Posts Tagged ‘Spree’

Rule #1: Never Respond to a Reviewer

Tuesday, June 6th, 2023

Before we get started, I want to share this link for a nice if unexpected endorsement of the first Nathan Heller novel, True Detective, by Paul Davis of the Washington Times.

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I am going to share a review with you from the Borg site, a mixed one by C.J. Bunce, who has generally liked my work and to some degree likes it here. It’s almost never a good idea to respond to critics, but one aspect of the Borg review touches on a topic I feel requires at least some response. So I am going to take this opportunity – one writers generally do not get or at least have sense not to avail themselves of – to respond to that objection, and a few other negative aspects of the review. Let me say that as the author, my view is skewed and biased to say the least, and Bunce – a solid reviewer – has every right to his opinion.

Mad Money cover
Retro fix–Max Allan Collins’ giant Nolan novel “Spree” returns in 2-for-1 volume “Mad Money”

BORG: If you were going to stage a heist at a shopping mall, how would you do it? Would you steal from all the stores in the mall in the same heist? Back in 1987, when malls were still in their prime, Max Allan Collins made an attempt in the pages of Spree, his longest novel in the Nolan series. His anti-hero Nolan is the Michael Corleone of grime fiction – they keep trying to pull the retired thief back in just as he’s ready to settle down (Collins pulls him back in each of his 9 novels). Collins knows how to reflect the ugliest people in the ugliest of underworlds, and he does it by creating criminals in Missouri that would make New York mobsters look like wimps.

COLLINS: Is “grime fiction” a knowing pun or a typo? Is it a term that’s previously been used by Bunce and others? Just asking. If it’s purposeful, I might use it myself sometime.

BORG: Spree sees a reprint this year thanks to Hard Case Crime in a 2-for-1 edition called Mad Money. It’s bundled with Mourn the Living, another Nolan novel, and the last of a series of reprints that provide some of the best value around for pulp crime readers and fans of Collins’ unique voice. I thought the hillbilly Comfort family of Missouri was vile in the last Nolan novel I reviewed here at borg: Hard Cash, the fifth Nolan novel. I had no idea.

As you see in the cover of Mad Money and the other novels in the series with art by Mark Eastbrook, Nolan is Collins’ Lee Van Cleef lookalike, a bad guy who thinks he’s a good guy in a world of creeps and criminals even worse. With Spree, Collins again pushed the boundaries of pulp crime. It’s full of the writer’s brand of rough sex, racist characters, and violence we’ve seen in his Quarry series and earlier Nolan stories, but this time that includes threats of incest and underage sex, the kind of cringey content that paints the darkness into the story’s villains. It’s also the kind of shock and awe that would later make Quentin Tarantino win movie awards. It all goes full circle, because Nolan was inspired by Donald E. Westlake’s Parker novels, which inspired every other pulp crime writer, including Tarantino. Spree takes Collins into horror territory, something that may give readers a Silence of the Lambs vibe.

I’m still reading and enjoying Nolan novels, with five more to look forward to, but I think Collins’ effort to stretch out the word count of this book is reflected in page after page of padding. Collins is a master of brevity in his books, and he spent more time in this book with descriptions that neither enhance the mood and setting nor further its plot. At a few points his leads Nolan and frequent sidekick Jon even make mistakes that the characters I thought I knew from Bait Money, Hard Cash, and Skim Deep were too smart to do. Maybe I was wrong about them?

COLLINS: I don’t ever knowingly pad. I understand it might come off that way, and I do get accused of it from time to time; but it’s not something I do to plump up page count or whatever. Nor am I in particular a “master of brevity.” If anything I am criticized for writing too much description of setting and wardrobe, which has irritated some readers and reviewers. I don’t care. My object is to use setting and wardrobe for purposes of characterization.

The book is a longer one than the other Nolans and was, like Stark’s Butcher’s Moon, designed to be more in depth than the somewhat brief paperback originals preceding it, and in a way to sum up the series (also like Butcher’s Moon). If by padding, Bunce means more characters than usual, I am guilty. The narrative technique in the Nolan books is to immerse the reader in point-of-view chapters of various characters, some rather minor. I learned this – borrowed (stole) this – from Westlake’s “Richard Stark” persona. This technique is an effort to make the world seem bigger.

BORG: Here’s the set-up for Spree: Nolan’s nemesis, hick Comfort family patriarch Cole discovers where Nolan has landed: owning a restaurant/nightclub named Nolan’s attached to a typical 1980s mall in Davenport, Iowa. Nolan previously killed some Comfort family members in a past exploit, and Comfort decides it’s time for payback. He stakes out Nolan and his mall and, along with his son and daughter, kidnaps Nolan’s girlfriend Sherry. Cole tells Nolan he must help him rob all the mall stores or he’ll kill her.

Collins provides the minimal details to show how the heist might be possible, but not quite enough to make it believable. The players are numerous: a few guys who worked jobs with Nolan before, plus a set of shoot-first triplets who can fence the loot later. Sherry, the great, tough, equal to Nolan, is relegated here to the victim role, and the 1980s shine through with Sherry as the only woman lead of the story. The only other woman is Cole’s “slutty-looking” daughter, who Cole hits on because she looks like her mom. Yikes. In no doubt Jon’s worst moment of the series, he has sex with the teen (who worships Jon from his days as small-time rock band member), which is bad choice #1, then instead of holding her to swap for Sherry he just lets her go (bad choice #2). Nolan has his worst moment by not grinding the story to a halt and holding the girl for a swap, maybe slapping Jon a few times. The story also just stops, and we don’t get to see the aftermath, which is a disappointment after all the build.

COLLINS: Sherry is held captive and (SPOILER ALERT) frees herself by way of a combination of her courage and ingenuity. Hardly a “victim” role. The structure becomes a back-and-forth report on the heist Nolan and Jon are forced into mounting for Cole Comfort and Sherry’s captivity and her efforts to free herself. At the time, I considered this effective and well-handled…and I still do.

The punchline of the massive robbery is (SPOILER ALERT) when Nolan makes his accomplices put everything back. The last dozen pages are devoted to the “aftermath.”

Of course, Bunce has every right not to like how I handled this, and for it not to work on him. Fine. A novel is a collaboration between writer and reader, and sometimes that collaboration goes better than other times.

Now, however, we arrive at the reason I have chosen to respond to this review. Bunce appears to be object to (or be offended by?) Cindy Lou, Cole Comfort’s seventeen-year-old daughter, being described as “slutty-looking.” But that description comes not from an omniscient author, rather a character in the novel, in that character’s point of view. The reviewer considers Jon’s “worst moment of the series” as having sex with this teenage girl. It’s a “bad choice.”

As we say in the funnies, “sigh.” I run into this with modern reviewers all the time. They object to sexism but not to homicide. Jon is a traveling rock musician in his early twenties; Cindy Lou is seventeen (the age of consent in Iowa is sixteen – making their consensual tryst “cringey” perhaps, but not “underage”). Still, that may indeed be a bad choice. You know what else is a bad choice? Being an armed robber. This is similar to the reviewers who criticize Quarry for sizing up women based on their attractiveness. I guess you’d expect better behavior from a murderer.

Nolan’s “bad choice,” Borg informs us, is that the retired thief does not kidnap Cindy Lou and try to swap her for Sherry. So we’re in favor of kidnapping now. In fact, the second section of the book concludes with a discussion, almost an argument, between Jon and Nolan about whether to kidnap Cindy Lou for this purpose, and how that might play out (not well)…or instead to manipulate this unhappy, abused girl (yes, manipulate – shame on them!), into helping get Sherry back. One of the darkly comic aspects of the novel, and that specific scene, is that Nolan and Jon are not as bad as Cole Comfort. Still, that doesn’t make them “good.” And the story does not “stop” here – it’s a cliff-hanger at the end of a section.

Also, and this is key, certain aspects of how the heist will go down are not revealed until (wait for it) the heist goes down.

BORG: Nolan, Jon, Sherry, and the reader know there is no way Sherry is going to get out of this alive. That’s the story Collins tells, but not quite where it lands – Collins doesn’t stick the landing as satisfying as in his other works (whether in his Nolan, Quarry, Heller, or Mike Hammer novels). Nitpicking aside, appropriate bad guys get theirs, just not directly proportionate to their level of vileness, and that’s a shame. But the bookending Collins incorporates is clever and almost delivers some satisfaction.

COLLINS: This grudging praise is for an aspect of the novel that I am rather proud of – the resolution of both Sherry’s escape from captivity and what Nolan does about the mall robbery he’s been forced into engineering. The fates of Cole and Lyle Comfort are very satisfying to the author and I believe probably are to most readers.

BORG: Jon returns as a slightly older young version of Nolan – who also has all those interests of a young Max Allan Collins – a guy who wants to create comic books for a living. He’s lost his apartment, which drives him back to Nolan for help, where he meets Sherry. He’s at a down point in his life with Nolan, but that doesn’t explain his extra dose of bad judgment this round.

COLLINS: Again…it just may be possible that Jon’s bad judgment was when he decided to be a fucking armed robber. Here, when he (like Nolan) has moved away from that into a more acceptable mode of living – the ironic theme of the series is that all Nolan wants is to realize the American Dream – Jon is still paying for the genuinely bad choice he made in this series, i.e., robbing a bank with Nolan in the first novel (Bait Money).

By the way, the supposed aspects of my life and interests as expressed in the Jon character are exaggerated by Bunce and others. I use my knowledge of comics and being a rock musician to provide some verisimilitude. But nothing else in Jon’s background or frankly character is drawn from me. On the other hand, the Mallory character (in No Cure For Death and other early novels of mine) is me, which is why I don’t write about him anymore – too boring.

BORG: Is there a worse pulp crime family than Collins’ Comforts? I don’t think so. Spree is not a typical Collins quick read, and that epic mall heist only gets to what you could imagine as the montage sequence in the movie adaptation. If the film rights were exercised today, the cast would need to be better developed and the execution a bigger part of the story. Here the idea is so good, but the delivery not so much.

COLLINS: I guess faint praise is better than no praise at all. In the context of my career, Spree was the first Nolan novel I wrote after the early Nathan Heller books (none of which is a “typical Collins quick read”). In fact, the success of those early Hellers got me the contract to do Spree (and Primary Target). Spree was a hardcover (not a paperback original, like the previous entries) and was a story designed to have some heft (not padding).

BORG: It may not be Collins’ best, but it’s still fun, and it will keep you engaged. Order Mad Money, including Spree and Mourn the Living, here at Amazon, and check out the other double-trouble sets, Two for the Money, Tough Tender, and Double Down, and the final novel in the series, Skim Deep (reviewed here). I reviewed Hard Cash here and Bait Money here. Keep coming back to borg where we’ll double back to the second novels in these 2-for-1 editions from Hard Case Crime later.

COLLINS: I am grateful for the attention Borg/Bunce brings to this series, and mean zero offense by this response. But I consider Spree the best Nolan novel, and feel it resolves the larger issues of the series, and the specific ones of the narrative at hand, rather well. So much so that I considered the series finished till editor Charles Ardai talked me into doing a coda by way of Skim Deep.

I also know that Spree is the Nolan novel most often cited as the favorite (or best) in the series by readers. Considering Bunce’s speculation that a modern screen version of Spree would probably improve it, I’ll mention two related facts: my own screenplay of Spree was optioned several times (twice by Bill Lustig), and right now Lionsgate is developing a Nolan film…based on Spree.

I want to make it clear that C.J. Bunce is an able reviewer and the Borg a worthwhile review site. Visit them here.

The issues I touch on above are nothing I usually would have bothered discussing – they are strictly a matter of opinion, and no one is more biased than the author. What made break Rule #1 (never respond to a reviewer in print) (or otherwise) is what I’ll call (for want of a better term) the Political Correctness Issue.

The first time I encountered this was with the publication of Bait Money in 1973, when I was criticized for Nolan thinking of young women as “girls.” A forty-eight-year-old-man in 1971 (when I wrote the book at age 21) would hardly think of a young woman in any other terms. But I began being careful about that.

Nate Heller was another matter, and he continues to be. Reviewers would occasionally complain about his sexism and racism, among other isms. Heller is a man in this twenties in the early 1930s and we are with him until he’s in his fifties in the mid-1960s. I try to be true to who the character would logically be, and what is appropriate to the year at hand. I tend to use “colored” and “Negro” most often, but have occasionally been beaten up for that. Heller indeed sizes women up by their looks, and has certain sexist tendencies (he hangs out at Hefner’s Chicago pad and dates Playmates, Bunnies, strippers, models and showgirls). A early lost love followed by an unhappy marriage made him a shallow swimmer in the male/female relationship pool. But he also treats women as equals and I am proud of the depiction of the major female characters in the novels, from Sally Rand to Amelia Earhart to Marilyn Monroe.

None of these offended critics has ever commented on the fact that Heller frequently murders the bad guy, Mike Hammer-style. Not once. As Tarzan might say, “Sex bad. Violence good.”

Quarry, similarly, is mostly a ‘70s and ‘80s character with views and modes of expression appropriate to those times. (Quarry’s Blood is modern-day and an exception; but Quarry remains a guy born around 1950) (a murderer, by the way).

Is a guy in a rock band in the mid-1980s, in his early twenties, making a bad choice having casual, consensual, legal sex with a teenage groupie? I’ll leave that up to you. But reviewers cheerfully accepting murder from Jon, Nolan, Quarry, Hammer and Heller, without comment, is an interesting commentary on what we consider acceptable in a fictional narrative.

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A nice mini-write-up about the Antiques series is here (scroll down).

Finally, here’s an analysis of the graphic novel Road to Perdition.

M.A.C.

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Encore for Filmmaking

Tuesday, April 25th, 2023

This new e-book collection of the three John Sand spy thrillers by Matthew Clemens and me is available from Wolfpack and, for the first time, includes Murderlized, a collection of our stories, one of which is the first John Sand story.

Max Allan Collins Collection Volume Two: John Sand cover image
E-Book:

An informal meeting of Quad Cities area filmmakers was put on at dphilms on Saturday, April 24. Since I‘ve largely been away from indie filmmaking in the area – though of course I’ve done some screenwriting in the interim – it was a nice opportunity to see some new and old (and in between) faces.

Quad Cities area filmmakers meet at dphilms
Quad Cities Filmmakers Meet at Dphilms, Rock Island. Chad Bishop and Max Collins at far left, Phil Dingeldein centerstage (next to colorful painting).

I had frankly thought filmmaking was behind me. The last thing I shot was an award-winning short in 2007 called “An Inconsequential Matter” starring my friend and longtime collaborator, Michael Cornelison (it’s a bonus feature on the Eliot Ness Blu-ray (), with excellent cinematography by Phil Dingeldein). Mike had starred in both the stage and movie version of Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life in 2005, as well as narrated Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and my comics-history documentary, Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop (). Mike worked with my right up to the end of his too short life, appearing as Pat Chambers on both Mike Hammer audio presentations, “The Little Death” (winner of an Audie for Best Original Work) in 2010 and “Encore for Murder” (nominated in that same Audie category) in 2011.

Mike Cornelison

Losing Mike – who was as valuable a collaborator to me as is my friend Phil – took the wind out of my filmmaking sails. I have, of course, had some things happen since then in the movie realm – we sold Heller to FX and I wrote the pilot (never produced), Quarry became an HBO/Cinemax series in 2016 (and I wrote an episode) and I’ve written a screenplay, Cap City, for director David Wexler. Recently, Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher by Brad Schwartz and me has been optioned by CBS Films, Nolan has been optioned by Lionsgate, and Mike Hammer (not just Mickey’s novels but the joint Spillane/Collins ones) just closed a deal at Skydance. Some serious interest is also afoot for the Antiques series, Ms. Tree and Fancy Anders.

With Hollywood, you never know, but there has been a lot going on. The truth is, on these projects my direct involvement is likely to be limited to being the source writer and a consultant, and maybe getting to write an episode of anything that goes to series (Hammer appears to be on track for a feature film, which is great, but there’s no way I would get to write it).

After my heart and cancer surgery, I figured my moviemaking days were over, and they may largely be. We shall see as we shall see. But the “instant” movie that Encore For Murder with Gary Sandy became – a rather last minute decision to shoot the live semi-pro production with multiple cameras – is what really got me going. Sitting with the gifted Chad Bishop in his editing suite, seeing our little movie come to life, reminded me how much I love doing that kind of thing.

This is a good time to remind you that – if you are close enough to Muscatine, Iowa, to make the trip (the Merrill Hotel is great, by the way) – Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder, the movie, will be shown at 7 p.m. on Friday, May 5, at Muscatine Community College. The details are here.

We will also be answering questions about our upcoming production of Blue Christmas, my return to serious indie movie production. Chad Bishop, my producer on the project, will be present as well as much of the Encore cast (not Gary Sandy, though).

If you’ve dropped by here in recent weeks, you’ll know that we have launched an Indiegogo crowd-funding effort to raise a mere $5000 (of course in Iowa five grand is not “mere”) intended either to provide some matching funds required by the Greenlight Iowa grant we’re going after, or (should we not get that grant) to help fund a version of Blue Christmas along the lines of a recorded live production a la Encore (however not Golden Age Radio style – plenty of bells and whistles).

As an incentive strictly to those of you nice enough to show up here at my weekly Update, I will offer a perk to anyone who comes in at any level by way of some item from your M.A.C. want list. Now somebody at the $25 or $35 level needs to be sane about what books and such they put on their want list. Larger contributions mean you can shoot higher and, in any event, I will do my best to make it worth your while. (This has a nice Nate Heller sleazy sound to it, doesn’t it?)

Your name will go in the credits at the $100 level, and at $500 you get screen credit as an Associate Producer, enabling you to impress your more gullible friends. There are other perks mentioned at Indiegogo, and at that level you can probably talk me out of something rare from my private stash.

An Executive Producer credit is available at (choke) $2000.

As I write this we are at $1440 – 28% of our goal, with a little over a month left on the campaign.

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Quasi (2023) movie poster

For those of you with a twisted sense of humor, I have a couple of film recommendations for you.

Just debuting this past week on Hulu – wholly unexpected to me – is the latest from the Broken Lizard comedy team, Quasi, the only Quasimodo movie that lacks a bell tower. I love Broken Lizard. They are masters of smart dumb comedy. The movie everyone knows – and most comedy fans adore – is Super Troopers. They write the scripts together and – with the exception of the crowdfunder Super Troopers 2, produced a decade and a half later – always go after a different subject or genre. Hence, Super Troopers 1 & 2 (cops), Club Dread (horror films), Beerfest (well, beer), Slamin’ Salmon (the restaurant game), and now Quasi (historical epic). Various team members have taken the “hero” role in these films, and various of them have directed, most often prolific TV director, Jay Chandraskekhar, although Kevin Heffernan directed both Slamin’ Salmon and Quasi.

The humor in Quasi comes from a cheerfully anachronistic approach to dialogue and a sweetness surprising for a film depicting somebody’s ballsack being nailed to a wooden block. It recalls Monty Python’s Holy Grail (the Broken Lizard guys each play multiple roles) and Start the Revolution Without Me, but despite the nonstop silliness, Quasi is more concerned with story than either of its two probable inspirations.

I watched it twice.

As I’ve mentioned before, a while back Barb and I saw Broken Lizard perform live at the Englert Theater in Iowa City and got to spend some time with them after. They were nice, normal human beings, funny and approachable, exhausted from the show they’d just presented but signing all of our DVDs and Blu-rays with patience and even joy. (Probably helped that I had their somewhat obscure first outing, Puddle Cruiser.)

Streaming on Peacock, the already notorious Cocaine Bear proves to be the funniest gory movie since Evil Dead 2. Its humor is a blend of Coen character eccentricities, Three Stooges slapstick, and jawdropping carnage. It’s largely about parenthood – specifically, motherhood. I realize some horror fans want it to be even gorier and dislike the amount of humor – for me, the fact that I’m laughing to the point of pain while watching humans getting torn apart strikes just the right balance.

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Back Issue, an outstanding magazine on comics history, covered my brief run (one continuity) on the Batman comic strip. It’s really in depth with lots of Marshall Rogers art, and I would encourage you to seek it out.

Finally, here’s a decent Kirkus review of the imminently forthcoming Mad Money, collecting Spree and Mourn the Living, the last of Hard Case Crime’s reprint series of the Nolan novels.

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.

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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.

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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?

* * *

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!).

* * *

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.

Working on Nolan’s Return

Tuesday, February 4th, 2020

Cover of Mad Money, which will reprint Spree and Mourn the Living.

I am “coming down the pike,” as Barb puts it, on the new Nolan novel, Skim Deep, the first in the series since Spree (1987). Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai has for some time been encouraging me to write a new Nolan, lately to help launch HCC’s upcoming reprint series of the previous novels (they will be done two books to a volume). These sport excellent covers by Mark Eastbrook, and that includes the novel in progress.

Also, a fair number of readers have wanted another Nolan. I’ve resisted this because I felt the character’s story was over – that Spree concluded it nicely. Nolan has always been an ongoing saga as opposed to a series with a premise, in the way of a P.I. novel does or a Quarry or even an Antiques entry.

Of course, Nolan has always been a homage to the Parker series by Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake), and as I often said to Don himself, “Homage is French for rip-off.” Don was always nice enough to say that Nolan, largely because of surrogate son Jon, was distinctly different from Parker. He also on occasion described my Nolan as the Jayne Mansfield to his Parker, and I would correct him, saying more the Mamie Van Doren.

To be fair to myself, the Nolan series did (after the first novel, Bait Money) quickly become its own thing. Nolan is a professional thief of fifty trying very hard to go straight and take part in the American Dream; but karma keeps looking for him, and finding him.

Editors wanting me to write something for them are a seductive lot indeed. So I’ve embarked on Skim Deep and am enjoying it a great deal, or anyway as much as possible when I’m up against a deadline – which is today, as it happens, which I’m going to miss by a week or two.

Then, out of the blue, there’s been some Hollywood interest in Nolan, which seems vaguely serious and involves a bunch of talented people. I’ll say no more because such things often do not play out into anything at all.

Rejoining these characters required little besides checking my previous novels for continuity issues. That’s in part because over the past several decades I have written various versions of a Spree screenplay (optioned a few times) that had me dealing with Nolan, his lover Sherry, and of course cartoonist/musician, Jon.

As is the case with continuing Quarry, I am keeping the novel in the time frame of the original series. Skim Deep takes place in 1988, about six months after Spree.

But I thought you might like another peek behind the curtain, this time as it pertains to working on this as yet unfinished novel.

Over the years I have developed a process that begins with an outline breaking the book down by chapters. Each chapter gets a paragraph or two, and occasionally just a couple of sentences. Among much else, that allows me to make sure the novel will be long enough to satisfy the editor (word count is often specified in contracts, although mostly that’s a guideline not a rule).

Each chapter has to be outlined, at least in my head, like a little novel or anyway a short story. And the narrative tends to develop in ways and directions I didn’t plan. So it is not uncommon for me to re-plot about half-way through, to accommodate the surprises I’ve given myself.

Fiction writing is largely a writer solving problems of his or her own making.

More often than not, I re-plot again, about half-way through the new half-a-novel outline. Sometimes more frequently. I have just written Chapter 11 of 17 (two of which are short chapters near the end). And I have, at this stage, re-plotted four times (after the initial first outline), and have also written a two-page outline of Chapter 11, which had a lot of moving parts to keep track of.

Last night, trying to get to sleep, I re-plotted again, but have not committed those changes to paper, although I will.

This is a tad (just a tad) unusual. But this represents my belief that plotting carefully must still allow for spontaneity. Have a roadmap, yes, but if a sign says, “World’s Biggest Ball of String NEXT RIGHT,” don’t be afraid to veer off. Some things just happen in a story – the ending of Road to Perdition had not been planned…just came out of my fingers when I was writing the final installment for artist Richard Piers Rayner.

Chester Gould did not plot ahead. He liked to say, “If I don’t know what’s going to happen next, neither will the reader.” That’s a little extreme, but Chet had a point.

* * *

Here’s a great write-up about the Reeder and Rogers political thriller series by Matt Clemens and me.

The Mommy/Mommy 2: Mommy’s Day Blu-ray gets some cool coverage at Media Play.

With Girl Can’t Help It waiting in the wings, here’s a nice review of Girl Most Likely.

Finally, MacMillan has the Kindle version of the Nate Heller novel Ask Not on sale for $2.99 here (regularly 7.00).

M.A.C.