Posts Tagged ‘Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction’

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Another Film Fest Award and…A Tricky One

Tuesday, September 9th, 2025

I wasn’t able to attend the Iowa Independent Film Awards, as I’m still in recuperation mode. I’m disappointed I couldn’t be there Saturday for our screening. But Death by Fruitcake did well just the same.

Death by Fruitcake IIFA award
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This is a tricky one for me, because I try to stay away from politics here. And my wife Barb, wisely, reminds me that people don’t come to this update/blog for such things. It’s difficult to restrain myself, sometimes; but mostly I do.

Let me say at the outset that I feel a need to let you know how events of the day have impacted my plans for the next Nate Heller novel. That’s what makes this germane, because I have mentioned, even discussed, that prospective novel several times. I’ve even presented it as my last Heller novel, and one I’ve in some respects been leading up to.

Now I may not write it at all, and you – those of you who are generous enough to follow my work – have a right to know why this book has been (at least) shelved for now or (at worst) never will get written. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that it basically means I’m considering two more Heller novels, not just one.

Also, I’m not fishing for a conversation or exchange of opinions here. Few facts are immutable, but this one is: no one ever won an argument on Facebook (or other Social Media); no one ever changed anybody’s mind on those platforms. I’m not going to try to. How you think, what you believe, is not my business.

Here’s how this transpired.

I was watching TV and saw Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and wondered if he had, if not damaged, the Kennedy name, brought it into a kind of doubt. He strikes me as a crank, and a dangerous one; some smart people disagree, but enough people share that view – that as Secretary of Health and Human Services he is a threat to health and human services – that the Robert F. Kennedy name is not something I dare, at the moment, hang a Heller on. It may already have hurt Too Many Bullets, my Heller RFK assassination novel.

I don’t do this lightly. I first asked Barb if she agreed that this was a bad time to embark on an RFK novel (the theme was to be RFK/Hoffa, as my previous Kennedy-oriented novels have more than hinted at). She immediately agreed and said, “Write something else.” I called my editor, Charles Ardai, at Hard Case Crime and asked if he thought I should do a different, non-Kennedy novel instead of the one we’d been planning (and that I was contracted to deliver). He was thrilled I was setting that subject aside (for now anyway). I asked my longtime researcher, George Hagenaur, what he thought. He, too, said it was a bad time to do a Kennedy book.

So. I am instead going to write a Watergate novel, which was already one of two Heller novels I was considering doing, for quite a while now. It seems like a good time to deal with a cover-up.

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This article celebrates the marriage of Dick Tracy and Tess Trueheart 75 years ago. You’ll have to scroll down to get to the meat of it, but it’s a nice piece.

Speaking of anniversaries, next year (2026) will mark Quarry’s 50th anniversary. The Broker, the first book’s title imposed on me (it’s now titled correctly as Quarry) went on sale in 1976. I had actually started it at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop in 1972 and finished it in 1973; but the anniversary is of the publication, not when I completed it.

Here is an audio review of The Wrong Quarry. A very nice one at that, and for one of my favorite novels in the series.

This will lead you to the wonderful blog, The Stilleto Gumshoe, where several Mickey Spillane articles appear and one of them is for Spillane, the bio by Jim Traylor and me. Good Spillane/Hammer/Velda stuff in general, but the bio review is a honey.

M.A.C.

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Completing “Completing Mickey Spillane”

Tuesday, January 14th, 2025

Before I get into the topic of the day, let me express my concern and support for my friends in the Los Angeles area over the cataclysmic fires that have destroyed so much. My friend Robert Meyer Burnett, who at this writing is safe, has spoken eloquently on his YouTube channel (see his recent Observations) about the disaster and its impact. To me, and to many, Los Angeles is the capitol city of entertainment present and past, and thinking about not just the homes and businesses, but landmark structures, that have been lost is staggering, as are the terrible losses to the populace.

I wish I didn’t hate the phrase “our hearts and prayers go out” so much, since those words are just a reflexive go-to in so many situations; but I wish I had better words to replace them.

* * *

Last week I discussed collaboration here, but I did not mention the most unusual and important collaboration I’ve been half of.

I would think most people who stop by here are well-aware of my love for Mickey Spillane the man and Mickey Spillane the writer (he hated “author”).

It has been the greatest privilege, the high honor, of my career for Mickey to have entrusted me with completing various works-in-progress and novels-in-consideration of his to fruition. The thirteen Mike Hammer novels Mickey wrote have been expanded by fourteen more novels by Spillane/Collins. Seeing my name on a book jacket next to him remains something I can barely compute.

I’ve told this story many times, so I’ll keep it brief. Mickey, who was dying of pancreatic cancer, called me and asked me if I’d complete for him The Goliath Bone, designed to be his last Mike Hammer, should he not be able to do so. I of course said I would, if that became necessary. Shortly after, he instructed his wife Jane to conduct “a treasure hunt” in his three offices at his home in South Carolina and turn everything she found over to me.

That treasure hunt, a few days after Mickey’s funeral, was conducted not just by Jane but by Barb and me. Stacks of manuscript were assembled on the Spillane dining room table, and the three of us began to sort.

Among the manuscripts and other typescript and occasional hand-written material were half a dozen substantial Hammer manuscripts – eighty to one-hundred double-spaced pages each, as well as two non-Hammer novels well in progress, Dead Street and The Consummata (the sequel to his The Delta Factor). Additionally, the completed screenplay of The Saga of Caleb York, never produced, became a novel, The Legend of Caleb York, followed by five more York novels signed Spillane and Collins, the only books I shared with Mickey’s byline that he didn’t write some of, though they were drawn from material in the unproduced screenplay. I also turned his screenplay The Menace into a novel.

The play Encore for Murder – which appeared as a Stacy Keach full-cast audio drama – later performed in Owensboro, Kentucky; Clearwater Florida; and my home of Muscatine, Iowa – was based on a Spillane synopsis. I had planned to write a novel version but that never happened. Encore does exist, with Gary Sandy as Hammer, as a special feature on the Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane blu-ray and as a freestanding DVD. Gary played Hammer in the Owensboro and Clearwater productions, as well.

Another screenplay, The Green Woman, with a science-fiction/fantasy aspect, awaits novelization, if time and a market present themselves. A number of Spillane fragments, some fairly substantial, may one day serve for novels or short stories. But the demand will have to be there.

In Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction, the biography that James L. Traylor and I wrote about Mickey, we included supplementary material at the end of the book. My essay “Completing Mickey Spillane” discussed each of the Spillane/Collins Hammer novels and how I approached them in the writing.

Again, there were six substantial manuscripts, literally novels in progress. Then came a number of shorter but somewhat substantial fragments in varying shape, usually a chapter or two or three, and sometimes endings, and in some instances character and plot notes. The last three novels I wrote that were discussed in “Completing Mickey Spillane” came from (unproduced) synopses Mickey did for the Stacy Keach television series (Murder, My Love and Masquerade for Murder) and Kill Me, Darling was developed from several radio and television scripts (unproduced versions of the same otherwise unpublished story).

The remaining two Hammer novels, which had not been completed at the time Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction was published, are Dig Two Graves and Baby, It’s Murder, the former developed from a couple of chapters that appeared to be a few chapters into the story – Mickey’s beginning was not among his papers.


Hardcover:
E-Book: Amazon Google Play Nook Kobo iTunes

Which brings us to the final Mike Hammer novel of the canon, Baby, It’s Murder, to be published on March 4, 2025 (a day before my 77th birthday). It derives from a two-chapter fragment in Mickey’s files. I made the story a flashback, as I needed…or at least wanted…to give the series some finality. Let’s just say the wraparound chapters (one fore, one aft) take place at a funeral.

Those of you who have followed these books, and have not dismissed them as “continuations,” as some have despite the actual Spillane content they include, I give my deepest thanks. If you haven’t read them, or read the first few and drifted away, I will say only that these are all books of which I am very proud. My greatest thanks goes to Mickey. And to Jane.

If you are interested in these books, I would suggest snagging them soon. The last few books have had fairly short print runs, and maybe half a dozen entries ago, Titan stopped publishing trade paperback reprints of the Spillane/Collins titles.

Are these the last Mike Hammer books? Or anyway the last Mike Hammer books that would contain real Spillane material? Possibly. At my age, how many projects I have ahead of me is unknown. I still have two Hammer fragments I did not complete…yet. They may become short stories, or they may become novels, if the long-promised Mike Hammer film from Skydance becomes a reality.

There is one manuscript waiting for a publisher (though I haven’t approached any as yet). Mickey wrote a draft of a Mike Danger science-fiction novel; my draft has never been completed. Mickey and I discussed the possibility that if the Miramax movie option didn’t come to fruition (and it’s long since passed) we might convert it into a Hammer.

Danger, of course, was Mickey’s original name for Hammer (when he was prepping to do it as a comic book in the late ‘40s). He and I revived it for a comic book company, Big Entertainment, where it had a three-year run (and scored a contract with the Weinsteins). The science fiction aspect of the story has Danger (now Hammer) being sent into the future. It’s a kind of Spillane take on the H.G. Wells Time Machine.

If I can find the right market, that one will be out there as a non-canonical Hammer. Mickey had an idea for a sequel, too, also with an s-f aspect.

If you want to know the many reasons for this famous, bestselling writer (never author!) leaving so many manuscripts unfinished, it’s all spelled out in Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction. For those you waiting for the trade paperback of that one, none is currently scheduled, though the book is staying in print.

One final fun fact: my grandmother’s maiden name was Spellman. And Spillane and Spellman are apparently different versions of the same name.

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This week I recorded the rest of the True Noir “History Behind the Mystery” episodes. If you have signed up for True Noir, now’s the time: go to truenoir.co.

And here’s the second “History Behind the Mystery.”

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Here’s an article on Tom Hanks and his “comic book movie” (Road to Perdition).

M.A.C.

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Kindle Deals, a Spillane Nom, A Beck & Woods Blurb, New Reviews of Old Movies, and More!

Tuesday, June 4th, 2024
Supreme Justice cover
What Doesn't Kill Her

Supreme Justice will be promoted via Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle book deals in the US marketplace, starting 6/1/2024 and running through 6/30/2024. The book (topical as hell right now!) will be offered at 2.99 USD during the promotion period.

What Doesn’t Kill Her will be promoted via Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle book deals in the US marketplace, starting 6/1/2024 and running through 6/30/2024. The novel will be offered at 1.99 USD during the promotion period.

Both are written by Matt Clemens and me.

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Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction cover

Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction by James L. Traylor and me has been nominated for the Macavity Award in the
Best Mystery-related Nonfiction/Critical category.

The Macavity Award is named for the “mystery cat” of T.S. Eliot (Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats). Each year the members of Mystery Readers International nominate and vote for their favorite mysteries in five categories.

I am not sure when or where the winners are announced. We were up for the Edgar, and lost, as you might recall; and are up for the Anthony, which will be announced at this year’s Bouchercon (which we will not be attending, as I will be shooting an indie movie then). If you are an eligible voter in the Macavity Awards or the Anthony Awards, please keep us in mind.

Our dashed hopes of winning the Edgar (I never really thought that was a possibility, frankly) have been soothed by the knowledge that we are a thrice-nominated book in our category. If we can just win one, Spillane will be an award-winning book; but even short of that, these multiple nominations are a nice validation of the decades of work by Jim and me that went into a book for which I feel a good deal of pride and accomplishment.

One of my missions in life has been to get Mickey Spillane some of the recognition denied him by the mystery community over these many decades, despite the boost he gave to the genre as a whole. The number of careers in mystery fiction that Mickey made possible with his success is difficult to overstate – the entire genre got a shot in the arm (and elsewhere).

* * *

Barb and I celebrated our 56th wedding anniversary on June 1. We had a nice overnight getaway at Galena, Illinois, a favorite haunt of ours. Here’s Barb and me (with one of us looking radiant and young) (hint: not me) at a restaurant we adore, Vinny Vanucchi’s.

Max Allan and Barbara Collins at Vinny Vanucchi's

Even an overnight trip, however, can be a little daunting these days. We feel much more comfortable at home, the familiar surroundings encouraging both work and play. I have sleep issues that staying in a hotel acerbate. This is why you don’t see us doing book signings, attending conventions, and doing other public appearances very often. As much as we like interacting with readers/fans/friends, it’s a dicey proposition, leaving our little cave.

We are extremely lucky to have our son Nate and his family (wife Abby and grandkids Sam and Lucy) just up the street from us, making the households mutual support systems. As you know, if you follow these updates at all, I even managed to write and direct a movie not long ago – Blue Christmas – which will be distributed on home video by VCI and MVD, who will also be marketing it to streaming services.

We have even received a lovely blurb from Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the talented creators of A Quiet Place: “Collins is a master of noir and activates a deep reservoir of affection for the genre in his latest noir chamber piece.” This is incredibly generous of Beck and Woods, who have been kind enough to single out my frequent cinematic collaborator Phil Dingeldein and me, as mentors.

Exciting (at least exciting to me) news about another indie feature film project will be announced here soon.

Also, the Nathan Heller audio production, True Noir (based on the novel True Detective) written by me and directed by my pal Robert Meyer Burnett, continues apace. I have completed and delivered the ten-episode script of the production to Rob, and the reviews from him and our distinguished cast members (we’ll be revealing more of them soon) have been wonderful. Unfortunately, our announced star Todd Stashwick had to step down, and we are in the process of recasting now.

* * *
Strawberry Blonde poster

It’s no secret that I am as much a film buff as I am a bibliophile. And I have viewed a ridiculously large number of films in my time on Planet Earth, from the worst to the best. But a few classic films have, for no good reason, remained unwatched by me. I caught up with two recently: Strawberry Blonde with James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland and Rita Hayworth, directed by Raoul Walsh, written by the Epsteins of Casablanca fame; and Meet John Doe with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck directed by Frank Capra and written by Robert Riskins.

Where to start? Both are 1941 films – in that sweet spot that began around 1939 and continued till World War Two kicked in, where Hollywood seemed to be at its creative zenith. The number of great character actors assembled for these two films is staggering: Jack Carson, Alan Hale and George Tobias, with future Superman George Reeves thrown in for good measure, in Strawberry Blonde; and Edward Arnold, James Gleason, Walter Brennan, Spring Byington, and Gene Lockhart in Meet John Doe. And a lot of others in both.

Let me interrupt myself to say that Barb and I, staying overnight in Galena at the Irish Cottage hotel, tried to watch a pay-for-view movie on the evening of May 31. The film we chose was Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. How might I best describe this movie? Childish nonsense, poorly acted, although Rebecca Hall is actually pretty good, whereas Dan Stevens embarrasses himself and Bryan Tyree Henry is, as an African-American, saddled with a stereotypical role that Mantan Moreland would have rejected as beneath his dignity. We bailed half an hour into this CGI fest in which the best that could be said for the monsters is that they come off as more human than the humans.

Meanwhile, back in 1941, Warner’s is giving us Jimmy Cagney in a charming role that because of his artistry overcomes the character’s boorishness, with Oliva De Havilland etching a modern young woman (at the turn of the Twentieth Century) with humor and deftness, and the comic figures (Alan Hale, George Tobias, Jack Carson) all show considerable humanity and growth. I think I’d avoided this film because of its reputation as an Americana valentine to the “Band Played On” early 1900s; but there’s a lot of skill and surprising depth to what at first seems a nostalgia trifle. What comes across as wistful seemed to me, at a distance, as something saccharine. I was wrong. Warner Arcives has a Blu-ray out of this right now.

Meet John Doe poster

As for Meet John Doe, I had expected to encounter Frank Capra at his most populist excessive, and while I wasn’t entirely wrong, I also encountered a skewering of corporate America and a cynical MAGA-style movement taking advantage of its members shamelessly. The dark side of Meet John Doe is plenty dark, and the artistry of a great cast is plenty great. James Gleason (the unforgettable Corkle of Here Comes Mr. Jordan) does a drunk scene in medium close-up, seen past a mostly silent Gary Cooper, that may be the best single piece of screen acting I’ve ever witnessed. After a few comic moments – not overplayed, but broad as drunk scenes often were in those days – Gleason talks about enlisting to serve in the Great War and how his father enlisted, too. The emotions that play over his face are sublimely, subtlely rendered; and this comes from a character who has, till now, been perhaps the most cynical in the piece.

And Cooper’s character is at times the “yup”/”nope” creature he’s known for, but other times is talkative and even spechifying without betraying the simple roots of his character. He’s remarkable as is Barbara Stanwyck, who – like Gleason – travels from cynicism and self-interest to a realization of how she’s betrayed her journalistic goals, feeling her guilt in what was a terrible, hurtful hoax at heart.

Meet John Doe – which has just become available from Classic Flix on Blu-ray (the people who brought you I, the Jury and The Long Wait on Blu-ray!) in a beautifully restored edition – is a kind of pre-war rough draft of It’s a Wonderful Life, which is definitely a post-war take on the same (or similar) material. People don’t think of Meet John Doe as a Christmas movie, in the manner of It’s a Wonderful Life, but both films use Christmas as a powerful climax to stories that otherwise are not holiday-themed.

For a film buff, seeing a James Cagney picture by a great director with a fabulous supporting cast, or a Frank Capra movie starting Gary Cooper and other legendary supporting players, as if they are brand-new items, is frankly thrilling.

Also depressing, in the wake of such travesties as the Godzilla/King Kong rematch. Stick with the Japanese alternative.

By the way, Furiosa is excellent. And yet it’s the poster child for Hollywood’s inability to get in step with itself.

Get Meet John Doe here.

Get Strawberry Blonde here.

* * *

The Big Bundle, a Nathan Heller novel, is out in trade paperback now. Here’s a nice review.

M.A.C.

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True Noir News, Another Nomination Plus a Serving of Fudge

Tuesday, May 14th, 2024

The crowd-funding effort at Kickstarter for True Noir: The Casebooks of Nathan Heller has been postponed until June (exact date to be shared when I know what it is) because we’d be in conflict with another crowd-funder our star Todd Stashwick is involved with. We don’t want to be competing with somebody in the family. (True Noir is directed by Robert Meyer Burnett and is a fully immersive audio drama. In production now!)

Also, I’m going to be announcing soon the next indie film I’m doing, and I won’t be crowd-funding that, either. But any of you who are interested in contributing to the production will be invited to contact me directly. Associate Producer credits and first edition books of your choice will be in the offing.

* * *

After all the talk about winning and losing awards last week, another nomination has popped up for Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction by Jim Traylor and me. I’ve spoken here before about how meaningful this work is to both my co-author and myself – our many decades-long friendship grew out of the need for two Spillane enthusiasts to work together on one Spillane literary bio. We were stymied a bit by Mickey’s insistence that he would cooperate but only in terms of a book about the Mike Hammer/Mickey Spillane by examining his fiction and limiting the biographical material to a short single chapter.

Mickey wanted to write his own biography – that is, autobiography – but he never got around to it. He did cooperate with me (and how) on doing a documentary on his life and work, which became Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane (1998), which has been expanded by my collaborator Phil Dingeldein and myself into a special edition now available from VCI (and on Amazon, of course). As a bonus feature it includes the 90-minute program (kinda a movie), Mickey Spillane’s Encore For Murder, the radio-style play we mounted here in Muscatine, Iowa, as a fund raiser for the local art museum. My Mommy’s Day star (co-star with Patty McCormack), Gary Sandy (of WKRP in Cincinnati fame) came in to play Mike Hammer. Gary was so terrific that, at the last moment, I decided to record the show (and our little movie version was edited by Chad Bishop and myself from one dress rehearsal and the lone performance).

Some of you will recall a longer radio version of Encore was done for Brilliance (there were two done, both Audie Award nominees and one winning, The Little Death) with Stacy Keach in his iconic role as Mike Hammer. Gary portrayed Hammer for me in two stage productions of Encore, one at Owensboro, Kentucky, another at Clearwater, Florida.

Anyway, the Spillane documentary is available on Blu-ray as mentioned above, with the 90-minute Encore for Murder as a special feature. Encore is also available alone as a DVD.

Some years ago, in its first incarnation, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane won an Award of Excellence from the Iowa Motion Picture Association. And in 2023 I unexpectedly won Best Director from the Iowa Motion Picture awards for the production. So there have been various awards, I’m happy to say, connected to all of these endeavors.

We, of course, lost the Edgar (as I expected to) to a bio of James Elroy (not my favorite author). And now we’re up against that book, and a number of others, nominated for the non-fiction Anthony, the awards named for critic Anthony Boucher given at Bouchercon. I’ve won one of those before, in 2005, for The History of Mystery (written with George Hagenauer). I’m not going to Bouchercon in Nashville, August 28 – September 1, as I’ll be shooting my next indie movie at the time. Because it’s a fan event with the voting going on at the event, it would be a good thing to be there, since that amps up your possibility of winning. And I’ve been to many a Bouchercon, but just can’t make this one.

Which makes this a good time to request that those of you attending Bouchercon 2024, who liked the Spillane book, consider voting for it.

But, as I discussed here last week, I really did and do consider the Edgar nomination a major victory for this biographical study of the genre’s most controversial figure. And I could not be more thrilled by this surprise Anthony nomination – and I know editor Otto Penzler, co-author Jim Traylor and, hell, my agent Dominick Abel are also pleased.

To those of you out there whose votes got us included among the nominees, you have my sincere thanks. Two nominations among the handful of the genre’s major awards (no, it’s not a leg lamp) are nothing to sneeze at. And I ain’t sneezing.

Speaking of awards, I’m going to provide a window onto a January 1968 performance on The Ed Sullivan Show by a rock group that is not in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. This may seem like a non sequitur to some, but longtime fans/readers of mine will probably recall that (as is the case with Bobby Darin) I am a huge fan of that particular, incredibly great, historically significant and hugely influential band who have been roundly forgotten by the rock organization that is too busy giving out its awards to Hip Hoppers and country western artists than to recognize true pioneers in the field.

But, as my wife says to me frequently, “At least you’re not bitter.”

M.A.C.

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