My buddy Heath Holland of Cereal at Midnight will be talking with me for an hour this coming week in a presentation about the 50 years of Quarry. The new book will be discussed, of course, and the Dec. 10 release of The Last Lullaby (featuring the short “A Matter of Principal) on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber – the only Quarry feature film to date with a script co-written by me from my novel The Last Quarry.
Not sure when it will go up on YouTube, but it’ll be soon.
This terrific write-up from Crime Fiction Lover for Quarry’s Reunion is definitely worth a look.
Here’s a nice review of The Last Lullaby, even if the writer spells my middle name wrong and doesn’t understand that I wrote the source material and have top billing on the screenplay.
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Last week I posted a picture of the Whites, Jackie and Mike. I gave no explanation because I thought it was self-explanatory; but I’ve been informed by several readers here that it wasn’t.
Jackie and Mike are what you’d call super fans, although what Barb and I call them are our friends, though they live a good distance away. Readers who regularly attend book signings (we rarely do those anymore) and get in touch with us we always consider friends, but the Whites really go the extra miles. Stephen Borer of St. Paul does, too – he often posts here and pops up at events – but he’ll be embarrassed by my mentioning it.
The Whites and Stephen are not alone and to any of you who have gone to a signing or a movie premiere of ours, we are grateful and, yes, thankful. Mickey Spillane used to say he didn’t have fans or readers, he had customers; but that was just a Spillane-ism. I saw how he often literally embraced a fan. He loved the people who enjoyed his fiction, and Barb and I feel the same way about people who tell us they like what we do.
Here’s a pic of Stephen.
Today at lunch a nice older lady told us her daughter always gave her the newest Antiques novel for her birthday – they’re both fans. Super!
That’s a good excuse to remind you that the new “Barbara Allan”-penned novel, Antiques Web, is now just out – available from Amazon in hardcover and on Kindle.
And it’s available on audio, too, from Skyboat, read delightfully by Gabrielle de Cuir.
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Walter Koenig passed away last week.
Walter was a friend. Not a close friend, but for several years we were in frequent touch and thereafter occasionally.
I got to meet him when he was a guest of the Chicago Comic Con in 1973. I was asked to pick him up at O’Hare Airport and gladly did. Barb was with me. He was quiet but friendly and we hit it off.
Barb and I took him to our favorite Chicago restaurant, the now-defunct George Diamond’s Steakhouse, which was within easy walking distance of the hotel. Over a delightful dinner, Walter answered a lot of inside questions about Star Trek – Barb and I were both major fans – and I remember being amused at how he reported William’s Shatner’s use of dramatic pauses to summon dialogue he’d barely memorized.
It turned out Walter and I had some common interests. We were both writers, and my first mystery novels had just come out. He wasn’t featured on the new animated Star Trek series, but he had written an episode. We exchanged mail (back then, actual mail) about our writing projects; he had a novel in progress. He wrote several novels including graphic ones, which is not surprising because he was a comics fan, or at least comics fan adjacent.
I say that because he was a huge fan and collector of Big Little Books, the small fat books featuring comic strip characters (pages at left text, at right single comics images sans dialogue balloons). Very much a hardcore collector of these items, he was after several I owned. I don’t recall what they were, but I think one was a Little Orphan Annie. I traded them to him for a couple of signed Star Trek scripts, one of which I still have – his production script from an episode with his notes to himself.
After a few years our correspondence trailed off, but I occasionally ran into him at conventions. The last time, oddly, he stopped me to ask if I was mad at him. No! I insisted. Why do you ask? He said someone had told him I was angry with him.
I assured him I had never been anything but delighted with knowing him since the day we picked him up at the airport. I only wish I knew if he knew that Dreamworks had made a promotional Big Little Book out of Road to Perdition.
You were a good writer, a good actor and a good friend, Walter. Thanks for the trade.
This will be a light week, as son Nate (who runs this page) is away with the wife and kids, so I’m chiefly going to present some links to a one article and some bargains (possible stocking stuffers) from my shelf.
First, though, an important announcement. True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak – the ten-episode, all-star almost-five-hour audio drama based on True Detective and written by me – has been picked up for distribution for Skyboat Media. Directed by Robert Meyer Burnett and starring Michael Rosenbaum as Nathan Heller, this is my favorite adaptation of my work…including the film of Road to Perdition.
Skyboat has been very supportive of my work, releasing audio books of, among others, Quarry and the Antiques series (by “Barbara Allan,” Barb and me). Here’s some of what they have available.
The great magazine True West has posted an article/interview about me from a while back, focusing on my Caleb York novels and my relationship with Mickey Spillane. I love the picture of Mickey and me (taken, I think, at San Diego Comic Con in 1994).
Hamilton also has Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction, the bio by Jim Traylor and me, at a great price, also a Caleb York, and several Hammer novels. Spillane and the more recent Hammer hardcovers are not scheduled for trade paperback, so picking up a hardcover at a bargain price makes sense. Also, the trade paperback of Kiss Her Goodbye, available at Hamilton, is the uncensored version with a different ending.
Here are some viewer reactions to The Expert, an action movie I wrote based on the classic Brute Force. I replaced Larry Cohen (!) on the film, which is tricky to find on physical media.
You can streamThe Expert here on Amazon Prime among others.
Matt Clemens and I have contributed “Moriarty’s Notebook,” a Sherlock Holmes story, to Thrilling Adventure Yarns 2026 edited by my old pal Bob Greenberger. If you dig pulpy tales, consider backing this Kickstarter campaign.
Our movie, Death by Fruitcake, will have a few theatrical screenings in December – I’ll announce dates later – but you can order the new Antiques novel right now. As I’ve said, these UK-published books can be elusive in American bookstores, so Amazon and Barnes and Noble are the best bet.
I wish all of you and your families a happy Thanksgiving. I am thankful to all of you who stop by here and support my work. This time of year I think about friends and colleagues I’ve lost, grateful to have known the likes of my musician cohort Paul Thomas – with me through both the Daybreakers and Crusin’ – and actor Mike Cornelison – who was part of so many of my movie projects, notably the Mommy movies and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life. I’ve been blessed to know my pop culture heroes Chester Gould, Mickey Spillane and Donald E. Westlake as both mentors and friends.
And my collaborators, including (but not limited to) Matthew Clemens, Dave Thomas and Barbara Collins. They have all made me look good.
Thanks to the reviewers and bloggers who give attention to me and my work, a list I’m glad is too long to share. But I’ll single out J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet and the boys at Paperback Warrior (the graphic this week is theirs).
Finally, I’m grateful just to still be here, thanks to my family and doctors rallying to me when a routine operation had some unexpected side effects, including sending me into a hallucination right out of one of my own books.
I am not exaggerating when I say I made it back from madness thanks to my beautiful and talented wife, Barbara Collins. She is only six months younger than this ancient mariner, but she still looks like a pin-up girl.
I stepped out from behind my usual “no politics here” stance last week by expressing my support for Kamala Harris. Wow, that really made the difference! Look, I am a centrist generally pissed off at both the far left and far right, having been cancelled by both in various eras. But I am grateful that nobody who follows this blog/update stepped up to slap me down last week. They respected or at least ignored my opinion. I had exactly one “pushback” on Facebook from somebody astounded that I would see Donald Trump as a threat to the rule of law. So at least I got one good laugh out of this.
The real winner of this campaign was social media for getting away with completely (a) blotting out any real news coverage in favor of this opinion and that one, and (b) making every one of us feel a sense of importance none of us deserve. Just this week I have had a movie I directed, and a book I am writing, lambasted by people who have not seen the movie and not read the book (not a surprise, since I haven’t finished it). I realize I am being a bit of hypocrite being opinionated in this – but how many of us now think our opinions are so important we need to express them in public, even when we are discussing a movie we haven’t seen, or a book that isn’t even out yet?
This is Alice in Wonderland stuff, boys and girls. And it’s going to get worse.
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Quarry’s Return is out now and you should be able to find it at your favorite brick-and-mortar bookstores, but it’s also available at the usual online retailers.
I’ve said a few places that this may be the final Quarry novel, but let’s face it – I said that before (about The Last Quarry and Quarry’s Blood, to name two). So who knows?
This novel is very much a sequel or follow-up to the Edgar-nominated Quarry’s Blood, though like all of these books, each can be read out of order without causing you too much mental whiplash. What I’ve discovered about Quarry, via this one and the preceding book in the saga, is that I like writing about him when he shares with me my current age (he’s actually a tad younger). I think that’s because he was conceived, in the first novel (Quarry a.k.a The Broker), as being my age, very much my contemporary as a child of the 1950s caught up in the Vietnam era.
Nate Heller has also been older in more recent novels (Too Many Bullets is something of a concluding one, though I do have one more to write, which is next up on my novelistic plate). Those books got out of chronological order fairly early on – only the first three (True Detective, True Crime, The Million-Dollar Wound) are strictly chronological, although you could kind of lump the fourth in (Neon Mirage) as well. After that I’m all over the map with Stolen Away and Damned in Paradise and so on.
Speaking of Heller, True Noir – the ten-part fully immersible, M.A.C.-scripted audio adaptation of True Detective is deep into post-production. Plans to drop the episodes gradually, while the later ones were still in post, have been scrapped by producer Mike Bawden in favor of waiting till the entire ten parts are complete. There is merit in this decision. Release should be some time in December or very early January. Exactly how and where they will be released I’ll announce here, as soon I know it.
What I do know is the cast and director Robert Meyer Burnett have done me proud. We have a terrific Nate Heller in Michael Rosenbaum of Smallville fame, and the supporting cast is second to none.
Getting back to Quarry, I should note that we have another terrific audio book of this one read by the great Stefan Rudnicki.
As far as more Quarry is concerned, it frankly depends on my health and the interest of a publisher. As long as Hard Case Crime is around, and I’m around, I’ll probably find a way to write the occasional Quarry. Whether any future one will be about the geriatric Quarry or a flashback to his earlier days remains to be seen.
At my age, writing this kind of book, I face not only my advancement of years, but that of my readership, which (let’s face it) is pretty much cult-ish, despite the occasional break-through like Road to Perdition.
I have found it revitalizing doing several micro-budget movie productions (Encore for Murder, Blue Christmas, Death by Fruitcake); but even at this modest (!) budgetary level, funding is difficult. We’ll see how Blue Christmas and Death by Fruitcake fare.
Right now Blue Christmas is playing a week-long run at the Palms Theater in Muscatine. Seeing our little film on a great big screen, with terrific sound, has been gratifying. (It’s still there through and including Nov. 14.) It’s a testimony to what director of photographer Phil Dingeldein and producer Chad Bishop were able to achieve on a wing and a prayer.
Blue Christmas also out on Blu-ray and DVD right now. Lots of special features, including a nice bio documentary of yours truly done for Muscatine Community College. A good place to get the Blue Christmas Blu-ray online (in addition to the usual online retailers) is the great website Diabolik. They are a terrific outfit offering all kinds of off-beat items, including our little Christmas fable. Their price is in line with other online retailers and I’d love to see you support them.
As for the DVD version, you can go to Amazon or Barnes & Noble and get it for eleven bucks and change.
Also out right now is the latest Antiques Trash ‘n’ Treasures comic mystery, Antiques Slay Belles. With Death by Fruitcake warming up as a release for next Christmas, with Brandy and Vivian Borne brought to life wonderfully by Alisabeth Von Presley and Paula Sands (co-starring with Rob Merritt who plays P.I. Richard Stone in Blue Christmas), Barb and I are happy to present another Antiques Christmas mystery. Sometimes the mystery of the Antiques novels is where to find the darn things. Our publisher, Severn House, is in the UK and sometimes it’s difficult to find the latest Antiques novel in a brick-and-mortar USA store (there have been some inroads with Barnes & Noble as well as mystery bookstores).
But you can absolutely get Antiques Slay Belles at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and whatever your favorite online retailer is likely to be.
Let’s face it. These are ideal stocking stuffers for a mystery fan – but choose wisely which of these items you stuff. Only the hardiest of souls out there might find both Antiques Slay Belles and Quarry’s Return (and yes, it’s a Christmas novel!) equally palatable. On the other hand, Blue Christmas would make a fine Christmas day family film, despite its noir-ish themes (same noir-ish themes as A Christmas Carol!).
Hey, movies don’t get much more indie or micro than this; but if you like my work, I think – I hope – you’ll impressed with what we came up with. Much thanks goes to our eastern Iowa cast, with Alisabeth Von Presley already receiving a Best Actress award from the Iowa Motion Picture Association for what is essentially a supporting role. And Rob Merritt as Richard Stone carries a good deal of the weight of the production on his shoulders and proves his value as probably the most popular, busiest actor in this region.
Two events are coming up that Iowa residents, particularly those in (or near) Des Moines may wish to attend.
The Fridley Theatre chain has reopened the great Fleur Theater and have booked me in for two events. Coming up this weekend (Saturday February 17) is a presentation of Chinatown that I will introduce. I will be discussing the importance of the film and how it has been a key influence on me and my work.
Then, just a week later on Saturday February 24, I will be there with a number of cast and crew members for the World Premiere of Blue Christmas.
Advance tickets for both events are available at the links.
As you may know, three more premiere events will present Blue Christmas to the public for the first time; it will not be made available (at least nothing is planned yet) until the Christmas season of this year:
Fleur Cinema/Des Moines, World Premiere; February 24th
Collins Road Theater/Cedar Rapids Premiere; March 13th
Palms 10/Muscatine Premiere; March 16th
Last Picture House/Quad Cities Premiere; March 22nd
I will be attending all four and at least some cast and crew will be at these events as well (with Q and A after).
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After delivering the new Trash ‘n Treasures novel, Antiques Slay Belles, to our publisher Severin (who we are pleased to say loves it), Barb and I began work on a film script based on the novella “Antiques Fruitcake,” seen in our collection of three Antiques Christmas novellas, Antiques Ho-Ho-Homicides.
Even before the script was started, we had approached with some success several key actors (mostly from Blue Christmas) as well as secured the primary location for the shoot, which we project for late July or early August (that, of course can change).
Working from the novella, with Barb consulting and editing everything I wrote, I’ve produced a screenplay called Death by Fruitcake which I think successfully captures the feel and approach of the books. For one thing, it has a lot of talking to the camera by Brandy and Mother, breaking the fourth wall. The goal was to be very funny and yet a legit mystery (the way the book series does, at its best anyway).
Why another Christmas movie?
Well, the warm reception we got from not only the home video distributor but a major film chain in Iowa, and several independent theaters, showed the holiday aspect of Blue Christmas was hugely beneficial. We’d been looking for another low-budget film project to do, and doing Christmas again but in a completely different fashion made sense.
This project will be in process all year, so you’ll be hearing about it here.
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I am pleased to announce what is almost certainly going to be the last Nathan Heller novel, The One-Way Ride, which I’ll be writing this year for Hard Case Crime. God willin’ and the crick don’t rise, it will appear in late 2025.
This will, at long last, tell the story of Heller, RFK and Jimmy Hoffa, which takes place in the ‘60s but with first and last sections that feature Heller at the end of his career – chronologically the farthest up I’ve gone (other than brief sections of the whatever-happened-to chapters in various of the books).
I both hate and love the thought of doing a final chapter in Heller’s saga. The love part is (a) getting to do another one, and (b) knowing that this saga has a definitive ending. The hate part is that I love to do them and consider Heller my key work (Quarry would disagree, but I’m not giving him a vote).
Several realities are at play here. First, at my age and with my health issues (which for now I’m keeping in check), doing a massive project like a Heller novel, with its soul-crushing research, is best put behind me. I have several other things I want to do, and speaking of Quarry, I may do more with him. I might also do an occasional Heller short story for the Strand and/or Ellery Queen.
Other factors are the way sales got impacted by the way a UK dock strike screwed up the publication of Too Many Bullets, which I consider to be a major book in the saga. That strike, as I’ve outlined here before, meant the 2022 publication of The Big Bundle effectively got pushed to the first quarter of 2023. That had the novel careening into Too Many Bullets, published early fall 2023, meaning two Hellers were published in one year (effectively). It led to the major trade publications (Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, Kirkus and Library Journal) not reviewing Too Many Bullets (and in the past they have almost always reviewed the Heller novels). That cost us bookstore and library sales.
And it made getting Hard Case Crime to do another book in the series required a real sales job from me.
On the other hand, we’ve had several really terrific reviews lately for Too Many Bullets. Check out this one from the fine fanzine Deadly Pleasures (who tabulated how many “Best of the Year” lists various books appeared on – Too Many Bullets appeared on five):
Too Many Bullets by Max Allan Collins
Hard Case Crime, $26.99, October 2023
Rating: A
Nathan Heller is body-guarding Robert (“Bob! Not ‘Bobby!’”) Kennedy on June 5, 1968, the night he won the California Democratic primary. As they walk through the crowded Pantry in L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel, a dozen or more shots ring out. Kennedy falls, as do five others, but he is the only one to die. A dazed Sirhan Sirhan, gun in hand, is slammed down by Roosevelt Grier, Rafer Johnson, and Heller. The LAPD muscles the FBI out of the investigation of the assassination, since it’s clearly an open-and-shut case against Sirhan. But months later, a now skeptical Heller undertakes his own investigation, first at the behest of columnist Drew Pearson, then Time/Life after Pearson’s death. After all, there weren’t enough guns and there were too many bullets in that room. And what of the mysterious woman in the polka-dot dress that several witnesses saw fleeing the scene?
Mystery Writers of America Grand Master and Private Eye Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement “Eye” Award recipient Max Allan Collins’ first Nathan Heller novel, True Detective, was published in 1983. This latest novel marks forty years of some of the very best and most cohesive historical detective fiction ever written. Each book in the series has been meticulously researched, down to the smallest factual details, then tied together with a cleverly plotted and convincing fictional re-examination of events surrounding a murder, a kidnapping, a disappearance, extortion, assassination or other well-known crime. What’s more, there is a well-reasoned solution to previously unsolved or questionable cases. Collins uses real names whenever possible, adding to the authenticity. Each book also contains a wrap up of what happened to characters after the story has concluded.
Too Many Bullets follows that established pattern. Collins presents little known facts gathered from autopsy and police records, things that were conveniently overlooked in a rush to judgment. But it is the reasoned conjecture that he wraps around those facts that make for fascinating reading. Further, he faithfully recreates the politics of the late 1960s. Readers will almost come to believe that they were caught up in the panic in the hotel’s Pantry, so realistic is the writing. In today’s world, with crazy conspiracy theories abounding, this novel takes a deep dive into one that just might not be so crazy.
The author has previously explored other Kennedy family assassination (and near assassination) stories, but this may just be one of his best. No need to have read any of the previous novels in the series, since Collins doesn’t write them in chronological order anyway. The final two sentence paragraph sums up Heller’s dedication to the job perfectly. If this is the final Heller (and I sincerely hope it is not), the detective goes out on a very high note.
Well, Too Many Bullets isn’t the last Heller, if I can get The One-Way Ride written. But that’s a fine review.
As I’ve said here before, it’s no picnic for an old white guy to get a book sold in a marketplace filled with young Woke editors who have apparently slept through the history of noir fiction. I am lucky to still be in business at all.
For example, I have pitched (sometimes with Matt Clemens and sometimes on my own) half a dozen projects (full book proposals) to Amazon’s Thomas and Mercer, where the Reeder and Rogers trilogy sold hundreds of thousands of copies and my back list has flourished for over a decade. And they haven’t gone forward with a thing. In fairness, the second of my two Krista Larsen novels (Girl Can’t Help It, a book I love) has not earned out yet and maybe never will. Still, the royalties on that title and several dozen others keep coming in and I’m grateful to them (particularly to the initial editors at Thomas and Mercer who made Ian Fleming and Max Allan Collins among their first buys).
I am not complaining (exactly). I have a full plate of work for 2024. But with both Nathan Heller and Mike Hammer getting their series wrapped up, I have to be resilient and creative. (Hammer was always planned to be finite – no new novels written solely by me, strictly M.A.C. finishing up Mickey’s works-in-progress.)
That’s why I’m directing and writing indie movies again. It’s why I’m developing a Nate Heller podcast, bringing the books to life, collaborating with my buddies Phil Dingeldein, Mike Bawden and the great Robert Meyer Burnett, a genuine YouTube star. Recently Rob did a blisteringly funny, wickedly sharp takedown on Amazon (don’t mean to pick on them, and this isn’t Thomas & Mercer) putting out a statement with advice to writers (particularly screenwriters) that is so D.E.I. (Diversity Equity and Inclusive) as to be absurdly hilarious. Take a look. (His Robservations episodes always begin with promos for other stuff of his, so be patient. It’s worth it.)
Also worth a watch this week is Heath Holland and me talking about the latest Kino Lorber film noir Blu-ray boxset on his fine podcast, Cereal at Midnight.
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