Posts Tagged ‘The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton’

Spillane, Soho & Jimmy Leighton

Tuesday, November 9th, 2021

The last book giveaway of the year – our biggest – is still underway – we have three copies left. If you want either The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton by Dave Thomas and me, and Fancy Anders Goes to War with Fay Dalton illustrating my novella, you still have a shot.

As usual, write me at macphilms@hotmail.com and provide your snail-mail address (even if you’ve won before) and your preference between the two books (if you don’t want a specific title, say so please). You pledge to write a review for Amazon – where both books are exclusively available – unless you hate what you read and don’t want to.

Amazon reviews and ratings are always important, but with these NeoText titles – unavailable in brick-and-mortar bookstores, and issued too late for the trade reviewers – they are crucial. If you like one or both of these books, please leave a review (and it can be short, a line or two). You can even rate them without posting reviews.

There are a bunch of links below to interviews Dave Thomas and I did together, but first you may wish to check out these links to sample chapters from The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton.

And at Crime Reads.

* * *

If you’ve been following these updates of late, you know that I have been deferring somewhat to the serialized chapters of my literary memoir in progress, A Life in Crime at the NeoText site. The first ten chapters have appeared and now the memoir goes into sleep mode. I will post more of these when new books come out that can use some background (and a push).

The plan was two-fold – the chapters allowed me to promote both Jimmy and Fancy, and – as I wrote the chapters well in advance – provide me time to work on the Spillane biography. I have completed that, or will very soon – my co-author Jim Traylor is going over the manuscript now.

It’s a big book and I hope will be perceived as a major one – it’s over 100,000 words, the complete life of Frank Morrison “Mickey” Spillane with all of his novels discussed, as well as the film and TV adaptations. The bio itself is 85,000 words, the remaining 15,000 (“The Spillane Files”) consisting of bibliographic material and odds and ends…sort of deleted scenes, like little essays about Spillane and Ayn Rand, the gangster named Mickey Spillane, and the possibility Mickey wrote as “Frank Morris” for the pulps.

With luck, the book will be out from Mysterious Press in about a year as part of the 75th anniversary of Mike Hammer celebration.

This one really is years in the making. Just short of a decade and a half ago, Jim Traylor spent weeks in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, digging through Spillane’s letters and other papers. Over the intervening years he interviewed numerous Spillane friends and family – obviously, Mickey’s contemporaries were getting up there and Jim spoke with any number of them who are now gone. He did several passes on the manuscript over the years. We interrupted the work on the bigger book to do Mickey Spillane On Screen for McFarland in 2012. We’ve worked hard not to repeat ourselves, having done One Lonely Knight: Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer decades ago.

While a lot of critical ground is covered in the book, I took the approach of making a linear story out of Mickey’s life, which was a colorful one to say the least. I gathered material I had collected on Spillane – magazines, newspaper articles, books – since I was in junior high, and my office floor looked like I was expecting the film crew from Hoarders to arrive any minute.

I considered suggesting the title The Mystery of Mickey Spillane as I began to realize that all of his disparate material provided puzzle pieces that could be assembled into the picture of a man. I knew the man in his later years, but I never met the young or even middle-aged Spillane. Many revelations emerged in the intense three-month process of writing the final draft.

Immodestly I will say I think Jim and I have written a major book on the most interesting figure in mystery fiction. In a year or so, you’ll be able to see if you agree.

* * *

Barb and I, regular filmmgoers (usually once-a-week) for many, many years, have gone out to the movies only rarely since Covid hit. Even though we are now triple-vaxxed, we are still careful – for one thing, our six year-old grandson Sam has asthma and Barb has been sitting with him and his three year-old sister in the afternoons while son Nate and their mother Abby work from home.

Barb is, of course, an amazing human being. She writes in the morning and then afternoons plays with those kids Monday through Thursday at my son and his wife’s house half-a-block up the street, and then we entertain the two kids Friday afternoons here. Sam and I generally watch a 3-D movie together.

Things are changing as Sam’s sister Lucy is now in Day Care, and Sam is going to get his Covid shot this afternoon. In a matter of weeks, he’ll be fully vaccinated and we can return to something more like normal. Or anyway the new normal.

Barb and I have only attended a handful of movies in a theater over these last vaccinated months – I believe Wrath of Man, Black Widow, No Time to Die and now Last Night in Soho are the only cinematic excursions we’ve made. We tend to go at off-times – yesterday, for example, we went to a 5:10 pm show. Only three other people were in the theater.

One Night in SoHo poster

That didn’t surprise me, really, because few people seem to be attending Last Night in Soho, and let me tell you (as Bob Hope used to say) it’s their loss.

I might have waited until this one was streaming if my Ms. Tree co-creator Terry Beatty hadn’t written me to say Last Night in Soho was “the best Brian DePalma movie Brian DePalma never made.” Now, Terry and I were at one time stone DePalma freaks, based upon Sisters, Obsession, Blow Out and especially Phantom of the Paradise. Most early and mid-period DePalma rated high with the Collins/Beatty team.

I lagged, and I think Terry did too (but I can’t speak for him), when the likes of Snake Eyes and Mission to Mars came along. But Terry’s description of Last Night in Soho resonated – I knew I had to see it in a theater.

Also, the writer/director Edgar Wright is sizing up as a major filmmaker. We’re talking Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Baby Driver. And I think Last Night in Soho may be his best work yet, though it’s difficult to discuss without spoiling it, because it takes a number of surprising and yet satisfying turns, delighting here, disturbing there.

Here’s a little bit of plot for you. A shy young woman – beautifully played by Thomasin McKenzie – from the sticks gets accepted into a fashion school in London; she has an affinity for tuneful 1960s music – the soundtrack swims in the stuff – and when the realities of modern Soho disappoint, she finds herself dreaming or fantasizing or possibly even time traveling to the area in the mid-sixties, where she begins to identify with what seems to be a fantasy projection of herself played by the dizzyingly charismatic Anna Taylor-Joy of Queen’s Gambit fame. There are strong hints that this Alice through the looking glass has had mental problems in the past, and we know that her mother was a sensitive, troubled soul who took her own life.

I loved No Time to Die, but it pales next to the thrill of seeing the young woman at the heart of this tale walk into a Soho landscape where a gigantic looming marquee for Thunderball glows in the night like a neon memory. That moment alone is worth seeing Last Night in Soho on a big screen. In a theater.

I’m not sure this movie is for everyone. It helps to have a feel for ‘60s music (anyone who considers what’s been happening for the past twenty years in music, at least in mainstream popular music, may be bewildered by things like an actual melody attached to accessible poetic lyrics). And you have to be willing to take the ride, a ride that doesn’t always go where you expect it to (what an effing pleasure)!

A lot of movies try to create the feeling of a dream, and this one accomplishes that, including the shifts in time and place and the feeling of being at the center of a dream and watching it at the same time. And yet you sense there’s a grounded story underneath all the questions being raised and the moods being bumped up against each other. But you have to be patient.

Not a movie for stupid people. That’s why you’ll like it.

* * *

Dave Thomas and I have been getting some nice attention for The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton.

Here Dave and I are on Sci-Fi Talk.

Here’s a wide-ranging, long Jimmy-centric interview with me at Word Balloons.

Here’s Dave on a Canadian news program, starting with his Bob Hope impression and winding up with Jimmy Leighton!

Finally, here’s a great print interview with Dave that really lets you know what Jimmy Leighton is about and talks about how the collaboration came to be.

M.A.C.

Hey Kids – The Last and Biggest Book Giveaway of 2021!

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2021

This is the last book giveaway of the year – ten copies of Fancy Anders Goes to War and ten copies of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton. Write me at macphilms@hotmail.com with your order of preference. You pledge to write a review at Amazon for these – I specify Amazon because both books are exclusive with Amazon on Kindle and (for now at least) as physical media…you know, books.

If you hate the book, you are released from your pledge to review it, though of course you may anyway. This is a USA only book giveaway. Be sure (IMPORTANT) to include your snail-mail address, even if you’ve won previously.

Here, by the way, is a link to NeoText and their announcement of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton, where you can also buy it.

Anybody out there who reads and likes either of these books, your Amazon reviews are vital this time around. As I mentioned last week, neither book went out to the publishing “trades” – Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal and Booklist. The reason is boring, so try not to let your eyes glaze over: NeoText is an e-book publisher, and fairly late in the game I convinced them (they are good people) to do print versions as well. These are Print-On-Demand books (and they look great). But “late in the game” means we weren’t able to get them to the trade reviewers on time.

Some of the Internet reviewers and a few newsstand magazines will get copies, though. But obviously it’s vital that my fans (both of you) review these books, preferably favorably, and get the word out.

Dave Thomas and I are doing our best to let the world know about Jimmy Leighton. We recorded a two-part Gilbert Gottfried podcast last week, which should “drop” (God I hate that expression) soon. We have done other podcasts together and separately, and some online interviews, too. Some links will follow at the end of this update.

Dave and I have become good friends, which I can hardly believe, stone SCTV freak that I am. He is a great guy, warm and funny but also with a genuine streak of Bill Needle (SCTV fans will understand). While we met a couple of times (unmemorably for Dave) before, during the writing of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton we did not. The plan had been for one of us to travel to the home/locale of the other, before we dug in to the writing – to plot the book, get a synopsis together, in person.

Then Covid came along.

So The Many Lives of Jimmy Lives became a Covid book – developed by Zoom and daily telephone calls (more than once a day, often). Dave did the first pass of each chapter, but called me frequently during the writing – he would read me what he’d written so far, I’d give notes, and we’d kick around where the chapter might go from there. Dave gets bored with just executing the synopsis, so the story became fluid in an interesting and positive way. I have never worked this way, and it was a glimpse into how SCTV and TV writers’ rooms work.

Dave had a bad health scare along the way – not Covid-related, other than the anxiety caused by having to deal with a health crisis when hospitals were overflowing with Covid cases – at a point where we had the first five chapters and a synopsis ready. We had already decided that we would do just that much before taking it out to market.

With Dave in the hospital, quite frankly fighting for his life, I set about to sell our book. I tried a couple of venues where I’ve had some success and got the kind of frustrating responses that longtime pros are used to – glowing enthusiasm and delight leading up to “not right for our list” as the punchline.

I was not prepared for that, though should have been. It is always difficult to sell a genre hybrid, and Jimmy Leighton was exactly that – half contemporary science fiction, half gritty crime novel. I brought my agent on board to try Canadian publishers, because Dave is a national treasure up there – a genuine superstar, as Bob and Doug are among the few Canadian icons. We got nowhere.

My agent was about to take it to other American publishers (only two had seen it) when I mentioned the project to my editor at NeoText, where I had just delivered Fancy Anders Goes to War. He was eager to see the chapters and proposal. The sale came quickly.

The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton, without text, trimmed
E-Book: Amazon Purchase Link
Trade Paperback: Amazon Purchase Link

Fancy Anders was set up to be published as three novellas, and each – although designed to add up to one book – was a stand-alone. We had brought the great Fay Dalton aboard to do elaborate illustrations for the Fancy novellas, so to give her time to accomplish that, we set up a program whereby the publication of the three Fancy novellas would be staggered over six months at least.

Initially we were going to publish Jimmy Leighton the same way. But first Dave – then I – became concerned that the three sections of Jimmy didn’t each stand alone in the way Fancy did. And we had early on abandoned the idea of illustrations for the book, other than the cover art. So – again – fairly late in the game, we lobbied for NeoText to publish Jimmy as a single book. The novel had been written that way and it began to make sense following that path, not the Fancy one.

It’s cost us reviews, which is (as I’ve indicated) where you come in.

I know I harp on this a lot. But the nature of the beast these days is that you nice people who actually still read books need to support the authors you like with reviews online, particularly at Amazon.

I irritated some readers when I complained about self-professed fans of mine who would (in my view) attack novels of mine that didn’t suit what they wanted from me. On artistic grounds, my hopping around from here to there has a lot to do with me staying fresh and also pursuing various interests, which takes me various places, obviously. But on practical grounds, I write a lot to stay in business and bad reviews from people who only like some of my work, and go out of their way to complain about what they don’t like, costs me money. Worse, it can cost me venues.

This is true for all of us telling stories in the very old-fashioned prose fiction way. Support the authors you like. Don’t just write reviews of my stuff, but theirs, too (I’m fine with me being at the top of your list, though). Even a couple of sentient sentences will do, but longer expressions of delight are good also (very Jerry Lewis cadence there)…even balanced, well-reasoned opinions are encouraged. Those numbers – how many reviews and even just star ratings have been logged – are key for the success of a book, and for an author to continue producing.

Novelists are an endangered species, like the spotted owl. Keep us healthy and fed, would you? Spotted owl is delicious, by the way.

* * *

I’ve had some wonderful comments on my ten-part literary memoir, A Life in Crime. I hope to write a few more entries over time, and eventually collect them into a book. Among the things I did not discuss at length in the series are my adventures in indie filmmaking, comics/graphic novel writing, the Spillane novels (Caleb York deserves a chapter of his own), and a bunch of other stuff.

The serialization of A Life in Crime allowed me to focus on the Spillane biography, which I completed my draft of over the weekend. I still have the lengthy “Spillane Files” appendix to work on, although most of that was already put together by Jim Traylor, who has been working on this project literally since Mickey’s passing in 2006.

This will absolutely be the definitive book on Mickey Spillane – the story of his life, and the story of his life’s work. We hope to send it to our publisher, Mysterious Press, this month.

* * *

I was disappointed in Halloween Kills. The same writing/directing team who did the much superior Halloween reboot stumbled here, sacrificing a political allegory about Jan. 6 and the divisiveness in America to a humorless and unpleasant gore fest. I understand this is the second of a trilogy and I liked the first film enough to give the third one a try.

Barb and I watched Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, which is flawed but very entertaining and underrated. Halloween Kills could have benefitted from this much unloved non-sequel’s strong but fleeting gore, and heavy-handed but effective satire.

In the Halloween spirit, I showed Nate The Final Girls, the 2015 horror comedy that has a group of current teens getting stuck inside an ‘80s slasher movie. It’s somewhat little known but is well-worth checking out, if you are at all a fan of the Halloween/Friday the 13th genre.

* * *

Here’s a great Fan Base interview with Dave Thomas on our novel, The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton.

Check out the Dave Thomas Appreciation Page at Facebook.

Finally, here’s the Word Balloon podcast with Dave about the book (and his SCTV adventures).

M.A.C.

Jimmy Leighton Lives!

Tuesday, October 26th, 2021
The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton, without text, trimmed
E-Book: Amazon Purchase Link
Trade Paperback: Amazon Purchase Link

The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton by Dave Thomas and me goes on sale today in both Kindle and physical book form. It’s quite reasonably priced – on sale at $3.99 for the e-book and $8.99 for the “real” book.

As I am still working on the Spillane biography, I am again making the Jimmy Leighton/Dave Thomas entry in my literary memoir, A Life in Crime, the major piece this time around. Link to it here.

For reasons not entirely clear – I believe the technical term is “screw up” – the physical book went on sale a couple of weeks early. Because of that I’ve had some nice e-mails from people praising the book – completely unbiased types like Terry Beatty – and I’m starting to feel a warm fuzzy glow about it.

Now I will get down on my figurative knees and beg (can’t pull that off easily with my literal knees these days): if you read and like this book, please give it an Amazon rating and write at least a brief review. We’re starting to get some nice media attention – Dave and I are recording Gilbert Gottfried’s podcast this evening – but the book will almost certainly be ignored by the mainstream publishing trades (Publisher’s Weekly and so on). We did not make the necessary three- to six-month lead time to get review copies to them. (See explanation of technical term above.)

So, more than ever we need your reviews. The physical book is only available at Amazon – not in bookstores and not even at the Barnes & Noble site, at least not yet. And the e-book is strictly for Kindle. I hope to do a book giveaway soon to prime the review pump, but don’t have copies in hand yet.

This book – I mentioned this last week – is not a novella, like Fancy Anders Goes to War. It’s a 90,000-word novel, a contemporary crime novel/s-f hybrid. We had originally signed up with Neo Text to publish it in three novella-length parts. But – and here is where Dave and I did our part to help screw things up – at the last minute we decided we preferred it to be published in a single volume.

I really love The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton. It’s a type of story I’ve long wanted to tell – in the vein of It’s a Wonderful Life, Ground Hog Day, Here Comes Mr. Jordan and A Christmas Carol. The closest I’ve come previously is the novella “A Wreath for Marley.” If you generally like my work, I would be astonished if you didn’t like this. In fact, I guarantee that will you like – stopping short of the “your money back” part.

* * *
Dune Promo Photo

Dune is the first new movie we’ve streamed at home that Barb and I kinda wish we’d seen in a theater. I almost like the wacky David Lynch version of this material, but found it mostly silly. I was surprised to like this serious take on the s-f classic so much; Barb liked it, too. Even in an age where we take CGI for granted, this one is visually stunning, transporting you to a world unlike our own (except for the politics).

It’s not called Dune, actually – it’s Dune and then, in the kind of fine print usually reserved for contracts they don’t want you to really read, Part One. Lynch had squeezed the whole book into a couple of hours and change, which is partly why it’s such a rough ride (inherently quirky, Dune hardly needed David Lynch to make it more so).

Be forewarned: the new and improved Dunecomes out of the gate slow, or anyway leisurely. There’s a lot to process and time is spent grounding the viewer. Lynch did an endless opening narration that had your head spinning before the film really started.

* * *
A Return to Salem's Lot Blu-Ray Cover

I’ll make a Halloween recommendation.

I had never seen writer/director Larry Cohen’s A Return to Salem’s Lot(1987). At the time, the barely released, sort of sequel to the Salem’s Lot mini-series (Cohen did a script for that but it was rejected) was savaged by most critics. But Cohen is consistent about only one thing in his filmmaking: he doesn’t care what you think. This is his version of Our Town but with vampires.

It has one of the oddest and in my view coolest casts ever, starting with Michael Moriarty, who combines sincerity and confusion in a unique mix, his seriousness as an actor relieved by a puckish sense of humor. Playing rather ancient vampires are (get ready) Evelyn Keyes (from Here Comes Mr. Jordan!) and June Havoc (“Baby June,” Gypsy’s sister!), with Andrew Duggan (Bourbon Street Beat) as the folksy town patriarch. Playing a sort of senior-citizen sideick to Moriarty is Samuel Fuller – you heard me! The great director, cigar in his mouth, charges into the last third of the movie and just takes over; it’s an incredible, fearless performance. Also featured are lots of blood, gnarly special events and some of the least convincing rubber monster masks ever committed to film. It’s the kind of film that just skips narrative steps and plants exposition in the mouths of characters to apply spackle over your questions. When it bothers to.

I couldn’t have had a better time.

* * *

This is a rather wonderful dual interview with Dave Thomas and me that ran in the Edmonton Journal, conducted by the sublimely named Fish Griwkowsky.

Here’s one of those announcement type posts about Jimmy Leighton, with a great look at Fay Dalton’s wonderful cover art.

M.A.C.

Collaboration and the Greatest Songs

Tuesday, October 19th, 2021

A great collection of Jack Kamen-drawn EC crime stories, Three for the Money, has just been published by Fantagraphics, and I wrote the intro for it. You will like this. Buy it here.

This week the major event of this update is a link to the second-to-the-last (for now) installment of my literary memoir, A Life In Crime, which this time talks about collaboration with an emphasis on the story behind my ongoing partnership with Matthew V. Clemens.

For reasons I don’t understand, the print version of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton by Dave Thomas and me is already on sale at Amazon although the Kindle version won’t be available till Oct. 26. So all of you Baby Boomer and other physical media types can order it right now.

I think Dave and I will likely be doing some podcasts and dual interviews on blogs as such – and Dave has already done Entertainment Tonight Canada, so other bigtime appearances may be in the works…sometimes with Dave alone, since I never appeared on SCTV or teamed with Rick Moranis. Anyway, heads up, and I’ll do my best to let you know about such things and stuff right here.

* * *

Channeling Bob and Doug, the topic this week is Rolling Stone, eh, and why I feel out of step.

It’s not just a feeling – I am out of step. I have continued to subscribe to Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly in a sad old-man attempt to know what’s going on in popular culture. But I suspect those magazines are out of touch themselves, perhaps with reality.

Let’s look at the October 2021 issue of Rolling Stone, shall we?

The cover is of Dave Grohl, and I know who he is and I like his music. But buried in the upper lefthand corner is a small: CHARLIE WATTS 1941 – 2021. Now when the death of the drummer in the second-most-important rock band of all time, in a magazine in part named after that band, gets pushed into the corner for a musician alive and available for a subsequent cover, I have to question somebody’s sanity and, for once, not my own.

Never mind.

An article on James Bond includes the following phrase: “The movies barely had time to get going before they inspired brilliant parodies like James Coburn’s Our Man Flint and Dean Martin’s The Silencers.” That must be “brilliant” in the British sense, like how was your Macdonald’s lunch? “Brilliant!”

Let’s move on to the topic of the issue: THE GREATEST SONGS OF ALL TIME.

Now first let me express an opinion that I don’t consider at all controversial – there is a difference between a song and a recording. This list appears to be about the “greatest” recorded songs “of all time.” So we’re off to a rocky start. By the way, there’s nothing by Cole Porter or Frank Loesser or Rodgers & Hammerstein or Rodgers & Hart or Stephen Sondheim on this list…but never mind.

Number 1 is “Respect” by Aretha Franklin. Okay, great record. But few of us have ever hummed “Respect,” which makes it less than the greatest song of all time. Still, not a crazy, absurd choice.

But Number 2 is “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy. A real toe tapper; just can’t get that melody out of my head, can you? Now what I’m about to say probably is controversial: no rap or hip hop recording is a “song.” It is a performance and it can be art. It can be valid and it can achieve excellence. But can it be a song? No. Yet predictably there are plenty of these on this list. A list that has “Be My Baby” at 22 and “God Only Knows” at 11.

There are wonderful songs here – like (at 72) “Yesterday.” Before you call me racist because of what I say about “Fight the Power,” let me point out that “What’d I Say” by Ray Charles is (drum roll please) number 80, and “Let’s Stay Together” by Al Green is at 84. “In My Life” is at 98. A really great Aretha Franklin song is at 90 – “You Make Me feel Like a Natural Woman” (written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin – actual songwriters).

And while Charlie Watts didn’t get the cover, Rolling Stone is self-indulgent enough to rate “Like a Rolling Stone” at 4, which is at least a goddamn song.

Tons of good stuff on the list, though. Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” is number 3. But “Get Your Freak On” is 8. “Imagine” is 19 and “Satisfaction” has to wait till 31. Oh, good – Del Shannon’s “Runaway” is at 25…

…no, it’s not Del Shannon, it’s something by Kanye West.

If Public Enemy is number 2, then how is “Walk on By” by Dionne Warrick number 51? Hold it, there’s “One” by Three Dog Night! Great! Oh…it’s the “One” by U2.

Okay. I guess.

I need to chill out. I need to be feeling those “Good Vibrations.” At 53. 42 “greatest songs” below “Hey Ya!” by Outkast.

Look, I know these “greatest” and “best of” lists are all bullshit. But this is insulting, revisionist bullshit, from people whose sense of history is maybe last Tuesday, proving all such lists that don’t include a single song by the Zombies are invalid. Ditto for Weezer. Bobby Darin. The Association. Blondie. Elvis Costello.

Over to you.

* * *

Finally, here’s another Fancy Anders Goes to War (and more) interview by the very cool Comic Book Couples Counseling.

M.A.C.