Posts Tagged ‘The Shrinking Island’

54 Years and Counting! (Really 56.)

Tuesday, June 7th, 2022

Barb and I took our first post-Covid lockdown overnight trip, celebrating our 54th wedding anniversary last week – specifically, on June 1st, the day of, and returning to Muscatine on June 2nd, the start of year 55.

It was a delightful trip, although two business situations back in the real world came up shortly after we arrived in Galena, Illinois (our favorite getaway spot) and reminded me how nice life was when you didn’t have a cell phone in your pocket.

Things settled down, though, and we shopped and lunched at Vinny Vanucci’s and had a lovely evening, dining at Fritz and Frites and then sharing a quiet, typically Collins evening in our suite at the Irish Cottage – see the photos as evidence.

M.A.C. and Barb at Fritz and Frites
Champagne and The Brain Eaters

You will note that I look almost giddy sharing a table with a beautiful blonde, undeterred by having spent 56 years of my life with her (we started going together in 1966). There are numerous reasons not to like me, even to hate me, but none better than my managing to hornswoggle (one of my late father’s favorite words) her into spending most of her life with me.

Obviously Barb is a beauty. But she is also funny and smart and ridiculously thoughtful. She loves the Three Stooges. She loves the Beatles. She loves the original Star Trek. She loves James Bond. She loves her grandchildren. And she even loves me.

The question we get most often is how we write together and remain married. I’ve seen other writing couples really struggle with that. My answer sounds flip but it’s true: our offices are on separate floors.

Another major factor is that we develop the idea for a story or novel together, often over lunch or on a car ride, and then she works alone on her draft, checking in with me only if she hits a rough patch and wants an opinion (rare). She does not love to write. I try to tell her that no writers really love to write, though many of us are compelled to do so, and all of us love to have written. But she entered the field basically to help me out, editing, and writing the “Mike Mist” feature for Ms. Tree after I burned out on minute mysteries.

So when she finishes a draft of a novel, she claims (believably) to be sick of it. She doesn’t care what I do with it. This is basically true, but if my draft wanders too far afield from what she had in mind, she’s very tough-minded about getting me back on track.

We just finished our short novel, Cutout, for Neo-Text. I say “finished,” but we haven’t heard back from the editor, so you never know when rewrites are requested. But it feels good and was very much an idea that came from Barb and a story that she generated. The Antiques novels are fairly loose and it’s not unusual for long stretches to be my work; but in Cutout, her writing was so tight that working on it, trying to improve on it, was like repairing an expensive watch.

So feel free to hate me for being so lucky in having this life partner. I don’t deserve her. But at least I know it.

Frankie Valli Concert 2022

We wrapped up our anniversary celebration with a concert – Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Really, it was Frankie Valli and four back-up singers/dancers, but I’m not complaining…it was a great show. Held at the cavernous and unfortunately named TaxSlayer Center in Moline, the concert featured an amazingly spry eighty-eight year-old Valli hitting all the high notes and giving a long, opening-act-free presentation of most of his many hits, without and without the Seasons. A multi-media affair, with a fantastic rocking band, it had a Vegas feel that made other oldies shows I’ve seen look and feel like the cobbled-together affairs they often are.

The event had been postponed twice, and we almost skipped it, having already had a fun but exhausting Galena trip. But we were very, very glad we saw this pop music legend in performance.

* * *
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds poster

Among the list of things Barb loves I listed Star Trek. We loved all the movies, including the one Shatner directed, and the recent J.J. Abrams reboot features, which not everyone does. We are okay with Next Generation, but every other ST series has left us cold – we haven’t ever boarded those vessels, not long-term.

I was once approached to do a Star Trek novel and was thrilled. It was to be about the newest, about-to-debut series, Enterprise, which I was told was a throwback to the original series. I watched the premiere, all revved up – it starred Scott Bakula, from Quantum Leap! But then it turned out to, well, uh…suck. At least in my opinion. And Barb’s.

I tried to get the book gig anyway, but both my tries were rejected because they resembled this episode of that Trek spin-off or that episode of this one.

Now comes Star Trek – Strange New Worlds, and we are both fans. It’s basically the series that Gene Roddenberry first intended to do, as indicated by the pilot (“The Menagerie”) with Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike, Majel Barrett as Number One, and Leonard Nimoy as Spock.

Strange New Worlds (streaming on Paramount Plus) is a smart, respectful prequel with a great cast. Anson Mount as Pike seems to combine the best of Kirk and Picard, Rebecca Romijn as Number One is a particularly strong presence, and Ethan Peck as Spock channels Nimoy to an eerie degree, particularly the sound and cadence of the original Spock’s voice.

The art design and special effects are stellar (sue me) and the stories so far mostly take place on the stunning Enterprise itself. The major difference is that none of the episodes to date are anything William Shatner would have put up with. Look, I love Shatner. (So does Barb.) He’s a force of nature and his Kirk is definitive. But he would never, never have allowed his episodes to focus so much on its ensemble cast. To Anson Mount’s credit, he holds the show together without flexing his ego.

This is the best Star Trek since…Star Trek.

* * *

Thanks to all of you who took advantage of the week-long 99-cent sale for the Kindle edition of No Time To Spy, which collects the three John Sand novels by Matt Clemens and me.

We did not hit number one on any of the Amazon bestseller lists (The Shrinking Island recently did) but we got into the upper reaches.

For those of you who (like me) prefer physical media, the “real” book of No Time to Spy is a fat thing of beauty.

You can get it here for $15.99.

* * *

Finally, here’s another of those “movies you didn’t know were based on comics” pieces, but not a bad one (on Road to Perdition of course).

M.A.C.

Paging Dr. Tongue, Plus Neal Adams and Martin & Lewis

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022

In case you haven’t been listening, 2022 is the 75th anniversary of Mike Hammer’s debut in the 1947 novel I, the Jury. A lot of exciting things are already underway. So far we’ve got The Shrinking Island and The Menace out there from Wolfpack’s imprint, Rough Edges Press. And coming up in about two weeks from Rough Edges is a great anthology of Spillane novellas, Stand Up and Die!

But perhaps most exciting of all (next to the January 2023 prose biography, Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction by Jim Traylor and me from Mysterious Press) is the long, long-awaited release of the 1953 film version of I, the Jury…and in 3-D!

I The Jury 3D announcement

ClassicFlix – who specialize in (not surprisingly) Blu-rays and DVDs of classic films from Hollywood’s 1930s/’40s/’50s Golden Age – is bringing it out (likely in the fall).
I will be doing the commentary.

The 1953 I, the Jury is a very underrated film (including by Mickey). Biff Elliot makes a fine Mike Hammer and the script and direction by Harry Essex are faithful to the source. Peggie Castle and Margaret Sheridan make the definitive Spillane women, and the great noir specialist, cinematographer John Alton, works in 3-D with his usual artistry. I put only Kiss Me Deadly ahead of it and would call the first I, the Jury a tie with The Girl Hunters for second place.

The publishing schedule for the Hammer anniversary includes The Menace, with me writing a horror/crime novel from an unproduced Spillane screenplay; a collection of the three YA novels, The Shrinking Island, with the previously unpublished title tale a Spillane fan Holy Grail; and the soon-to-be-published Stand Up and Die! (with a Spillane/Collins Hammer story) the best collection of Mickey’s novellas ever assembled.

In August Titan will bring out the novel Kill Me If You Can, again with me working from an unproduced Spillane screenplay and dealing with the period between Kiss Me, Deadly and The Girl Hunters – the direct aftermath of Velda’s disappearance. The book includes five Spillane/Collins short stories, including two Hammers.

And the capper of this wave of Spillane publishing will be the 100,000-word bio from Jim Traylor and me.

* * *
Two legends: Neal Adams (left), Batman (right)
Two legends: Neal Adams (left), Batman (right)

I suppose being my age – 74, damnit – means a progressive thinning of the ranks of my heroes and friends (two groups not mutually exclusive). Now we have lost Neal Adams, at 80, who for my money is the best Batman artist of the “serious” period, which – let’s face it – he and Denny O’Neil (also gone) invented.

He did much more, of course. His work on the comic strip Ben Casey, in his very early twenties, is stellar – I have an original daily example on my wall. I loved his Deadman, the Green Arrow/Green Lantern work was groundbreaking, and, really, everything his pen touched turned to great.

But he also was a champion for the rights of his fellow cartoonists, and he was a big part of getting some recompense for Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the teenagers from Cleveland on whose bones the DC empire was built.

I knew him a little, and I was complimented that he knew who I was…something which still seems to me a little unbelievable. I have a small but cherished memory of standing in line with him getting ready to ship things home from the San Diego Comic Con. I introduced him to my wife as a beginner I knew, and his grin couldn’t have been wider. He had a smile as dazzling as his artwork, and that’s plenty dazzling. We chatted and laughed for about five minutes, a small encounter that I will never forget. I always stopped by his booth at the con in subsequent years just to say hi.

Not a big relationship, by any means. But a big loss.

* * *

Another sign of advancing old age is my reading habits. I’ve never been one to start a book and then put it down without finishing it. But now I won’t waste my time if a book doesn’t engage me in a chapter or so. Like most of you, I have an ever-growing stack (stacks) of books I can’t wait to read. So some of this stuff just has to get out of the way if it can’t grab me.

Related to this is my experience with Judd Apatow’s new book, Sicker in the Head, a follow-up (of course) to his Sick in the Head. Both books are Apatow interviewing individuals in the world of comedy. I read every page of the first book. This time I read about a third of it.

Not the first third – I selected interviewees I was interested in – like the late John Candy, John Cleese, David Letterman, Peter Davidson, John Mulaney, Kevin Hart, Sasha Baron Cohen, Samantha Bee, and Will Ferrell. But I have no interest in people I have barely (or not at all) heard of – for example, Amber Ruffin, Ed Templeton, Hannah Gadsby, Lulu Wang, and on and on. Please don’t write telling me who they are, and/or defending their presence in a book with the comic legend likes of Candy and Cleese. I just don’t have time to let these people in unless they get up on their hind legs in the pop culture and make enough noise for someone my age to notice.

Now a book I read every word of is the massive, inch-and-a-half thick, 8.5″ by 11″, 772-page (!) Marketing Martin and Lewis by Richard S. Greene…with a foreword by Eddie Deezen! (Why didn’t Apatow interview him?!?). This is a Martin and Lewis fan’s dream, and worth the fifty-buck price tag (although I got it through Barnes & Noble for $40 using a coupon).

The book is predominantly pictures – movie posters and ads, TV ads, magazine covers, publicity photos, comic book art (Neal Adams!), and on and on; but the text is substantial and thorough, with every Martin & Lewis film discussed and the individual, post-team careers of both are examined. Greene is the ideal fan – his knowledge and the collectibles he shares are mind-bogglingly vast, but his opinions are frank, fair and well-articulated.

It also has the greatest cover of any book ever published. I shared this opinion with my wife, who looked at me as if about to say, “Are you for real?”

Marketing Martin and Lewis
* * *

Here’s a New Yorker article about a Muscatine, Iowa (my hometown) resident who inspired my Mallory novel, No Cure for Death.

An interesting Road to Perdition article is here, looking at the film’s shooting locations (cameras, not guns).

Netflix has added Road to Perdition to its roster.

This review of the Nolan two-fer, Double Down, begins with a left-handed compliment but evolves into a pretty decent write-up. I wrote these books around 1974 and it’s peculiar to see them judged in terms that don’t acknowledge it’s not unusual for writers to grow over time.

Finally, this article wonders whether Road to Perdition is based on a true story (the answer is “sort of”).

M.A.C.

Menace & Shrinking Island Giveaway…And Robert Morse

Tuesday, April 26th, 2022

The publication date of The Menace by Mickey Spillane and myself (from Wolfpack’s Rough Edges Press) is August 27 (Wednesday of this week, as I write). To jump-start some reviews of this and of The Shrinking Island (the collection of Mickey three YA adventure novels), I am announcing right now a book giveaway. Winners agree to write an Amazon review; other reviews are also encouraged.

M.A.C. holding copies of The Menace and The Shrinking Island

I have five copies of The Menace and five copies of The Shrinking Island for the first ten who request a book by writing me at macphilms@hotmail.com. Tell me which book you prefer, but if your choice is gone, the other will be sent. You must include your snail mail address, even if you’re entered before. These will go fast.

As usual, USA only.

The Menace is a special book. It is unusual in several respects. The Mike Hammer novels under the Spillane/Collins byline reflect me finishing books of Mickey’s in progress or put aside at the time of his death in 2006, or novels developed from synopses he left behind. I’ve also done from partial Spillane manuscripts two non-Hammer novels – The Consummata (with Morgan the Raider from The Delta Factor) and a standalone (Dead Street), with a very Hammer-like protagonist.

The Menace was developed from an unproduced screenplay in the Spillane files. It was apparently written shortly before or around the time he and I became friends in 1981, and he spoke to me of it frequently. He seemed to have an independent production in mind; he was friendly with South Carolina indie producer, Earl Owensby, who had his own studio, and the two had explored doing projects together. Nothing came of it, but The Menace indicates something might have.

But the screenplay was short – around 40 pages – and seems either to be a condensed version designed to attract investors or a version that could have been a pilot for a one-hour anthology series, probably with Mickey hosting. (In the forthcoming Mysterious Press biography by Jim Traylor and me, Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction, we explore Mickey’s efforts to put a mystery/crime anthology on the air with himself as the on-camera Rod Serling or Alfred Hitchcock).

What is particularly interesting about The Menace is the genre – while one foot is in a crime/mystery story, the other is in horror. Elements of horror were a part of Spillane’s novels from the beginning – he brought the horrors of graphic violence to his post-war crime fiction – the endings of Kiss Me, Deadly and My Gun Is Quick come to mind – and flirted with horror themes in The Twisted Thing and his last Hammer-in-progress, The Goliath Bone.

But The Menace is specifically Mickey reacting to the success of Stephen King. I go into this in my intro to The Menace, and will only say here that it was a Spillane reaction to King’s enormous success as a writer who became a media star and who carved out his own new niche in popular fiction. It’s fair to say that King has been imitated in much the same way Mickey was in his heyday.

Spillane did not, however, like the supernatural aspect of King and that other huge success, The Exorcist (book and film). As a Jehovah’s Witness, he took demons and the devil very seriously and did not consider them appropriate subject matter for fiction. He didn’t cry out for censorship, and in fact called King “a great writer”; but that type of horror was not for him.

The novel I’ve fashioned from his compact screenplay is unusual in its crime/mystery aspect having no Mike Hammer substitute at its center, though a tough small-town police chief is one of the two protagonists. The story is about a family where the husband (a self-made-man doctor) and wife (an artist from a wealthy family) have been driven apart by their disagreement over how to raise their ten-year-old “special needs” son. During much of the action, the estranged couple and their boy are in a big old spooky house, the grounds behind walls, which becomes the setting for a siege of sorts involving an Aztec mummy who may or may not still be breathing and a creature who may or may not be human. And at its heart is the story of a family coming back together in adversity.

Not typical Spillane elements, but typically compelling Spillane storytelling. Like the adventure stories he wrote in his last decade – The Shrinking Island, Something’s Down There and The Last StandThe Menace indicates an author trying to break away from Mike Hammer and flex other storytelling muscles.

I am very proud of the book and think it shows a whole other side to Mickey Spillane. It’s a relatively short novel – 40,000-words – but we have included as a bonus the original, previously unpublished version of the short story “The Duke Alexander” and a rare non-fiction crime story by Mickey, “The Too-Careful Killer,” unseen since 1952.

* * *

Yet another of my heroes has left the planet. As if losing Norm Macdonald and Gilbert Gottfried weren’t enough, a selfish God has taken Robert Morse away. Granted, Bobby Morse had a 90 year-run, and I admit when Barb and I screened How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in his honor over the weekend, we could not mourn. We could only get caught up again in the joy of experiencing the magical, shamelessly mugging musical comedy performance that is Robert Morse playing J. Pierpont Finch.

I started thinking about what I was going to say about How to Succeed and Morse, but thought I should check on what I’d said on the subject in this space before. And I discovered that in a post in 2017, I had already said the things that my mind was putting together for me to share now. So I’m going to do something I don’t believe I ever have here – I am going to rerun my response to seeing the Twilight Time Blu-ray edition of How to Success in Business Without Really Trying.

* * *
As you may have gathered, if you’ve stopped by here at all frequently, I am a collector of movies on Blu-ray and DVD. Many of my favorite films have made it onto Blu-ray, like Kiss Me Deadly and Gun Crazy (though I had to get that from Germany). And a fairly short list of my favorites remain on DVD only, like the Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes, and the great film version of the Broadway musical, Li’l Abner.

One of my favorites, poorly represented with a terrible transfer on DVD, has finally made it to Blu-ray, in a limited edition of 3000, from Twilight Time, the boutique label that has brought us any number of terrific films, from The Big Heat to the Hammer Hound of the Baskervilles, from a Sinatra Tony Rome double feature to Pretty Poison.

But this time – and my birthday month yet – they have given me (and Barb and for that matter son Nate, who also loves it) a film I could watch once a week – How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

There are those who can find reasons not to like this movie, just as there are people who can find a reason not to like ice cream. They are to be pitied. How to Succeed features a brilliant, witty, acid but not hateful score by the brilliant Frank Loesser. A Pulitzer Prize-winning musical (yes, Pulizter Prize-winning musical) in 1961, the Broadway version skewered the shallowness of big business in an up-to-the-moment manner. Unfortunately, the timing of the film’s release – 1967 – made How to Succeed’s cutting-edge satire seem dated, a lot having happened since ‘61.

Fortunately, time has been kind to this early ‘60s musical, with its bright Batman TV colors and cartoon images come to life (cartoonist Virgil Partch – VIP – was a consultant) and Bob Fosse choreography that is as witty and biting as the original play itself. (Fosse is not the actual choreographer of the film, but he’s credited as the source.)

A number of players from the Broadway show are retained, including Michelle Lee (who was the second Rosemary Pilkington in the original cast), the very funny Rudy Vallee, Ruth Kobart, and Sammy Smith, with Charles Nelson Reilly’s Bud Frump M.I.A., though decently replaced by Anthony Teague. Maureen Arthur – a live-action Little Annie Fannie – was in the national company of the musical and joined the Broadway run later.

I saw the national company in Chicago when I was in high school and fell in love with the musical then. The cast included Dick Kallman as Finch (later star of Hank on TV), who was excellent, with the second Great Gildersleeve, Willard Watterman, in the Rudy Vallee role. And of course the eye-popping Maureen Arthur was Hedy LaRue (“O.K. Charlie!”).

Two things make this film one of the best transitions of a Broadway hit to the big screen. First, director/writer David Swift – with credits like Pollyanna and Under the Yum Yum Tree enough to make one doubtful – had the surprising sense to film faithfully a show that had won seven Tony Awards, the New York Drama Critics Circle award, and the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The other thing is Robert Morse.

His J. Pierrepont Finch is my favorite performance in any musical film. He shamelessly recreates the Broadway role with only the slightest concession to movie technique. He understands, as does the rest of the cast (though not on this level), that he’s appearing in a cartoon. His character, who climbs from window washer to the chairman of the board in a few days, following a self-help book that provides the film’s narration – should be unsympathetic. He’s manipulative and dissembling and is never seen really working (not really trying, remember?); but the boyishness of Morse himself smooths the edge off.

Morse brings a remarkable energy to his songs and his loose-limbed dancing brings James Cagney to mind. In the ensemble, “Brotherhood of Man,” in the midst of a sea of Bob Fosse choreography, brilliant scene-stealer Morse knows just how to draw the viewer’s eye, chiefly by lagging like a jazz player behind the melody just enough to seem improvisional among all the precise dancers. He alone seems spontaneous.

Does he mug? Almost constantly. His performance is basically Jerry Lewis Goes to Graduate School. Somehow, playing a ladder-climbing nogoodnik, he seems joyful – the perfect conveyer of Loesser’s lyrics, with their hidden dark side.

Famously, the big hit love song from How to Succeed is sung by Morse’s Finch…to himself in a mirror. Few scores rival this one, though like Sondheim, Loesser writes to the story. The songs that were left out (“Paris Original,” “Happy to Keep His Dinner Warm”) are the weakest in the show. The only loss, besides Charles Nelson Reilly, is the great “Coffee Break,” which was filmed but cut for time. Too bad it doesn’t seem to have survived to be a special feature.

Morse and Reilly, by the way, were so successful on Broadway that they made an album together, “A Jolly Theatrical Season,” in 1963.

If the name Robert Morse seems vaguely familiar to smart younger people, he played Bertram Cooper on Mad Men, a role he was cast in, in tribute to his star turn in How to Succeed. Toward the end of Mad Men’s run, Morse was given a lovely song-and-dance farewell.

Morse’s career on Broadway was a stellar one, particularly his roles in Sugar and his one-man play, Tru, in which he played Truman Capote, winning his second Tony. But his film legacy is, largely, How to Succeed. No other film caught his magic, and a few really did him no favors – Honeymoon Hotel; Quick, Before It Melts – though The Loved One and Guide for the Married Man are worthy credits. I used to feel sad that this great talent had only one film to do him justice.

But with How to Succeed finally on Blu-ray, and with Mad Men as a wonderful, Emmy-nominated coda, I can only smile.

Nice modern-day (separate) interviews with Morse and Michelle Lee are special features. No “Coffee Break,” alas.

Buy it here.

* * *

UPDATE: The Twilight Time Blu-ray is still available but is pricey from some sources, although Screen Archives still has it at $20.

Let me add a few thoughts. Morse, who I describe above as “Jerry Lewis Goes to Graduate School,” shared with Lewis an inability to move from boyishness into anything else. It took the heavy make-up of his Truman Capone one-man show to briefly change that – he won a second Tony for it, after all – but he remained a boyish persona.

His rise to success (and Succeed) came from a string of stand-out youthful Broadway roles that culminated in J. Pierpont Finch being designed as a star vehicle for him. Two Broadway revivals have not shown their popular stars able to make their performances anything but reminders of how good Morse was.

He worked. He had a career. For a while he remained hot on Broadway, with Sugar (the musical version of Some Like It Hot) in 1972 a particular highlight. But mostly it was episodic TV and TV movies (he played Grandpa Munster in one), Pringle commercials and lots of cartoon voiceovers (Teen Titans, toward the end) – not what his dazzling How to performance promised.

That he had Mad Men as a last act is wonderful. But he deserved more. And we deserved more Morse.

* * *

Richard Piers Rayner’s phenomenal work on Road to Perdition gets some nice notice here in a piece on movies that recreated panels from the comic books they were based on.

M.A.C.

Mickey Spillane and Bobby Darin

Tuesday, April 5th, 2022
The Shrinking Island
Trade Paperback:
E-Book:

The Shrinking Island – the YA novel by Mickey Spillane (collected with the preceding two novels in the Larry and Josh Trilogy) – is out now from Wolfpack/Rough Edges. It is unlikely (though not impossible) you’ll find it in a brick-and-mortar book store, so please seriously consider ordering it from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

This third Josh and Larry was announced in the mid-‘70s, so it has been (ahem) a long wait. Spillane fans should be used to that by now. Among the novels that were announced but did not come out during Mickey’s lifetime are The Consummata (the sequel to The Delta Factor), Complex 90, and King of the Weeds. I completed all of them from the unpublished, unfinished manuscripts. Novels whose stories he clearly referred to in interviews (though sans titles) include The Big Bang, Murder Never Knocks and the non-Hammer Dead Street. All of these I have completed, Mickey having requested I do so with his unfinished manuscripts.

Another announced (but never published) example is the Mike Hammer novel, Tonight I Die, which existed in Mickey’s files in three forms: radio, TV and movie scripts. One of these became a short story, “The Night I Died,” the radio play version of which I adapted during Mickey’s lifetime for the anthology The Private Eyes. I have done another pass on that and it will finally appear under the original title, “Tonight I Die,” in the forthcoming Wolfpack/Rough Edges collection, Stand Up and Die! Another version (the screenplay one) has become Kill Me If You Can, a Hammer novel that will be published in August.

Confused yet?

The Menace
Trade Paperback:
E-Book:

Allow your head to clear, then pre-order The Menace, which will come out later this month, again from Wolfpack/Rough Edges. The outstanding cover appears here for the first time. This is a novel I developed from a screenplay that appears to have been either a feature film or the pilot for an unrealized anthology series. Mickey had been toying with an Alfred Hitchcock Presents type of show for years, intending to host it himself. This script dates to the early ‘80s (possibly a bit earlier) and, while he always spoke to me of it as a movie project that he would produce and perhaps direct, the surviving version is rather short (under fifty pages).

That required fleshing it out some, and it became a full-length (but not lengthy) novel of 40,000 words. (We are including a short story and a non-fiction true crime piece by Mickey to round out the book somewhat.)

The Menace is unusual in that it’s a horror story, although it does have mystery elements (but then horror stories often do). Mickey conceived it as a sort of response to the overwhelming success of Stephen King in the literary marketplace. He disliked King’s use of the supernatural – he avoided that in his own writing – but considered King “a great writer.”

More on this later.

* * *

Those of you who have followed these updates over the years are well aware of my enthusiasm for Bobby Darin, the late great singer who gave us everything from “Splish Splash” and “Dream Lover” to “Mack the Knife” and “Beyond the Sea,” as well as “If I Were a Carpenter” and “Simple Song of Freedom” and memorable film appearances in Pressure Point and Hell is For Heroes.

I discovered Darin at age eleven when I saw him singing “Mack the Knife” on a Heart Fund special. I have never been the same since. The combination of a confident, sardonic singer, who moved with a dancer’s grace, and the dark story of a Jack the Ripper figure, widened my eyes in a way that hasn’t shut them yet.

I’d been aware of him, a little, because of “Splish Splash,” which at age ten I’d loved as a novelty record in the vein of “Purple People Eater” or “Witch Doctor.” “Mack” was something entirely different. I somehow scraped together enough to purchase his swinging standards album, “That’s All,” and received “This Is Darin” for my birthday, 1960. I collected everything I could get my hands on, searching record stores for his (even then) rare Decca releases going back to ‘56. A year or so later, I discovered Mickey Spillane, and my classmates at Grant Elementary (and later Central Junior High) were divided into two groups: those who knew me as the Bobby Darin guy, and those who knew me as the Mickey Spillane guy.

The bloody storytelling of “Mack the Knife” was the connective tissue. As I grew older – something Darin did, too, but not for long, dying at 37 in 1973 – I came to learn Darin had suffered a heart condition from childhood and had been told he wouldn’t live past thirty. And I now understand that “Mack the Knife” – and “Artificial Flowers” and such lesser known fare as “Gyp the Cat” and “Goodbye Charlie” – were the singer thumbing his nose at death. Even “Beyond the Sea” seems to have that resonance.

Darin has never gotten his due. I have long felt that if one singer/songwriter of the 20th Century was chosen to represent every facet of popular music, Darin was the obvious choice – not that he was the best in every category, but his curiosity as an artist, and his death-sentence desire to explore everything that interested him while he had time, makes him unique. His two major areas – rock ‘n’ roll and the Great American songbook – tend to get him dismissed in both genres. But try to imagine Frank Sinatra singing “Splish Splash” or Jerry Lee Lewis doing “Mack the Knife” and you’ll get the idea.

The other day I stumbled onto something that might be called an epiphany, if I could put it into words. Having turned 74, I feel more and more removed and detached from the younger world. For the first time, I can find nothing in popular music that I can relate to. Even movies interest me less, and pop music and mainstream movies have always been at the center of my adult (and childhood) life. It’s easy for people my age to feel the world moving away from them. Maybe it’s God’s way of making it easier to let go.

But then, quite by accident, I came upon something delightful. Something that made me smile and even laugh and feel a sense of common humanity with people decades younger than me. None of these people were old and white; most were Black and young. And I got such a kick out of sharing time with them on You Tube.

You may be hipper enough than me to already know about this, but a genre of You Tube posting has people younger than me (which is most people) reacting to music from earlier generations, hearing for the first time very famous songs from another era. Mostly this is ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s rock and pop music. Now, as someone who has difficulty – extreme difficulty – finding anything to admire about Rap and Hip Hop, with the notable exception being that those forms are at least not Country Western – I can’t properly express the life-affirming joy I felt seeing young people listening to Bobby Darin for the first time and being blown away.

There are at least a dozen of these out there, but I’m going to share a few of my favorites with you.

Here’s the Rob Squad, a cute, smart couple hearing “Mack the Knife” for the first time. Watch the young woman start picking up on the subject matter of the song, and then nudge guy – who’s been grooving along – to pay attention to the lyrics.

India Reacts has a very fun young woman picking up almost immediately on the murder spree and her reactions are wonderfully entertaining. She had earlier heard and loved “Dream Lover” and is not prepared for the dark alley Darin goes cheerfully down.

Another fun couple, Shawn and Mel, discover the magic of Darin doing “Beyond the Sea.” It should be noted this is Darin lip-syncing on a Dick Clark nighttime show (the standard practice) and he is probably all of 24 years old…but his smooth confidence and humor and ease is on full display. But the real point here is the infectious, positive energy of Shawn and Mel, and the power of Darin and good popular music spanning the decades like they’re nothing.

Dani’s “I’d Rather Be Listening” gives us a great live performance of “Mack the Knife,” and her reaction is smart and fun.

This older gent, Harry, reacts beautifully to “Beyond the Sea.” And then he looks Darin up and lets his audience know what a genius he’s stumbled upon. A great post. Thank you, brother!

I am so relieved to known that smart, cool people will be here after I’m gone.

M.A.C.