The Big Bang « Friends/Family/Fans of Max Allan Collins

Say Hello To Goodbye

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

Kiss Her Goodbye

I have spotted KISS HER GOODBYE on the shelves of the Davenport Barnes & Noble, so you should be able to find the new Mike Hammer hardcover at your favorite brick-and-mortar. (The trade paperback of THE BIG BANG should be right next to KISS HER.) I don’t know if Borders is carrying the new Hammer (they aren’t getting as many titles in right now, for obvious reasons), but I encourage you to snag this one at Amazon or elsewhere on line, if you don’t have a “real” bookstore handy.

Don’t wait for the trade paperback, because I don’t know if there will be one. This is the last of the Harcourt Spillane/Collins Hammer novels, and the future of the remaining three is in your hands.

Also, the Stacy Keach-read audio book should be out soon. Stacy thinks KISS HER is the best of the three. Our old friend Craig Clarke seems to agree at his Somebody Dies blog.

Great news on about THE LAST LULLABY. I’ll let director Jeffrey Goodman tell you:

“I am very excited to announce that we have signed with Level 33 Entertainment to distribute THE LAST LULLABY in the United States. We are currently aiming for a Fall release of a newly-packaged DVD. At this point, I am not sure what extras it will include, but we are looking into some different things. We also expect this release to place LULLABY in many other places and make it much more readily available.”

Whether there will be a blu-ray seems up in the air. I also don’t know if Jeffrey will include me in the extras on the disc, but I’m hoping there will be some short history-of-Quarry feature, and possibly the original, award-winning short (“A Matter of Principal”) that spawned the film.

Speaking of Quarry, Hard Case Crime has brought out all of their Quarry novels again as part of their re-birth at Titan, the great UK publisher distributed in the USA by Random House.

You might check out this interesting if odd and not entirely accurate mini-article about my DICK TRACY movie tie-in, as part of a list of 100 famous rejections. For the record, it wasn’t Warrren Beatty who went to bat for my novel, rather producer Barry Osborne. And the rewritten version was deemed fine by Disney, they just made me remove the identity of the Blank, making the book the bestselling mystery novel ever published that didn’t reveal who did it. (The 6th printing includes my real ending – all other printings are incomplete.)

ROAD TO PERDITION has made another top ten comic book movies list.

It has also made this top 25 comic-book movies list.

And speaking of movies, you can get my long out-of-print boxed set THE BLACK BOX on sale for under $25 right here. It includes an anniversary edition of MOMMY and MOMMY’S DAY (with lots of special features not previously available), plus REAL TIME: SIEGE AT LUCAS STREET MARKET and the anthology film SHADES OF NOIR (available nowhere else, and including the original, longer cut of my Mickey Spillane documentary, recently shortened/re-edited for the Criterion KISS ME DEADLY release).

M.A.C.

Tags: Dick Tracy, Kiss Her Goodbye, Mike Hammer, Mommy, Mommy's Day, Quarry, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market, Reviews, Road to Perdition, Shades of Noir, Spillane, The Big Bang, The Black Box, The Last Lullabye, Tie-Ins
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Bang Bang

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

J. Kingston Pierce over at the great Rap Sheet site has a fun discussion (with plenty of comments, including from me) about the relative merits of the USA and UK covers of THE BIG BANG, the second Spillane/Collins “Mike Hammer” collaboration. But the key piece of news here is that THE BIG BANG trade paperback is out this week, and if you didn’t pick up the hardcover, now’s your chance to get the Best Private Eye Novel of the Year (according to Sons of Spade).

Another book that’s out is the TOP SUSPENSE anthology, designed to be an e-book but also available in a very nice trade paperback, too. Here’s the pitch:

Don’t forget the blistering anthology TOP SUSPENSE is now available for $2.99 on Kindle and a mere $11.99 in trade paperback. Our authors at the peak of their powers in thirteen unforgettable tales. This pulse-pounding anthology – packed full of cold-blooded killers, erotic tension, shady private eyes, craven drug dealers, vicious betrayals, crafty thieves, and shocking twists – is only a taste of the thrills you will find in the breathtakingly original ebooks by these authors at www.topsuspensegroup.com.

So sit back, bite down on a piece of strong leather, and prepare to get hit by some gale-force suspense and writing so sharp it will draw blood.

CLICK TO BUY YOUR COPY NOW!

Top Suspense includes:

Unreasonable Doubt by Max Allan Collins
Death’s Brother by Bill Crider
Poisoned by Stephen Gallagher
Remaindered by Lee Goldberg
Fire in the Sky by Joel Goldman
The Baby Store by Ed Gorman
The Jade Elephant by Libby Fischer HellmannThe Big O by Vicki Hendricks
The Chirashi Covenant by Naomi Hirahara
El Valiente en el Infierno by Paul Levine
A Handful of Dust by Harry Shannon
The Canary by Dave Zeltserman
The Chase by Top Suspense Group

Press release over, and M.A.C. back again: this is a terrific bunch of writers, all of whom have work well worth sampling, making this a worthwhile purchase (the e-book price is damn near a gift). Several of the Top Suspense Group writers are good friends of mine, but one is among my best friends – Ed Gorman. This week Ed was nice enough to give my Eliot Ness series a push (and me in general). If you haven’t read Ed’s work yet, you are missing one of the great contemporary voices in crime fiction – funny, wry, sad, innately Midwestern.

Here’s an excerpt from a piece about Ed that I wrote a while back, dealing in part with the notion some people had (early in Ed’s mystery-writing career) that he was a penname of mine – a mistake that arose because (a) Ed is an Iowan but never attends conventions and rarely does book signings, and (b) there are at least superficial similarities in our style and approach:

I am proud to have Ed Gorman’s writing mistaken for mine – having him viewed for a time as the Ed McBain to my Evan Hunter was pretty cool, actually. And, for years, when I would tell people that I had, no kidding, really met Ed Gorman, multiple times, it all seemed to be part of my master plan to put this pen name across.

Of course, this mistaken identity couldn’t last – Ed Gorman is too distinctive a writer, with a laconic, wry voice that is his alone, whether in first- or third-person. But it was fun while it lasted….

Ed’s distinctive voice and style are an outgrowth of his interests. He is an endless resource of arcane information and informed opinion about popular storytelling in the 20th Century. That’s why I spent so many hours on the phone with him – we could do half an hour on why Rex Stout was, line for the line, the best wordsmith of all; forty-five minutes on why we both loved Hammett and Chandler but considered the former superior; or an hour on why certain highly regarded crime writers of our day were worthy of Emperor’s New Clothes awards. It’s Ed’s ability to analyze what works in the fiction he reads that has made him such a skillful writer himself.

No writer of the late 20th and early 21st century has mastered so many genres – Ed is equally adept at mystery, crime, horror, science fiction and western. He is a screenwriter and a columnist. He respects and understands these genres and forms, much as he respects and understands his job as a professional storyteller.

Read more about Ed Gorman here (cue the NBC “More you know logo”):

http://topsuspensegroup.com/authors/ed_gorman.php

M.A.C.

Tags: Eliot Ness, Mike Hammer, Short Stories, Spillane, The Big Bang, The Dark City, Top Suspense
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Morgan The Raider #2: 44 Years In The Making!

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

I have just completed THE CONSUMMATA, the Morgan the Raider novel of Mickey’s that I finished for Hard Case Crime. It just went out via e-mail to editor Charles Ardai a few hours ago. I’m very pleased with it, but it was a tricky one. Mickey had completed 108 double-spaced pages, but this time I had no plot or character notes. Even the evocative title itself (which had been announced by Signet Books many years ago) went unexplained. It required really getting inside the manuscript, and Mickey’s head, to figure out where he was headed…and I think I pulled it off.

So finally, the sequel to THE DELTA FACTOR, the second Morgan the Raider novel (Signet Books announced modern-day pirate Morgan as Mickey’s new series character with great fanfare), will appear…with Mickey’s fans only having to wait 44 years.

My technique I’m sure would dismay purists. I expanded and revised Mickey’s hundred-plus pages, weaving my own scenes and thoughts and style in and around his, so that his material appears deep into the book, nine of its thirteen chapters. (I created no new characters, however, and my plot strictly flows out of things he put in motion.) I get a lot of praise (much appreciated) for the seamlessness of these collaborations, but it’s because I treat them as collaborations – and don’t just “pick up where Mickey left off” that they are able to achieve what they do.

This is going to be an extremely big year for me, at least in terms of how much stuff will be out there. I will do a post on that subject either next week or soon thereafter.

The First Quarry Audiobook

One thing that is out right now is the audio book of THE FIRST QUARRY. I haven’t heard this yet, but it’s the same reader (Curt Palmer) who did THE LAST QUARRY, and he’s excellent. This company, Speaking Volumes, will be doing more Quarrys – all the Hard Case titles and perhaps the early books, as well. It’s only $19.95, very reasonable for an audio book.

Vince Keenan considers THE BIG BANG one of the best books of the year. Hey, Vince – me, too!

The Sons of Spade website went even farther, calling THE BIG BANG the best P.I. book of the year.

This is very gratifying, and we showed up a few other places, too, but mostly were overlooked. This is the first year in a while that Bookgasm hasn’t listed me on the best books of the year. As I have made clear here before, I despise these lists, and give them absolutely no credence…unless I am on them.

There’s a lovely post about THE GOLIATH BONE, which posits a movie version and presents a dream cast. Very much worth checking out, plus I posted a comment you may find of interest.

There is a very interesting piece about the BATMAN character Two-Face and the similar Haf-and-Haf character in DICK TRACY, discussing my work on the latter and referencing my BATMAN work in general. I provided several comments and you may find the back-and-forth interesting.

Finally, the contest remains open for anyone who can identity my two sections of the Top Suspense Group “Round Robin” short story (see below for details). So for nobody has won. Well, almost nobody…my son Nathan pegged ‘em. Nice going, Nate! Too bad you don’t need any M.A.C. books….

M.A.C.

Tags: Batman, Dick Tracy, Mike Hammer, Morgan the Raider, Quarry, Reviews, Spillane, The Big Bang, The Consummata, The First Quarry, The Goliath Bone, The Last Quarry
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Getting A Big Bang Out Of Quarry

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

The Big Bang UK edition

Some nice stuff popped up on the M.A.C. front this week on the web.

We’ve had lots of really great reviews for THE BIG BANG, but this one from top UK critic Mike Carlson, who really knows his stuff, is probably my favorite. Mike was not a big fan of THE GOLIATH BONE, so getting this rave from him means a great deal.

Jedidiah Ayres has been reading the new Perfect Crime reprints of the first five QUARRY novels (available on line at Amazon and Barnes & Noble), and he’s talked about them several places. Check out his Barnes and Noble column, and this blog entry.

I am getting great comments from readers about these new QUARRY reprints – everybody seems to find them really handsome books and Terry Beatty’s covers are getting a terrific response. Even if you have the other editions on your shelf, you’ll find these worthwhile. Plus, my new intros are worth the price of admission! Well, not really, but you’ll probably enjoy them….

Jeffrey Goodman, director of the Quarry-based film THE LAST LULLABY, showcased the new Quarry reprints on his blog.

Another of those lists of “great movies that you didn’t know came from comic books” popped up, and had this nice write-up about ROAD TO PERDITION. We seem to be number one on the list.

And THE NEW ADVENTURES OF MIKE HAMMER: VOLUME TWO, THE LITTLE DEATH, has been named one of the best audio books of the year by AudioFile Magazine (in the “Full Cast” category).

Over at the Top Suspense Group web site, we are starting a publication of a round robin story (two 250-word installments each), featuring me, Vicki Hendricks, Ed Gorman, Bill Crider, Harry Shannon and Dave Zeltserman. Check it out.

M.A.C.

Tags: Awards, Mike Hammer, Quarry, Reviews, Road to Perdition, Spillane, The Big Bang, The Goliath Bone, The Last Lullaby, The Little Death, The New Adventures of Mike Hammer
Posted in Message from M.A.C. | 2 Comments »

Posts Tagged ‘The Big Bang’

Say Hello To Goodbye

Bang Bang

Morgan The Raider #2: 44 Years In The Making!

Getting A Big Bang Out Of Quarry