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Blue Christmas Is a Wrap!

Tuesday, October 31st, 2023

Jake Marley (Chris Causey) and Richard Stone (Rob Merritt) in the private eye’s office.

We completed production on Blue Christmas last evening, and will be picking up various things and stuff at Muscatine Community College (our gracious host) this afternoon. Before I discuss the shoot, let me provide some background, requesting patience from those of you who have heard this story before (perhaps more than once).

The day before Thanksgiving 1992, I was notified by mail in a letter from a particularly odious editor at Tribune Media Services that my services as writer of the Dick Tracy strip were no longer required. I had done the writing of the strip, taking over for creator Chester Gould, since late 1977 – a fifteen-year run plus a few months.

Actually, they had already picked up my contract by not notifying me into I was three months into the new contract period, which was an automatic pick-up. But when I called the gracious Robert Reed, the recently retired head of the TMS, he talked me out of suing the Trib. He had hired me, and he deplored the decision of the editor (who had not hired me), but reminded me how many lawyers the Trib had, and how costly it would be for me to fight a battle even in the right. Then he said something I will always appreciate him for.

“You don’t need to worry about your next job,” he said. “You’re Max Allan Collins.”

I had needed reminding on that point. My friend and future DC Comics editor, Mike Gold, had already told me, “You really should have moved on after ten years. It stopped serving your career at that point.”

Nonetheless, it was a blow. And the same day, my agent informed me that – just a few weeks after winning the Best Novel Shamus award for Stolen Away – my Nate Heller contract had been dropped by Bantam Books, who had screwed up the series by publishing the hardcover and trade edition simultaneously, and making my hardcover sales on that title look like shit in the computers.

So I had lost everything, career-wise – both Tracy and Heller. I scrambled and did a few short stories for my pals Ed Gorman and Marty Greenberg, God bless their memories, but mostly I was at a loss. Untethered. And as close to a writing block as I had ever got. Thanks to Ed and Marty I kept going. But other than those assignments (writing for their theme anthologies), I had hit the wall.

Then on Christmas Eve 1992, after the festivities were over (my family has always celebrated Christmas Eve, rather than Christmas Day), I had an idea and began to write. A Christmas Carol was one of my favorite stories, the Alistair Sim film of it in particular, and my favorite single detective novel was The Maltese Falcon. I had the stray thought that the two stories might be effectively combined, and began to type. I have no idea how long I worked – most of the night, as it was a single session – but the result was a fifty-page novella, “A Wreath for Marley.”

I am not by inclination a short story writer, but as soon as I’d finished it, I knew “Marley” was special. Maybe not to anybody else, but to me. And over the years it’s been in several anthologies and ultimately the lead story in a holiday-themed collection of my shorter stories, Blue Christmas (available from Wolfpack in the collection’s most current incarnation).

The writing of “Marley” ended my creative logjam. Soon I had sold Carnal Hours, one of the best Heller novels, to Dutton in a multiple-book contract; and – on the fly, at WonderCon – sold the idea of Road to Perdition to a DC editor who wondered if I might be interested in writing a noir graphic novel. Mike Gold and Robert Reed had been right – losing Dick Tracy was like Dean Martin breaking up with Jerry Lewis – teaming with Jerry was the best thing that ever happened to Dino (Martin said) and the next best thing had been breaking up with Jerry.

Another result of losing the Tracy strip was finally pursuing my interest in filmmaking. In 1994 I wrote The Expert in Hollywood for director William Lustig, and wrote and directed Mommy here in Iowa. The latter feature – in which Patty McCormack portrayed a grown-up variation on her famous evil kid role in The Bad Seed – became a video store hit and sold to Lifetime as a movie of the week. Its success led to my scripting a feature film version of “A Wreath for Marley,” which I called Blue Christmas. We were in pre-production of that project when the success of Mommy made it necessary to follow up with a sequel, Mommy’s Day, causing us to temporarily shelve Blue Christmas. The thought was to do it next.

That did not happen. While Mommy’s Day was also a video store hit, we did not get a cable TV sale, and then my producer – only my best friend from high school days and the best man at Barb and my wedding – stole our money. I was never able to mount a full-throated production again. Our budgets of half a million and a quarter million for Mommy 1 and 2 respectively were never to be repeated.

I managed to stay active in indie filmmaking for another decade. I served three terms as president of the Iowa Motion Picture Association. I was able to get funded for two documentaries (Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop) and did three short films with my Mommy director of photography, Phil Dingeldein. Phil and I mounted Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market for around $10,000 (shooting mostly on security cameras) and had a similar budget (thanks to a Humanities Iowa grant) with Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life. I wrote numerous screenplays and sold a few, including some that were never produced, with a short Quarry film, “A Matter of Principal” leading to the feature The Last Lullaby, which I co-wrote.

Then, of course, there was Road to Perdition with its big-name cast and Academy Award nominations and so on, which led to Phil and me trying to get the sequel, Road to Purgatory, off the ground. Much time was spent on that and we came heart-breakingly close several times. While various screenwriting projects continued (and still do), gradually I came to accept that my film directing days were over.

I did not consider this a tragedy as my fiction writing was trucking along. A Quarry TV series was produced by HBO for their Cinemax network and I was able to do a couple of scripts for it (one for the never-produced second season). Filmmaking was a part of my credentials and that was nice but nothing I was actively pursuing any longer.

Then last year I co-produced the “Mike Hammer” Golden Age Radio-style play, Encore for Murder, originally an audio full-cast production with Stacy Keach. I had done the play twice before (in Owensboro, Kentucky, and Clearwater, Florida) with Gary Sandy as Hammer. Gary and I were friends going back to his co-starring role in Mommy’s Day. This latest Encore production was a fundraiser for the local art center/museum, and Gary generously donated his time.

The play came together so well that literally a few days before its single performance, I called Phil Dingeldein and asked, “Do you want to make a movie this weekend?”

As some of you already know, Phil came down and he and Chad Bishop (who was the on-stage foley guy in the play) pooled their resources to shoot two dress rehearsals and our one performance. Then Chad and I spent a month or so editing the footage into a movie of sorts – or maybe it’s a television program, hard to say exactly what animal it is.

At any rate, the result, like the performance itself, was surprisingly good. Phil and I were already mounting an expanded version of the Spillane documentary as a 75th anniversary (of Mike Hammer) release for VCI. We showed Encore for Murder to Bob Blair, the president of VCI, pitching it as a Blu-ray bonus feature for the expanded documentary. Bob not only snatched it right up for that purpose, he planned a release on DVD of Encore itself. Both will be out well before year’s end.

So my filmmaking juices were flowing again. I proposed to Chad Bishop that we mount a follow-up Golden Age radio-style production of Blue Christmas. This morphed into a stage play that I planned to shoot much as we had Encore, only with more elaborate pre-production.

Finally I decided just to shoot it as a movie.

The script needed to be reworked from one that had half a dozen locations to one location in which all the the Scrooge-like visions take place in the private eye hero’s office – a single realistic set that would serve surrealistic purposes.

Phil came on board, taking a week’s vacation to shoot it (with his sometime accomplice, the talented and skilled Liz Toal), meaning we had to mount the principal photography in a single week. I approached Muscatine Community College about using their black box theater as, essentially, a film sound stage for the week-long shoot, and they got on board.

We had been led to believe we had a good shot at a Greenlight Iowa grant for $50,000, which would have been tight but sufficient. We mounted an Indie Go Go campaign to raise supplemental funding and reached our $7000 goal. But the grant did not come to us – although frankly we were never contacted about that after jumping through many an official hoop (never even informed we weren’t getting it, which stalled us while we waited for news that never arrived).

So finally we built upon the Indie Go Go money, took our own payment completely out of the budget (Chad, Phil and me), and got one $5000 investor and a few more donations, coming up with a princely $14,000 to produce the equivalent of a $300,000 to $500,000 indie. This was a big part of planning to do the film in (choke) six days.

For a long time, Gary Sandy was going to play Marley, but other commitments and a reluctance to work during the actor’s strike (although our micro-budgeted production was not a target of the strike) caused Gary to drop out a few weeks before shooting began. That left us with a cast consisting of talent from the Quad Cities, Cedar Rapids and Muscatine, with almost everyone from Encore for Murder back again.

So how did the shoot go?

The professionalism of Phil and Liz was a breathtaking thing to watch. Chad Bishop wore more hats than Barthlomew Cubbins – lighting, audio, producer, actor. I had caught Covid about a month out and got cleared to work weeks before the production would begin; so I was tired and exhausted going in…but that didn’t stop me. I would say I got my stride back by the second or at the latest third day.


Barb and Max on set at Blue Christmas.

Our set was a thing of beauty thanks to Bill Turner, a veteran of local theater; and Bill took on a role in the production as well, doing a fine job. Our lead was the remarkable Rob Merritt from Cedar Rapids, who has many movie roles under his belt and held up under the burden of being in virtually every scene. Among his co-stars was national celebrity Alisabeth Von Presley, who looks like something out of a Russ Meyer dream and performed like a dream, period. The entire cast did stellar work, including Encore veterans Chris Causey, Rene Mauck, Cassidy Probasco, Brian Linderman, Keith Porter, Judy Wilson, and Evan Maynard. Tommy Ratkiewicz-Stierwalt, Chase Bishop, Kim Furness, Dave Juehring, Tracy Pelzer-Timm and Scot Gehre, among others, were also in a very talented cast of twenty-four. Corey Ruby did the special effects, and my old Seduction of the Innocent pal Chris Christensen has signed on to do the score.


Director of Photography Phil Dingeldein gets a role…

…and lead actor Rob Merritt films a scene.

We worked long days – seven a.m. till at least seven p.m. On all but one day, I went home on the lunch hour and took a nap. The production was both brutal and rewarding, and it’s doubtful I’ll ever be foolish enough to put myself through something like this again…although I’m glad to have done this one last time.


Special effects man Corey Ruby takes pride in applying bullet holes to lovely Alisabeth Von Presley.

Barb had sworn not to be part of this crazy effort, but she was right there with me on the first day and thereafter. She ran craft services and did so very much more. Nathan Collins and Matt Clemens were there every day running security (MCC was in session). Nate did everything from man a boom pole to shoot footage on a high-end camera.

Of course, we’re not finished. Chad and I (and Chad’s cohort Jeremy Ferguson) will be shooting Second Unit material, chiefly establishing shots (once the snow starts to fall here). And right away we will begin editing, a process I enjoy a great deal.

I will report here as we move forward, but I can say that at long last, the promise of Blue Christmas is being fulfilled. If we’re not the best goddamn fourteen-thousand dollar movie ever made, I defy you to show me one that is.

* * *

Despite some stellar reviews on Amazon, Too Many Bullets remains mostly ignored by critics elsewhere. As I mentioned previously, none of the trades – Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal or Booklist – had reviewed it.

I am going to get the book into some reviewers’ hands, but in the meantime, if you’ve read and enjoyed the novel, please review it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads and elsewhere, and if you have your own blog, talk it up there.

There have been a few notices, like this one.

And this.

M.A.C.

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Robert Rydell/Siodmak/Odenkirk

Tuesday, April 12th, 2022

Last week I talked about Bobby Darin. Since then, my second favorite pop-music artist of the pre-Beatles era has passed – another Bobby.

Rydell.

Robert Ridarelli has received less acclaim than Darin, and he would have been the first to say he was fine with that. He was a humble man whose great accomplishments came early in life, as was the case with almost all the teen idols of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. But he deserves better than just having a mythical high school named after him in Grease.

When Barb and I saw him perform with the other two Golden Boys of Bandstand, Frankie Avalon and Fabian – and while Avalon and Fabe were very entertaining – Rydell was the show stopper. For one thing, he was the only Golden Boy whose set was almost entirely his own hits; although the other two are somehow more emblematic of teen idols of the period, only Rydell was a consistent hitmaker. The only song he sang at the performance we saw that was not a chart hit of his was “Mack the Knife” – part of an excellent, obviously heart-felt tribute to Bobby Darin.

Darin was clearly Rydell’s model for moving into material that straddled teen and adult tastes – his “Old Black Magic” was patterned on Darin’s “Bill Bailey,” and Rydell’s biggest, arguably most memorable hit, “Volare,” was his “Mack the Knife.” “Sway” was another Dean Martin hit reimagined (Dino’s version of “Volare” informed Rydell’s) but his more rock-oriented numbers indicate the great “Wild One” and such fun numbers as “Wildwood Days” (which didn’t even make the Golden Boys set we saw) and “Swingin’ School.” His post-Beatles hit, “Forget Him,” is a fine ballad.

I met him twice and had an e-mail exchange with him once.

At the Iowa State Fair in 1981, Barb and I were strolling through the grounds one afternoon when I heard someone singing, “New York, New York.” I told her it sounded like Bobby Rydell and we made our way quickly to a bandshell stage in front of which fairgoers were on benches listening. It was indeed Rydell, and we heard most of a set that mingled standards with hits, including “Swingin’ School,” which I had always loved, though it’s a fairly idiotic song. But it had been in the Dick Clark-starring “Because They’re Young,” a major film event for the junior high kids of my era.

After the show, I tracked the performer to a small trailer – one of those two-wheel jobs, which would have provided him with just enough room to freshen up a little, maybe catch a nap and avoid pests. Well, not this one. I knocked and he came out and was very gracious to both Barb and me, giving me five minutes to gush about how I owned all of his albums. Which I did. Which I do.

We spoke a little bit about Darin and he seemed genuinely moved by my enthusiasm for that other teen idol of his era.

Very softly he said, “Ah, Bobby…Bobby….No one like him.”

Ten years or so later, Barb and I took in that Golden Boys of Bandstand show in Cedar Rapids. It really was a wonderful concert, but Rydell stole it. His “Mack the Knife” brought down the house, and he had more hits of his own to share than Frankie and Fabe put together.

Barb and I hung around the stage door like the wide-eyed fans we were, and all three came out and greeted a small group of fans, and took their time chatting and signing autographs. Rydell claimed to remember meeting us before. Avalon and Fabian were clearly impressed by how beautiful a woman I’d somehow convinced to go around with me.

In 2010 Rydell released a terrific CD, “Then and Now,” which was two albums – a re-visitation of his greatest hits, very nicely done, and a swing album in the Darin/Sinatra vein. I thought it was an outstanding job and wrote Rydell saying so, and got a warm personal reply – clearly not canned, as it responded specifically to my remarks. I dropped him a few notes after that, when he was suffering from health problems – he underwent several transplants (kidney and liver).

I tried, perhaps twenty years ago, to get a contract to do a book on the Bobby’s – Darin, Rydell and Vee. Bobby Vee I also met and he was a wonderful rock entertainer and a warm, lovely guy. My late musical collaborator Paul Thomas got to know him really well.

As for the other famous Bobby of that era, I’m not a big Bobby Vinton fan (don’t dislike him) and have one small connection. At a Vegas show, Vinton asked for a volunteer to duet with him and my father was enlisted. I wasn’t there, but I’m told Vinton was startled by my dad’s trained, commanding voice, and smilingly accused him of being a ringer sent to embarrass him.

The absence of Rydell and Vee from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame is criminal. I feel the same about Pat Boone, for his importance (his cover records opened doors for the original artists, plus for several key years he out-sold Elvis), and for the Association and Vanilla Fudge for obvious reasons.

When Rydell passed away at 79, the Hall of Fame oversight came jarringly to the fore.

John Lennon, by the way, confirmed that the “Yeah, yeah, yeah’s” of “She Loves You” were inspired by Rydell’s use of them in several songs (“We Got Love,” which “She Loves You” started out as an “answer” song to the Rydell hit).

Anyway, here’s a taste of two of Bobby Rydell’s hits performed years later.

And from the same show, here’s a look at his Darin/”Mack the Knife” Tribute.

* * *

I’d like to call your attention to two excellent films noir that had somehow slipped under my radar.

Shakedown Blu-Ray cover

Shakedown (1950) stars Howard Duff, whose big success on radio as Sam Spade led many in Hollywood to think he was a natural for big league stardom. That never quite happened, though he had success as a B-movie star and wound up on TV starring on Felony Squad (earlier, he and his then-wife Ida Lupino had a somewhat successful sitcom, Mr. Adams and Eve). His career was likely compromised by McCarthy-era accusations, but Shakedown reveals him as an interesting screen presence whose rather putty-like features (while handsome) suggest an unspoken moral laxity that really power this particular noir.

Directed by Joe Pevney – whose other noirs are pretty middling and whose claim to fame is helming episodes of the original Star Trek – Shakedown charts the rise and abrupt fall of a newspaper photographer who climbs to the top over anybody in his way and who blithely blackmails dangerous gangsters until (of course) it all catches up with him. The pace is fairly breakneck and the cast is amazing – Brian Donlevy and (yikes) Lawrence Tierney are among those Duff betrays or blackmails. Noir veteran Peggy Dow and former screen Tarzan Bruce Bennett are cheerfully trampled along the way. With a script co-written by Martin Goldsmith, who wrote both the novel and the film Detour, you know what you’re in for.

The Devil Strikes at Night Blu-Ray cover

The Devil Strikes at Night is a 1957 German film directed and written by noir master Robert Siodmak, after his long stay in Hollywood (Criss Cross, The Killers). It’s an anti-Nazi film made in Germany, a little more than ten years after war’s end. If that weren’t enough, it has a remarkably rule-breaking structure, cutting between a wounded war veteran who returns to his job on the homicide squad and the crimes of a serial killer who is presented with startling sympathy. On top of that, the film seems to wrap up at the one hour mark with a half hour remaining. That it continues on in its bleak, uncompromising way – including a “happy” ending that has the protagonist heading off to the front to likely die – is pleasingly head shaking. By the way, it turns out the SS were a bunch of crumbs.

Both Shakedown and The Devil Strikes at Night are available from Kino for you other dinosaurs who still like physical media.

* * *
Comedy! Comedy! Comedy! Drama! cover

People are always asking me what I’m reading.

Well, I just finished the excellent Comedy! Comedy! Comedy! Drama!, the autobiography of Bob Odenkirk. The triple comedies of the title should indicate to potential readers (perhaps even warn them) that there’s more here about Odenkirk’s many years as one of our best comedy performers and writers than on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Both of the latter get paid attention, each about a chapter’s worth. But Mr. Show gets more space, probably because Odenkirk was a writer/creator (with David Cross of course) on it, whereas he’s “just” an actor on the great Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

To put this in perspective, I said to Barb, “I love this book! You wouldn’t like it.” Keep in mind we’ve been married over fifty years, so I have reason to know her fairly well.

But Odenkirk conveys his own voice in the book – you hear him speak, you crawl around in his brain, you understand how he thinks and how he makes career choices, about which he frequently, frankly criticizes himself.

The book also has some strange resonances for me. Odenkirk lived next door to Dick Locher, my second Dick Tracy artist, who had been his Scoutmaster. Odenkirk’s best friend was John Locher, he was his father Dick’s artistic assistant who I worked with and liked very much (he tragically died very young, while he was preparing to take over the strip from his dad).

Also, Odenkirk knew Del Close – even met him in a bookstore in Chicago (as did I, when Del came to a Nathan Heller signing). Some here may recall that I directed Del in Mommy’s Day. Odenkirk invokes Del many times in his book.

My son Nate (then living in Chicago) met Odenkirk at a Second City event; Bob signed a Mr. Show DVD to me. We have never met, but I feel we have.

* * *

Here’s an article on the making of The Expert, the movie I wrote back in 1994. I make some comments clarifying issues made in the piece.

Remember, The Menace by Spillane and Collins will be available later this month, and The Shrinking Island by Spillane (introduced by Collins) is available now.

M.A.C.

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Cruse Control

Tuesday, June 14th, 2016

I realize, as the writer entrusted by Mickey Spillane to complete his Mike Hammer novels-in-progress, that I have a good number of conservative fans. Few if any of them are concerned that my views are too left-leaning for the task – I don’t write my point of view when I’m doing Mike Hammer, I write his.

Also, I try not to indulge in politics here. I don’t want to alienate readers, or collaborators who might hold other opinions.

But I would be remiss not to share an opinion in the aftermath of the Orlando tragedy. Here it is: you don’t need an assault rifle to kill a deer, unless Bambi has one, too.

* * *

My first Crusin’ gig post-heart-surgery went well, if not perfectly. It was a hot, humid afternoon in Muscatine, Iowa, though a nice breeze rolled in off the river. The event was open to the public, designed as an after-work event for downtown merchants and businesses. Our host, the First National Bank, did a great, fun job creating a 1970s class-reunion vibe. On the slight downside, this tended to make us background music and not the main event.

I was a little frustrated that I had to curtail my showmanship because of my limited stamina – I feel like I’m just playing and singing, and that’s only half of the job. And during the last half hour of the two-hour gig, I seriously ran out of gas. I don’t think it was terribly (if at all noticeable) by the audience, but I knew it and so did Barb. But I made it. It was a start.


Brad Schwartz and M.A.C.

That was Thursday of last week. On Friday and Saturday, co-author Brad Schwartz and our research associate – both making considerable treks to join me – met at my house to work on the joint Eliot Ness/Al Capone non-fiction book we are doing. We sold the book, based on a proposal and sample chapter, a year ago, and this was our first face-to-face since. There’s a reason for that.

I learned on the set of QUARRY in New Orleans that we’d made the sale…and the night before I’d suffered congestive heart failure. So it’s taken a while for me to get in shape for such a meeting.

But these two guys know their subject inside/out. We talked strategy and scheduling and much more. We also watched two movies about the Capone case – the embarrassingly lousy SPECIAL AGENT (1935) with Bette Davis and George Brent (and Ricardo Cortez as the Capone figure!), and the very, very good UNDERCOVER MAN (1949) with the always top-notch Glenn Ford, directed by Joseph Lewis of GUN CRAZY fame. The latter film is practically a schematic for THE UNTOUCHABLES TV series, though the hero is not Ness but the over-rated IRS agent, Frank Wilson.

* * *

The Rock and Hall of Fame discussion rolls on. Witness Micheal Tearson’s comment:

As for the R&R Hall, that’s been kind of a bugaboo for me. I had to deal with it constantly while I was working on Sirius/XM’s Deep Tracks channel which was pretty closely aligned with the Hall’s own channel (same administrator for quite a while). It became my view that the Hall has long since lost any focus on R&R as more and more artists with little or nothing to do with rock & roll have been honored. My top omission would be Procol Harum (Love is another). I’d also argue they have been very harsh on prog rock by skipping Moody Blues, Yes and ELP, all of whom have had very influential careers.

And “robbiecube”:

As much as I think the RRHOF is a scam, when acts I dig get ignored as disco & rap acts are inducted, I need to vent. And by vent, I mean list the acts I believe should already be in the hall;

Blue Oyster Cult / Procol Harum / Thin Lizzy / Kate Bush / Rory Gallagher / MC5 / Motorhead / Mose Allison / Grand Funk Railroad / Johnny Rivers / X / XTC / Pretty Things / J. Geils Band / Husker Du / The Jam / Deep Purple.

I think Michael’s remarks show that each generation has its own valid complaints about which acts have been forgotten. I certainly can see his prog rock choices as worthy ones.

As for Robbie, I think the same (slight) generational difference is afoot. But I would certainly be in favor of Kate Bush, XTC, Johnny Rivers and Deep Purple. Personally I find a few of the choices less than worthy – J. Geils, Thin Lizzy, Grand Funk – but that’s just taste. And some are just outside my range of musical knowledge – I have heard of Husker Du, but that’s all, and Procol Harem (mentioned by both correspondents) is only “Whiter Shade of Pale” to me. My bad, as the kids (used) to say.

But it certainly indicates how the Rock hall has missed the boat on a ton of significant artists.

* * *

Here’s 10 hitman novels everyone should read (oddly, only one of them is a Quarry, making the other nine pretenders).

Here’s a fun, intelligent look at WILD DOG (although the otherwise well-informed writer refers to my DICK TRACY stint as “short” – fifteen years?!?).

SUPREME JUSTICE is on a top ten list of Supreme Court novels.

Finally, here’s an uncomplimentary look at THE EXPERT. Worth a read, and stick around for my comment.

M.A.C.

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A Real Bookstore

Tuesday, September 16th, 2014
Centuries and Sleuths Signing 2014
Barbara Collins and Max Allan Collins with fan Andy Lind

Barb and I did a signing at one of our favorite bookstores, Centuries and Sleuths in Forest Park, Illiniois, this Sunday past. The turnout was modest but included some of our most dedicated fans – one of whom brought two cartons of doughnuts! (Thanks, Rick!) The relatively small group meant that these hardcore fans could ask all kinds of knowledgeable questions, and that was a real pleasure. Among them were Andy Lind – Cedar Rapids fan relocated to Rockford who came all that way – and Mike Doran, old TV expert par excellence and frequent poster here.

Hosts Augie and Tracy Aleksy are ever gracious, good-humored and interested in what authors have to say. We signed some stock for Augie, and since we are doing no more signings this year (and probably few to none next), you may want to pick up signed copies from Centuries and Sleuths. You can call Augie at 708-771-7243, and the e-mail is csn7419@sbcglobal.net. He has signed copies of KING OF THE WEEDS, ANTIQUES CON, THE WRONG QUARRY, and – yes – SUPREME JUSTICE. He has a good quantity of signed ANTIQUES and Hard Case Crime QUARRY titles, too.

What makes Centuries and Sleuths unique is the combination of history and mystery – not just historical mysteries, but books on history. Right now Augie is concentrating on World War One (“celebrating” its 100th anniversary), and has all sorts of non-fiction titles available on the subject, but also fiction. He’s ordering in THE LUSITANIA MURDERS, for instance, in its Thomas & Mercer paperback edition.

Walking into a bookstore like Centuries and Sleuths is a reminder of what makes book buying such a pleasure in a real store with an expert hand-selling owner who really cares. If you are lucky enough to have a good indie bookstore, particularly a mystery bookstore, within your home area, please support them.

As a guy published by Amazon, I buy a good number of books there. But I have a simple rule that I try to follow. If I spot a book in an actual store – and it’s a book of which I was unaware – I buy it there. I don’t look it up on Amazon to get the cheaper price.

I have another rule that pertains to bookstores where I do a signing – I always buy a book there. It amazes me when authors do signings at bookstores and don’t repay the venue with a purchase. Maybe not all authors like books.

* * *

Here’s a nice little write-up about COMPLEX 90.

And out of nowhere comes this fun write-up on the film THE EXPERT for which I wrote the screenplay. The writer doesn’t know the extensive backstory – such as my working for many months on a DIRTY DOZEN version for older actors, then when Jeff Speakman was cast at the last minute had to throw together a very different version – but his views are smart and entertaining.

The Kindle Taproom has a swell write-up on my favorite of the Mallory novels, A SHROUD FOR AQUARIUS.

Finally, a writer picks his five favorite Mike Hammer novels, and there are some interesting surprises, including his favorite (the undervalued SURVIVAL…ZERO!) and THE BIG BANG.

M.A.C.

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