ill mother dragging Barb and two of her sisters across country (to Arizona) to get one of those sisters well from a supposed illness (undiagnosed) had only brought us closer together upon her inevitable return. Her mom’s general erratic behavior had a lot to do with why we decided to get married right after graduation from MCC – Barb was nineteen, I was twenty.

When I look back on these fifty-five years, I realize how very lucky I was and continue to be. While I tend to focus on my career, I don’t value anything more than my relationship with Barb. She has continued to amaze and amuse and delight me, and occasionally put me in my place. I had no idea – nor did she – that she would develop into such a wonderful writer. The Antiques series is a unique accomplishment and my co-authorship of Barb’s novels is among my proudest achievements. The son we produced, Nathan, is another.

Then there’s how beautiful she still is. I am obviously a shallow soul. I have been criticized for celebrating attractive women in my fiction – apparently I should have been celebrating harridans – but I admit that one of the great pleasures of my life is the many times each day when I glance at this lovely girl (yes, I know she’s a woman!) and think, “Wow. How can I be this lucky?”

On the other hand, it’s another reason for people to hate me. I get it. I would feel the same way. I’d be right there with you saying, “That lucky effing stiff.”

She may or may not read this. She reads my updates sporadically – after all, she is subjected to what I think every time we go out together. We’re easy to spot. She’s the beauty. I’m the beast with his fingers in the water glass.

* * *

The day this appears we will have seven days remaining on the Blue Christmas Indiegogo fund-raising effort. Just in case you were wondering what to get Barb and me for our wedding anniversary.

I will continue, this week, to honor requests from anyone who puts in $35 or more to do my best to fill in some blanks on their M.A.C. want list. Barb and I have sent out around fifteen packages so far, often containing one-of-a-kind items that I’ve parted with in gratitude for this support.

We do not know yet (soon, I hope) if we’ve nabbed a Greenlight grant, but even if we don’t, we intend to go forward with the best version of Blue Christmas we can. The Indiegogo $5000 (we are at 85% now!) will go toward matching funds, if we get the grant, or into the production itself, if we don’t.

Chad Bishop is the mastermind here, aided and abetted by Karen Cooney. Karen is the go-getter who went and got me to do Encore for Murder as a fund-raiser for the local Art Center. If I hadn’t had the experience of turning that one live performance into a multi-camera movie (or “movie”), I would not have got my filmic juices flowing again. Right now Chad and my longtime collaborator Phil Dingeldein (and a talented young woman named Liz Toal) are working hard to get other projects going, including Reincarnal and even Road to Purgatory.

I did not imagine at this age (75, choke) post-open-heart surgery that I would be back at filmmaking again. Few in that field have trod a weirder road than mine. Mommy and Mommy’s Day had respectable low budgets (half a mil and a quarter of a mil respectively); but after that, my then best friend slash producer stole most of the profits, and my subsequent productions have been put together with spit and chewing gum – Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life are respectively $10,000 and $15,000 productions but managed to get national distribution and some decent critical reaction.

And yet my graphic novel Road to Perdition became a $90 million movie (at the same time Real Time was shooting on a budget that maybe covered one day of stocking Perdition’s craft services table) and I made respectable money on two films I wrote but did not direct, The Expert and The Last Lullaby. The Quarry TV series at Cinemax, for which I wrote two scripts, also paid some bills.

Along the way there have been two documentaries (Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop) I wrote and directed, and three short films, and one I didn’t direct – A Matter of Principal – but wrote; that one was an award-winner and led to the feature, The Last Lullaby. By the way, that’s a Quarry movie with a great Tom Sizemore performance and it’s available on Amazon Prime right now.

I am the rare writer of prose fiction who will admit that he likes movies as much as books. I feel lucky, even honored, to have been able to do as much as I have in that arena, even if my own little movies have never made me a dime. The joys of collaboration – my friendships with the likes of Phil and Chad and the late Steve Henke, my creative collaboration with the late Mike Cornelison – are more reward than anyone could dream of.

Should I have gone to Hollywood and pursued that dream, as opposed to joining the fiction-writing ranks of Hammett, Chandler, Cain and Spillane? No. I do not have the temperament for what Hollywood puts writers through. Because movies are my side hustle, screenwriting for Hollywood on occasion is something I can abide. I would also probably have been married three or four times by now, and I refer you to earlier in this post for the reasons why that would have been a tragedy.

Last night I watched Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder on the local public access channel. Because we have landed a deal with VCI that includes both home video release and streaming for both the new expanded Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and Encore for Murder, we have decided not to offer either to the Iowa or Quad Cities branches of PBS. But my collaborator Chad Bishop runs Channel 9, Muscatine’s public access channel, and his participation in the project includes the right to show Encore there.

I had worked on Encore on a computer screen – on several actually – and have seen it projected on a full-size movie screen at our recent premiere showing. But this was the first time I’d seen it on my TV at home. And that was a thrill, because that’s the venue we had in mind. I refer to it as a “movie,” but really it’s a TV program. I thought it held up pretty well. When you consider that we only decided to record the play a few days out from dress rehearsal and its one public performance, it’s another of the small miracles that seem to litter my life.

And there’s nothing wrong with small miracles. You can enjoy them. The big miracles are so overwhelming, you can’t really enjoy them.

But I’m willing to try.

* * *

I did an interview with Jason Dehart on his podcast Words, Images, & Worlds that is fairly wide-ranging and covers some things that have rarely come up, like the influence of Hong Kong movies on my work.

This is a really good interview with my frequent collaborator, Matthew Clemens.

Here’s a way to access my Batman comic strip continuity with Marshall Rogers.

Here’s a free-wheeling interview that I really enjoyed doing – you might, too.

Finally, he’s a largely positive review of Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life.

M.A.C.

Please, Sir, I Want Some More…Money

Tuesday, April 18th, 2023

We have about a month and a half to raise $5000 for our movie of Blue Christmas (we’re at $550 as I write this). It’s your opportunity to help us make a good little film, and to see your name on screen – being thanked, or even given a claim to fame as an Associate Producer or (if you’re flush and really want to pep up your resumé) Executive Producer.

Physical media-type perks have not been offered, but I’m going to give the nice folks who drop by here an opportunity that isn’t part of the Indiegogo page. If you contribute $25 to $500 range, write me at macphilms@hotmail.com and include a list of books by me that you are lacking in your M.A.C. collection…hard to find, out of print, and/or pricey stuff. I’ll do my best to send you something, signed (personalized if you like) from that list. If I can’t comply, we’ll discuss other options via e-mail. Don’t ask for first editions of True Detective, True Crime, Stolen Away (hardcover), or the original trade edition of Road to Perdition unless you are going in at the Associate Producer level (a few pages of original art from Ms. Tree, Wild Dog and Mike Danger would be available at that level). If you’re interested in being an Executive Producer, we’ll talk.

Associate Producers and of course any Executive Producer will be able to arrange a visit to the set.

Again, this offer is not being mentioned on the Indiegogo page. This is for readers of the F.O.M.A.C. blog.

As I’ve mentioned before, there is a Plan A and Plan B for Blue Christmas. Plan A will require our receiving a grant from Produce Iowa’s Greenlight competition. Chad Bishop has put together a presentation for us that is absolutely outstanding, but the competition is considerable. Reaching the goal in the Indiegogo campaign will help us come up with the necessary matching funds, should we prevail.

If we are not a recipient of funds from Iowa’s Greenlight competition, we will go forward with Plan B: a play version of Blue Christmas, which would be produced live and recorded much as we did Encore for Murder, only with full-on pre-production (Encore’s shooting as very much a last-minute decision, based upon what we felt was emerging as a strong production, thanks to a strong local cast and a wonderful guest performance from Gary Sandy).

For those of you in (or near) Eastern Iowa, we are presenting the premiere of the movie version of Encore for Murder on May 5 (having postponed it due to weather). The info accompanies the photo here.

M.A.C. at the MCC Black Box Theater
Courtesy Muscatine Journal
[Correction: The time is 7pm, not 7am. There will be no breakfast showing of Encore for Murder.]

Speaking of Encore, we have delivered it and the new expanded edition of my documentary Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane to VCI Home Entertainment. With Phil Dingeldein backing me up, I recorded a commentary for the documentary (which now runs 61 minutes) at TAG (the ad agency affiliated with dphilms).

I am not doing a commentary for Encore because it’s being presented (I think appropriately) as a bonus feature with the documentary. The new approximately fifteen minutes of footage that Phil and I shot as a wraparound for the doc brings it up to date, including Mickey’s passing and the efforts to bring his unpublished material to completion and publication. It also includes interview footage with Encore actors (Gary Sandy discusses playing Mike Hammer) which provides me an opportunity in the commentary to explain the circumstances of the production of the Golden Age Radio-style play as a fundraiser for our (Muscatine, Iowa’s) local art museum. Essentially, this sets up the bonus feature.

Please note that, in our Indiegogo effort to raise 5K for Blue Christmas, we are not going after a s**t-load of money. I have designed the screenplay to be shot on a bare bones budget, though I think without compromising the material.

Compare this to the kind of money that Riff Trax (God bless ‘em) raises just to lambast somebody else’s movie (half a million bucks on their current one, and we’re seeking a “mere” five thousand).

Imagine me pleading with giant kitty eyes and see if your heartstrings (and pocket book) aren’t touched.

Blue Christmas is, frankly, an experiment to see if I’m up to directing a film, starting out with this low-budget affair that is designed not to be a challenging shoot in terms of locations, stunts, length of shoot, etc. I had assumed, after my heart and cancer surgeries – and the continuing medications that have followed them – that my movie-making days were over…that my contribution to film would be relegated to providing source material by way of my prose and comics work, and by the occasional screenplay.

But the “instant movie” that was the stage production of Encore for Murder got my filmic juices flowing again. Blue Christmas is designed in part to see what I am capable of at this ripe old age. My health, for someone with so much wrong with me, appears to be pretty damn good.

So we shall see, as they say, what we shall see.

* * *

Remember how I whined a few weeks ago about my lack of support at the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Barnes & Noble? A return visit found one (count ‘em, one) copy of The Big Bundle available, no copies of Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction, but a nice display of some Nolan Hard Case Crime titles.

The Davenport Barnes & Noble, however, is giving me stellar support, as these photographs indicate. No need to whine here.

* * *

Here’s a nice review of Kisses of Death, the Nathan Heller short story collection from some time ago. These stories were rearranged with additional ones in two volumes from Thomas & Mercer, Chicago Lightning and Triple Play, short stories in the former, novellas in the latter.

The first six volumes of the collected Dick Tracy are coming out from Clover Press, making them physically compatible with the subsequent IDW printings. Each has an intro by me.

Here’s a nice little review of Kill Me If You Can, the current Mike Hammer novel.

Finally, this is a nice assessment of the film version of Road to Perdition.

M.A.C.

A Legendary Evening

Tuesday, April 4th, 2023

[Nate here with a quick plug before this week’s update: VJ Books, home to the world’s largest selection of signed books, is featuring M.A.C. for the month of April with a 50% off sale. Check it out below!]

VJ Books M.A.C. sale banner
* * *

Most of the honorees to date among Muscatine Community College’s Legends have been pillars of the community, including a former dean and major industrialists, and certainly no other writers of sex-and-violence thrillers. How is this to be explained?

Here are the words writer Robert Towne put into the mouth of John Huston as Noah Cross in Chinatown: “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”

That may explain it.

I attended Muscatine Community College from 1966 through 1968. My father taught choral music there in the 1950s. I took classes at MCC throughout my senior year of high school and racked up a good number of credits, and had the pleasure (and honor) of being taught and mentored by Keith Larsen, poet and gentleman farmer, who has a building named after him at MCC. So I had affection for the community college before I made the decision to turn down a bunch of writing and even football (I’d have been killed) scholarships, influenced by my desire to keep my band the Daybreakers together. I’d formed the combo my senior year of high school and wanted to stick with it for a while. No idea the Daybreakers would morph into Crusin’ and I’d still be at in 2023.

I taught Freshman English and classes in both literature and creative writing at MCC during the first five years of my so-called adult life. My last semester at the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City coincided with me teaching half-time at MCC, which over those five years would expand to full time and then (as my fiction writing career got off the ground) recede back into half-time.

But my roots with MCC are deep, and in that fashion at least my becoming “Legendary” there makes at least a little sense. I should mention that Barb not only attended MCC – where the two of us got together, after knowing each other since childhood – and got her four year-degree there from an extension program offered by Iowa Wesleyan College (now, unfortunately, facing a shut-down). She was also on the scholarship board for MCC and as far as I am concerned is every bit as legendary as yours truly.

The evening celebrating my new legendary status – last Thursday, March 30, at the Merrill Hotel – was pleasant and fun, and never embarrassing. Friends like Matt and Pam Clemens were there, as were bandmates Bill Anson (guitarist) and Steve Kundel (drummer). I’d gone anticipating seeing a lot of my parents’ friends, but few were in attendance, having (like my folks) long since passed away. So a lot of the faces were as unfamiliar as they were friendly.

Our number one fan – Stephen Borer, who is blushing even as he reads this – made an unannounced trip from St. Paul, Minnesota (!), to attend the event. He sat with us at the Collins family table, where son Nate, his bride Abby, and our two incredibly smart grandchildren – Sam, 7, and Lucy, 4 – were also seated. Those two kids sat through a long evening, surprisingly interested in the proceedings and even (mostly) paying attention to the documentary about their grandfather. (Sam noticeably gasped when some violent pages from Lone Wolf and Cub were displayed in the doc as having influenced Road to Perdition.) My wife’s wonderful aunt Helen, herself an MCC legend in tandem with her husband, the late Stan Howe (a great friend of my father’s), sat with son Jim with Barb splitting time between the two tables.


M.A.C. and Stephen Borer

We gave away 130 copies of various M.A.C. and Barbara Allan books, and I signed quite a few after the dinner, which was provided by more than half a dozen local restaurants. The main event was an excellent half-hour documentary about my life and work. Before you dismiss my positive reaction as having mostly to do with my approving of the subject matter, I have to say Naomi DeWinter (president of MCC) and the college’s media guru Chad Bishop did an incredible job pulling the disparate elements of my creative life together into a cohesive whole.

I hope to have a link, before long, to this documentary, as some of you may wish to give it a look.

We also, rather casually, let it be known that the aforementioned Chad Bishop – who was the on-stage foley artist, among much else, on Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder – has enlisted me to do a project at MCC…specifically a production of Blue Christmas, long a favorite unrealized project of mine.

You may have read a little about that here already, but I’ll recap. Blue Christmas is a proposed film version of my novella, “A Wreath for Marley,” which might be described as a mash-up of The Maltese Falcon and A Christmas Carol. I thought I’d hung up my indie filmmaking spurs (or maybe megaphone and jodphurs) after a long effort to get Road to Purgatory made followed by my descent into health problems, most dramatically open-heart surgery. But then the Encore for Murder experience – staging it as a play and then shooting it as a film (or video production or however it might best be described) – got my juices flowing again.

(NOTE: The screening of Encore for Murder at the MCC Black Box Theater has been moved to May 5. Inclement weather caused the postponement, although the success of the Hawkeye girls in the Final Four was also a factor.)

We are already in serious pre-production with Blue Christmas, and have applied for several grants – one particularly key – that require us to come up with matching funds. Some of that can be “in kind” (i.e., I don’t get paid) but some has to be actual, you know, money. So we have launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise those funds. See my video pitch below.

I’ll be talking about this more over the coming weeks and months. But if you can kick in a few bucks – maybe enough to make it into the credits with a producing credit – that would be much, much appreciated.

By the way, if you’re never read “A Wreath for Marley,” it’s in a book entitled (not surprisingly) Blue Christmas from Wolfpack. And it’s available right here.

Speaking of Wolfpack, they have Barb’s (and my) great collection of short stories, Too Many Tomcats, on sale for 99-cents right now. Don’t dismiss this as a “cat” book – Barb (and I) mostly write about cats who are either killed or are themselves killers.

Amazon has a deal worth noting, too. Starting April 1 and running through April 30 Fate of the Union by Matt Clemens and me is $2.99 on e-book.

* * *

Sadly, we have come to the end of the Max Allan Collins Film Festival, held annually during March, my birthday month. Here are last week’s selections:

12. Super Troopers. Okay, they can’t all be Vertigo or Chinatown. Sometimes they just have to be dumb fun, and this movie is the most dumb fun to be had in one place, and it is a refreshing look at Brian Cox before Succession, which I like…just not as much as Super Troopers. A few years ago the Broken Lizard comedy team (who put this film together) appeared in Iowa City at the Englert Theater. Barb and I got to meet them after the performance and they were unfailingly nice and fun.

13. The Magnificent Seven. Barb requested a western and I quickly served this one up. Never get tired of it. Never get tired of seeing all these stars either at their peak or on the cusp of greater things. Never get tired of watching Steve McQueen upstage Yul Brynner, and Yul Brynner entertainingly retaliating. Then there’s Eli Wallach, whose performance here – really, the whole movie – paves the way for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

14. Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot. Another Barb request – I wanted to wait till June 1 for this one, when summer was getting started, but when a lovely blonde requests a screening of one of the greatest comedies ever made, who am I to argue? Not a knee slapper (like The Producers for example), Hulot is all gentle comedy, observational humor, and pleasing sight gags. It always feels like you’ve been on vacation after viewing it.

15. Start the Revolution Without Me. This is one of the three truly outstanding funny performances from Gene Wilder (the others being the aforementioned Producers and Young Frankenstein). The first half of this film is hilarious – a take on The Corsican Brothers specifically and swashbuckling films in general – but the second half devolves into farcical blackouts, which are also hilarious but intermittently. Look, the movie is a mess. But what a wonderful, sublime mess, from the greatest comedy team who ever made only one movie together: Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland. “As we say in Corsica — goodbye!”

16. Hour of the Gun. Another western – James Garner as Wyatt Earp and Jason Robards as Doc Holliday in what was then the most accurate retelling of the O.K. Corral shoot-out (and the subsequent “vendetta ride”) to date. It’s still the best, and a grim shock to the system for Garner fans raised on the wry Maverick. The second western from director John Sturges this week (Magnificent Seven being the other).

17. The Time Machine. George Pal’s charmingly dated yet timeless special effects and a narrative that rests comfortably on the broad shoulders of Rod Taylor are enough. But the surprisingly moving story of a man unstuck in time, who falls in love with Yvette Mimieux without quite knowing it, retains its emotional impact with an action-packed climax that holds up (Taylor doing almost all of his stunts). This sports a terrific supporting performance from Alan Young, who deserved better than Mr. Ed, and a mesmerizing score with a haunting theme by Russell Garcia.

Thus ends this year’s Max Allan Collins Film Festival. What, no Gun Crazy? No Kiss Me Deadly? What about The Great Race? No Anatomy of a Murder? There’s always next year….

* * *

Peter Davis at The Washington Times has been very kind to Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction. Here is his interview with my co-author, James L. Traylor.

The Big Bundle is briefly but intelligently discussed on this podcast.

Finally, fifteen comic-book murder mysteries are recommended here, and Road to Perdition is one of them.

M.A.C.

Book Giveaway & The Writing Life 2023

Tuesday, March 28th, 2023

We have ten copies to give away of the lovely new Hardcase Crime release, Mad Money, a combo of two Nolan novels, Spree and Mourn the Living. Spree is considered by many the best of the Nolan books, and Mourn the Living – his first appearance, written when I was but a lad of 19 or so – has never appeared as a mainstream paperback before.

We also have ten copies of Fancy Anders For the Boys. This is the second of the three Fancy Anders novellas. Fancy is a private eye working in Hollywood during World War Two; in this novella, she has gone undercover at the Hollywood Canteen on a murder investigation.

[All copies have been claimed! Thank you for your support, and see you next time! –Nate]

Mad Money cover
Trade Paperback: Bookshop Purchase Link Amazon Purchase Link Books-A-Million Purchase Link Barnes & Noble Purchase Link Target Purchase Link
E-Book: Amazon Kindle Purchase Link Google Play Books Purchase Link Nook Purchase Link Kobo Purchase Link Apple Books Purchase Link
Digital Audiobook: Amazon Purchase Link Nook Purchase Link Kobo Purchase Link
Audiobook (MP3 on CD): Amazon Purchase Link Nook Purchase Link Books-A-Million Purchase Link
Audiobook (CD): Amazon Purchase Link Nook Purchase Link Books-A-Million Purchase Link
Fancy Anders For the Boys cover
E-Book: Amazon Purchase Link
Trade Paperback: Amazon Purchase Link
Digital Audiobook: Amazon Purchase Link

This is the last of the Hardcase Crime series of Nolan reprints (plus the new Skim Deep) and they have done an incredible job. Thank you, editor Charles Ardai.

Fancy Anders For the Boys is not available in stores. It was published as an e-book by Neo-Text and this is a (quite nice) Print-on-Demand. The Fay Dalton illos are in color on the e-book, and in black-and-white in the trade paperback.

For those of you within driving distance, here’ a reminder that Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder – the filmed version of our live Golden Age Radio production – will be presented this Friday (March 31) at the Muscatine Community College Black Box Theater. See the end of this update for details.

The night before is the Legends event in Muscatine, with Muscatine Community College honoring me. For those desperate for something to do this coming Thursday evening, here’s the details one last time.

* * *

If you’re not a superstar, even if you’ve had some successes and are moderately well-known, making a living as a writer of fiction has never been a picnic. Usually you have a choice between finding a day job and taking on work-for-hire that rarely includes royalties, much less artistic fulfillment.

If you’re somewhat up the literary ladder, that day job is going to be as a “creative writing” teacher at a college or university. But I recall vividly that the University of Iowa Writers Workshop – where I matriculated (and you know how painful that is) – turned down Donald E. Westlake’s application to teach there. The current well-intentioned TV series Lucky Hank, with the great Bob Odenkirk, shows what a soulless draining existence that life can be for a real writer.

But you really have only those two choices, unless you can marry a woman of wealth, and that’s the one attribute my wife did not bring along for the ride. The work-for-hire I’ve done means I’ve written several shelves of books that do not generate any income for me in my dotage.

For me the price has been to work hard – to be prolific – and the return has been both positive (I have indeed made a living) and negative (I am not taken seriously – I “crank books out,” you see). As I’ve reported here before, my first agent – of only two in a career that began in the late 1960s – took me on with the caveat that (as a writer of hardboiled fiction) I was “a blacksmith in an automotive age.” What the fuck am I now?

My markets have shrunk as a generation or two find me repellently politically incorrect and later ones are thoughtlessly dying out. I lost a major market apparently because a sarcastic throwaway joke in public was misinterpreted – perhaps humorlessly or worse willfully – as being my actual opinion. My dream job – a being able to complete Mickey Spillane’s unfinished novels – has largely been realized in a world where the Best-Selling Mystery Writer of the Twentieth Century elicits, “Never heard of him,” from a couple of generations.

It’s an uphill battle but (to mix metaphors) I am in the second half of my last act, so it’ll be over soon. All I have to do is hang on and, hopefully, feather my nest and add to my legacy.

Here’s an example of why I characterize the battle as uphill: a recent visit to the Barnes & Noble in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I have probably done a dozen book signings there (often in tandem with Barb, for our Antiques books) over the years. None during or after the Covid lockdown, but we’re not talking ancient history here. We also shop there probably once a month. This visit, like any writer, I checked my presence on the shelves…specifically, to see if my two recently published books were in stock – Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction (the biography written with James L. Traylor) and The Big Bundle (the new Nathan Heller novel).

Both books have been glowingly and widely reviewed, including starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly, the top trade magazine in the book field.

Neither was in stock. Spillane was in the system, but hadn’t been ordered. The Big Bundle did not seem to exist. Not in the computer, anyway. In fairness, I have seen copies of both books in other Barnes & Noble stores, including Davenport and Iowa City. But the book buyer at Cedar Rapids did not choose to even enter us in their computer base.

This is disheartening but it is the life of a writer if your name isn’t Stephen King or Harlan Coben. Now plenty of writers who aren’t named King or Coben have books in that Cedar Rapids bookstore. But few of them will be able to maintain that presence and are doomed to day jobs, possibly teaching others on college campuses how to join a profession that will never enable them eat regularly.

This is a problem that has been there throughout my entire career, but it is worse now. It is in part created by publishers and editors who do not nurture their authors, fail to promote them, fail to allow them to build a name and an audience. It is in part created by a lack of bookstores whose staffs are “book people,” who love and hand-sell books. This problem is acerbated by Amazon and other on-line booksellers who offer books cheaper, but who also tend to push a bestseller list that is preordained.

Nothing much can be done about this, but those of you who love books and prize authors can help by spreading the word about what you’ve read and liked (loved) on your blogs and by posting reviews (however brief) on Amazon and other sites.

I am able to keep going because of you. Yes, Don Westlake said, “A cult writer is seven readers short of the writer making a living,” but your support is what has kept me in the game all these years. And when I say, “Thank you,” I mean it from the bottom of my heart…even if I use a cliche to express it.

* * *

Not to put too fine a point on it, I hated John Wick 4.

Looking at Rotten Tomatoes, it would appear I’m in the minority. Most reviewers like it, most viewers like it. Even love it. So, once again, I’m out of step and probably just plain wrong.

Certainly the movie is well-made. Visually it is often – even consistently – stunning. The art direction is staggeringly beautiful. The action scenes are mind-bogglingly well-staged. The movie begins with a rousing action scene right out of the gate, capped off by a shock; and the movie has a very satisfying ending, both that of the climax and then another of the movie itself. It owes much to Mickey Spillane but I doubt many of those involved even know who Mickey was. But, like a Spillane novel, the film embraces revenge and harsh violence, begins and ends well…and of course Mickey once said, “Nobody reads a novel to get to the middle.”

And yet I hated it. Was almost glazed-over bored.

Start with Keanu Reeves, whose performance has me scratching my head. Is he a brilliant minimalist screen actor? Or just a charismatic lummox? His dialogue mostly consists of one word – “Yeah” – which he somehow turns into three syllables. He performs his martial arts stunts well, even if co-star Donnie Yen outshines him, and performs the John Woo-style shoot ‘em up stuff admirably. And he is the only actor in the piece (including Yen, who is essentially playing Zatoichi) who doesn’t ham it up.

But the dialogue is terrible – Dick and Jane rewriting the Marquis De Sade. The supporting actors caress the words they speak as if it’s Shakespeare, or maybe it’s that they are being paid ten grand a word, and are savoring that. Certainly Ian McShane and Laurence Fishbourne are almost giddy in their over-the-top performances, as if they can see the coins stacking up with every lousy line. The Asian actors alone seem to find the right tone. Bewilderingly bad is putty-faced Bill Skarsgård, so good as the evil clown in the It movies, coming across here like the young Matthew Broderick playing a James Bond villain.

That may be the best way to watch John Wick 4 – imagine Keanu is playing Ted from the Bill and Ted movies and Skarsgård is Ferris Bueller.

I liked the first John Wick (did they steal the “they shouldn’t have killed my dog?” bit from Hard Cash?). I have no memory of John Wick 2, but I think I liked it well enough. I remember thinking they had at least edged up on going too far with the action scenes in John Wick 3. Now in John Wick 4, the action scenes – well-staged but going on forever – become mind-numbing and uninvolving. This is the fantasy of a school shooter the night before the big day.

John Woo’s heroic bloodshed was wrapped up in a Douglas Sirk-style melodrama. What Mickey had was an avenger with a point to his crusade. John Wick just kills a whole lot of people and then…well, you’re going to see it anyway, aren’t you?

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The Max Allan Collins Film Festival (in which throughout my birthday month I subject my wife to my favorite movies) continues with only two entries this time.

10. Phantom of the Paradise. Brian DePalma’s greatest film and a movie that wrestles with Vertigo, Chinatown and Kiss Me Deadly for the top spot in my Favorite Films list. Terry Beatty and I used to go to great lengths to see Phantom in theaters in those pre-VCR days. Hard for me to talk about this one because I love it so much – every actor, not just William Finley and Paul Williams and Jessica Harper, but also Gerrit Graham and George Memmoli and Archie Hahn (and the rest of the Juicy Fruits). I’ve sometimes had difficulty convincing people who dismiss Williams as an easy listening artist (which at times he was, but a brilliant one) that his score is the definitive rock opera. A unique blend of horror and satire, Phantom is a movie unlike any other even as it invokes everything from Psycho to The Cabinet of Caligari, from The Picture of Dorian Gray to Faust…and, well, The Phantom of the Opera.

11. Vertigo. Why am I as messed up as I am? Is it that I began reading reprints of the most violent era of Dick Tracy when I was six? That my mother read me Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs around the same time? Possibly. But also I was ten years old when I first saw Vertigo. You can only see Vertigo for the first time once. But the glory of it is you get to watch it for second time once, as well, and for me anyway that began a series of viewings that always reveal new depths and nuances. Look, it’s an outrageous plot. Like the best of Spillane, it’s a fever dream, but one that poses as a romantic one, when at its tragic heart it’s the story of a detective who can’t stop himself from detecting and a woman who can’t stop pretending to be the woman she (SPOILER ALERT) conspired to help kill. This – like Phantom of the Paradise – works on me every time. Every damn time I get caught up in it. Don’t tell me the story is preposterous because I don’t care. It’s melodrama, which is pretty much the only kind of story I am interested in and that moves me. It’s easy to get caught up in Stewart’s performance, which begins with him as his genial screen self and gradually, then dramatically, devolves into a dangerous obsessive. Instead, next time you watch it, take your eyes off Stewart and pay attention to how layered Novak’s performance is.

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Here’s an article on Irish comic book characters, and Michael O’Sullivan of Road to Perdition is in first place!

Here is a positive and even erudite review of Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction.

Another positive Spillane bio review is here (after the Harper Lee one!).

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Film Premiere Press Release

Encore for Murder premiere poster
Max Allan Collins, Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, has returned to independent filmmaking in his native Muscatine, Iowa, turning the stage production of his radio play Encore for Murder into a new film.

Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder was professionally shot during its one-time-only stage performance in Sept 2022. Premiere of the film is Friday, March 31, 2023 at 7:00 pm at Muscatine Community College Black Box Theatre in Muscatine, Iowa. Admittance is free. Collins wrote the graphic novel Road to Perdition on which the Academy Award-winning film was based, as well as the New York Times best-selling novel version of Saving Private Ryan. His Quarry mystery novels became a recent HBO Cinemax series and he has continued the famous Mike Hammer PI series working from the late author’s unfinished materials. Encore for Murder will be included on an upcoming Blu-ray release from VCI Home Entertainment as a bonus film with Collins’ documentary, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane. Spillane is widely considered the “king of pulp fiction” and became America’s best-selling post-WW II writer. The audience at the March 31 screening will be the first to see and hear about the newest venture Blue Christmas, written and directed by Collins and shot entirely in Muscatine, working with editor Chad Bishop and director of photography Phillip W. Dingeldein of dphilms in the Quad Cities. Collins and Dingeldein worked together on the Muscatine-lensed film Mommy (seen on Lifetime TV).

Encore for Murder was originally produced as a Fundraiser for the Muscatine Art Center. Actor Gary Sandy of WKRP in Cincinnati fame, who appeared as Mike Hammer in productions of Encore for Murder in Kentucky and Florida, reprised his acclaimed performance in the Iowa production. Dingeldein and Chad Bishop filmed the event, staged as a Golden Age of Radio production with scripts in hand but in costume, with an on-stage sound effects table, music and a big screen presentation of scene-setting slides.

Audience Q & A will be available after the film and news about Blue Christmas.

M.A.C.