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Return of the Maltese Falcon Pub Date

Tuesday, January 6th, 2026

Despite the title this week, I am not suggesting we all go down to the local pub and discuss Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

No.

It is the publication date of my sequel to The Maltese Falcon that we are celebrating on January 6, 2026 (not the sixth anniversary of the Insurrection at the Capitol, either).

The celebration actually began last week, when I announced a book giveaway for copies of the hardcover Hard Case Crime first edition of Return of the Maltese Falcon. I offered 20 copies but expanded that to 25 from my personal stash. All 25 copies were gone on the first day. My thanks to all of you who entered and won, and especially to those I had to turn away.

Tomorrow as I write this (and today as you read it), you will be able to send a review to Amazon and other of the usual on-line suspects (Amazon doesn’t allow pre-pub reviews). I have been asked what it feels like to have this dream project actually come to fruition, and I have replied thusly: I am waiting to see it displayed among the New Releases at the Davenport, Iowa, Barnes & Noble – then I will believe it. And savor it.

Yes, I have long been dreaming about doing my own Sam Spade novel, and I can pinpoint when that desire began: 1961. I was thirteen, still in junior high, specifically the 8th grade. I saw the movie on TV that same year – I believe I did so on a Sunday morning, having convinced my parents that I was sick and couldn’t go to Sunday school or church.

I’ve done several interviews, including one on YouTube, wondering if the idea of specifically doing a Maltese Falcon sequel was something I’d had in mind from the start. The truth is: no. I just wanted to do a Sam Spade novel. The idea for the sequel was what I came up when I made my pitch to Titan Books in March of 2024. I think the whole pitch was, “I’d like to do a sequel to The Maltese Falcon.”

Doing so was gratifying and enjoyable, but hard. Hammett’s brilliant novel was a contemporary work; mine was a period piece. I had plenty of experience in the latter, having done all those Nathan Heller, Eliot Ness and “disaster series’ novels (like The Titanic Murders). So I was something of an old hand at historical fiction, which this would be in a way.

Hammett’s sly, spare style had to occasionally give way to describing places in a historical context – fortunately I had WPA Guides to both San Francisco and California, Don Herron’s excellent The Dashiell Hammett Tour, and several other reference works to call upon. Internet research also came into play. I think – hope – I hit the right balance.

When I completed the novel – having read it through to my satisfaction, doing any necessary tweaks – I was ready to send it to editor/publisher Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime (Titan is the parent company) – my wife Barb (a writer herself) took me gently aside.

“You’d better prepare yourself,” she said, “for attacks. Not by everybody, but you will be seen by some as exploiting a classic.”

I’d known that going in, but hearing Barb say it was damn near bone-chilling. And last year, as word about my novel got around, I was in fact attacked several times, before the book had even come out or been read by anybody.

I have run into this before. It’s likely, if you’re reading this, that you are aware of my love for Mickey Spillane as a man and a writer, and that – at his request in his final days – he honored me by asking me to complete various works of his that were to be found in his three home offices. He did not put this in motion for his glory or mine, for that matter; but to generate income for his widow, Jane Spillane.

And yet.

There are hardcore Spillane fans who refuse to read the Spillane/Collins byline books or say disparaging things about them. This despite every one of the 16 novels (14 Mike Hammer) having significant Spillane content. The first ten or so were manuscripts well in progress by him, 100 manuscript pages (and notes about endings in some cases). One reader posted a review of Complex 90 (in which I show Velda and Mike in an overtly sexual relationship), accusing me of doing explicit material in a way that Mickey supposedly never would have.

Apparently that huge Spillane fan had never read either The Erection Set or The Last Cop Out. Hint: The Erection Set has erections in it, and I don’t mean buildings.

A key part of my approach to the Spillane co-bylined novels was to determine when he had written the partial manuscripts (and other material), so I could place the book at hand in the context of where Mickey was as a writer and as a man at that moment.

Much of the Spillane unpubbed material was developed during the (ahem) long wait between Kiss Me, Deadly (1952) and The Deep (a non-Hammer followed a year later by Hammer’s return in The Girl Hunters). But Mickey didn’t stop writing during that period – he published a dozen novellas, usually in the men’s adventure magazine Cavalier – works that are a window into his thinking and his evolving literary style.

Here’s the thing about The Maltese Falcon and public domain: somebody was going to do it. Other things that have gone into the public domain have led to such wondrous creative projects as horror films featuring Popeye the Sailor, Winnie the Pooh and Steamboat Willie. I wanted to make a respectful, serious attempt to do Sam Spade correctly. Faithful to Hammett. Others will no doubt follow me, and some may do a better job of it. But I wanted to be first and do it right.

After all, we can’t be far away from James Patterson bylining a novel in which Sam Spade meets Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, perhaps among Father Brown’s congregation or maybe in the waiting room of Sherlock Holmes, possibly to solve the murder of C. Auguste Dupin.

Anyway, you can imagine how relieved I’ve been at getting such great reviews from the three major book reviewing services: Publisher’s Weekly (a starred review), Booklist and even Kirkus, who in the past have often indicated that humanity would have been better served if I’d just stayed at sacking groceries (I was goddamn good at that).

The first review not from one of those reviewing services has popped up, and it’s worth sharing with you.

Return of the Maltese Falcon
Reviewed by James Reasoner

I’m starting the new year off well with an excellent novel from Max Allan Collins. I’ve been a fan of THE MALTESE FALCON since I read the novel in high school, the first thing by Dashiell Hammett I ever read, I believe. Needless to say, I was hooked. Now the original magazine version of the novel, as serialized in the iconic pulp BLACK MASK, is in public domain, and that’s what Collins has used as the starting point for his new novel RETURN OF THE MALTESE FALCON, which, as he points out, is a continuation rather than a true sequel.

And if, by some chance, you’ve never read Hammett’s novel, stop right now and read it before you read this review, and absolutely don’t tackle Collins’ novel until you’ve read the original, because they’re both, of necessity, full of spoilers. I mean it!

The action starts a week after the end of THE MALTESE FALCON, in December 1928. The dead Miles Archer’s desk has been removed from the office of Spade & Archer, and Effie Perrine, Sam Spade’s secretary, has put up a Christmas tree in its place. (Does that make this a Christmas novel? It sure does!)

A potential client pays a visit to Spade’s office. She’s Rhea Gutman, Casper Gutman’s daughter, and she wants to hire Spade to find the real Falcon. The one in Hammett’s novel was a fake, remember? Rhea is the first of four clients who give Spade a retainer to find the dingus. The others are Chicago gambler Dixie Monahan, Corrine Wonderly, the younger sister of femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and Steward Blackwood, an official from the British Museum who claims that institution is the true owner of the Falcon.

Spade plays all these characters against each other. He has run-ins with the cops. A dead body turns up. Spade is hit on the head and knocked out, and he’s captured by a gunman who wants to kill him. This is great stuff in the classic hardboiled private eye mode, the kind of thing that Dashiell Hammett invented, along with Carroll John Daly. Stylistically, Collins’ fast-moving, straight-ahead prose isn’t quite as stripped down as Hammett’s, but it’s certainly in the same ballpark.

Being constrained to use only the elements to be found in the original novel’s pulp serialization turns out to be a good thing. Collins is able to bring on-stage characters who were only mentioned before and invent new ones who fit perfectly in that setting. The resolution of the mystery and the way the book wraps everything up are extremely satisfying.

A number of years ago, I read and loved Joe Gores’ prequel novel SPADE & ARCHER. RETURN OF THE MALTESE FALCON is even better. I’m glad Max Allan Collins wrote it, and I’m grateful to Hard Case Crime for publishing it. It’ll be out officially in e-book and hardcover editions tomorrow. For hardboiled fans, I give it my highest recommendation.

This is, obviously, a lovely review. James Reasoner, a top-notch word smith himself, is incorrect about one thing: while I re-read the serialization of The Maltese Falcon (in Otto Penzler’s The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories), the basis for my sequel is the published novel (Knopf, 1930). The serialization did not go into the public domain till last year, as its final installment appeared January 1930.

Trust me – I kept an eye on that.

Nonetheless, Mr. Reasoner liking my novel means a lot to me, as he is about as seasoned a pro in the fiction game as anybody I know of.

If you are familiar with the Bogart-starring film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon, a re-reading of that novel before reading the sequel isn’t necessary. A few readers have already told me they plan to re-read the original after they’ve read my sequel. Or that they will view the 1941 film either again or for the first time, in preparation of reading Return of the Maltese Falcon.

That my book will bring some new readers to Hammett’s masterpiece (The Glass Key is next best) is incredibly gratifying.

* * *

My pal Robert Meyer Burnett – who so masterfully directed the audio drama True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, adapted by me from my novel True Detective – is a well-known YouTube pundit (among much else) with two long-running shows on that platform: Robservations and Let’s Get Physical Media.

On the first weekend of January, 2026, I appeared on episodes of both of those shows.

I caution you: these are lengthy episodes. The Robervations is an interview of me by Rob about (largely) Return of the Maltese Falcon). It runs around two hours!

The Let’s Get Physical Media has Rob, co-host Dieter Bastion, and me discussing our top ten favorite physical media releases of the year – it’s well over three hours with many excursions into this and that, including my most recent battle with Rob over Never Say Never Again, the film missing from the Sean Connery “James Bond” 4K set.

The interview:

The Favorite Blu-ray and 4K releases of 2025 from Burnett, Bastion and Collins:

Amazingly, one of the outstanding reviewers of physical media on the Net, That Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader, has done a very smart deep-dive into my novelization of the Dick Tracy movie, and goes into my misadventures writing it.

Even more amazingly, Spencer Draper, The Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader himself, has done the same for my two hard-to-find Tracy novels, Dick Tracy Goes to War and Dick Tracy Meets His Match.

He’s articulate and very, very smart, but again, a warning: these ain’t short shows. The novelization episode is about half an hour, and the Tracy novels episode is about forty minutes.

Damn that Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader! He makes me want to try to get the rights back to reprint the two rare Tracy novels he discusses!

* * *

Here’s another one of those articles about movies from comics that aren’t about superheroes.

* * *

Let’s make 2026 a much better year than the last.

M.A.C.

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Nate Heller – History or Mystery?

Tuesday, November 18th, 2025

I occasionally get a nice e-mail from a reader who likes one thing or another of mine (or several things, which is really nice) and I do my best to answer all of these. I don’t mean to imply I’m swimming in praise, but sometimes I mean to respond and don’t get around to it. Things can get lost in the shuffle when you’re busy writing or getting a pacemaker put in.

For that reason, if you happen to be one of those who’ve written and been ignored, you weren’t really being ignored, your missive just got away from me. Please know I appreciate hearing from you. And I’m pleased to say I rarely get a negative letter from a reader.

Same goes for the comments that appear below each of these Update/blog entries. I read everything and usually respond, but not always.

Recently a reader who obviously read a lot of my stuff said the Heller novels didn’t trip his trigger like Quarry and Nolan. I get that, particularly when a reader doesn’t care for a book of the kind of length that Heller usually runs. Quarry and Nolan tend to appear in books that are quick reads – 50,000 to 60,000 or so. And Heller tends to appear in books of 80,000 words or more. True Detective was the longest first-person private eye novel ever written, until I wrote the even longer Stolen Away.

I myself find that Heller is rather daunting for me at this age. The breadth of research is staggering and the many chapters a challenge. In some ways I am a better writer now than I ever was. Mickey Spillane felt a writer should get better with age, because of being at it longer and gaining more experience in both art and life.

But in other ways I’m not the writer I was.

It isn’t just age. But the experience part Mickey mentioned applies to just being on the planet a while, and the fiction writing – like reading – depends on where you are in this string of seconds, minutes, days and years called time.

I recently re-watched The Verdict (1982) starring Paul Newman and written by David Mamet. I revisited it in part because I had been responsible in a way for the last motion picture this great film actor ever made, and had met – and been intimidated – by him. (I’ve written about that here before.)

But I am no fan of David Mamet. I find him mannered and pretty much despised his screenplay for The Untouchables. It has that great “Chicago way” speech of Sean Connery’s, but is a knuckle-headed and lazy take on Eliot Ness and Capone. I even turned down the novelization (stupidly, because it would have boosted sales of my Eliot Ness novels).

I had seen The Verdict when it came out and thought it good but overrated. Barb and I, pre-Covid lockdown, would go to at least one movie a week; and I sometimes went alone, too. So I find now, in my dotage, that I often remember nothing about a movie I saw twenty or thirty or more years ago except (a) that I saw it, and (b) remember my opinion of it.

The Verdict this time around seemed a near classic, a terrific courtroom drama and a fantastic character study from Paul Newman, who had a drinking problem in life that he explored in this particular performance. Fucking brilliant. And Mamet’s script didn’t strike me as mannered at all, and extremely well-constructed.

I am a different person going to the movies than I was years ago.

Right now I’m not going to theaters much at all, and doing considerable watching at home. You probably are the same. I’ve seen some stellar flicks in 2025 – Sinners, Weapons, One Battle After Another – and encountered some of the best TV ever, notably Slow Horses and the under-seen Chantal.

But I am also at odds with some things that a lot of people, smart people, really like – we walked out of the new Predator movie, and would have walked out on Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein if we weren’t home streaming it. In any case, we didn’t make it past an hour. We found it a precious thing, the kind of movie where you walk out humming the costumes.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but my point is that we see things at a specific point in time and who we are at that time – this obviously goes for books, too – impacts how we take things in. Barb and I – both of us big Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul fans – hated creator Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus. Son Nate liked it.

Nobody’s right, nobody’s wrong. Well, sometimes things are just plain bad, but you catch my drift. A novel or a film is the artist plus the someone taking in that novel or film. The reader’s mind, the viewer’s mind, is where the novel or film plays out. I often have said that sometimes my stuff plays on Broadway and sometimes at the Podunk Community Playhouse.

Of course some reviewers have considered my micro-budget Christmas movie Blue Christmas barely worthy of a community theater. But quite a few others have praised it and were able to meet it on its own modest but sincere terms.

As for Heller not tripping a reader’s trigger where Quarry or Nolan or the Antiques mysteries do, I only hope it’s not the history aspect that puts such readers off. I admit that Heller was a way for me to combine my love of historical fiction with that of hardboiled mystery fiction. Do most of my readers even know who Samuel Shellabarger was? That his novels Captain from Castille and Prince of Foxes were my favorites at the same time I was inhaling Hammett, Chandler and Cain? Or that my favorite novels as an adolescent were The Three Musketeers and The Mark of Zorro? Or that Mickey Spillane’s faves were The Count of Monte Cristo and Prisoner of Zenda? (Shellabarger, by the way, was originally a mystery writer, under several pen names.)

But to readers who duck Heller because of the historical aspect, know this: the first intension is to write a classic private eye novel in the Hammett/Chandler/Spillane (Father, Son and Holy Ghost) vein. That is the goal and I think I’ve achieved it.

Interestingly, when I moved Heller to Hard Case Crime, editor/publisher Charles Ardai was pleased that The Big Bundle was based on a less-remembered crime than other books in the Heller series. He felt the HCC audience might be put off by the historical aspect.

What prompted this rambling missive to you, Dear Readers, is a particularly nice e-mail I received, and which I will share with you now, from Andrew Lewis – a fellow Iowan!

I hope this letter finds you well. I have been a fan of detective fiction since picking up The Hound of The Baskervilles at an elementary school book fare. Over time I’ve delved into Hammett and Chandler and even some of the better Batman comic books from the late 70s, but nothing has ever punched me in the face like the Mike Hammer novels.

What Mickey Spillane does with storytelling is, in my mind, what Lou Reed did with song lyrics, say very profound things using the most simple language you can. I’m five chapters in to Kiss Her Goodbye which is, thus far, the 3rd Hammer novel I’ve read which you’ve completed. It’s hard to tell where Mickey stops and Max starts. It’s got some Black AlIey elements the same way Lady Go Die had some Twisted Thing elements, ideas set aside, forgotten, and reused. I’m all in.

I am confused about the timeline. Hammer indicates in the novel that he made it halfway through 12th grade before lying about his age to enlist in WWII. That would make him maybe 72 in 1996 when Black Alley is set. I understand that King of The Weeds is a sequel to that novel. Is there a set chronology or is it a suspension of disbelief where Hammer is always just as old as he needs to be for the story being told? My mind needs order, “foolish consistency” and all that.

I’ve recently picked up The Wrong Quarry and will be reading it after Kiss Her Goodbye. It’s my first journey into Quarry’s world, is it a good place to start? Thanks for taking the time to read this overly long note and for continuing the Spillane legacy.
Warmest regards,
Andrew Lewis
Council Bluffs, Ia

Here is the reply I sent to Andrew:

Thanks for your great e-mail.

With your permission I’d like to use it in this week’s Update/blog of mine, because you raise interesting questions that would be well answered in public.

Briefly, though, Mickey was very loose about continuity. Not as loose as, say, Rex Stout, who kept Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe frozen at the age at which we met them (their ages, not ours!). I have attempted to put together a continuity that doesn’t contradict Mickey, but that can only go so far. Do keep in mind Black Alley (my least favorite of Mickey’s Hammer novels) is his final Hammer novel, and King of the Weeds was a direct sequel he began as was Kiss Her Goodbye — he set aside King of the Weeds, intended to be the final Hammer, to write a 9/11 novel, The Goliath Bone. I finished both King and Bone and kept them in relative continuity not only with Black Alley but with the entire series. King of the Weeds, by the way, is in part meant to answers questions and fix inconsistencies in Black Alley. I liked to think (and this is outrageous I know) that I “fixed” Black Alley — that reading Alley and King back to back is an improved experience…the “part two” that Mickey began writing.

I always tried to set each story that I completed in time — specifically, when Mickey started (and set aside) those unfinished novels. I try to think about where Mickey was in his life, and get into his head space at that point. This means Lady Go Die is like an early Hammer, and King and Bone like later Hammers in tone and technique. Kiss Me Darling is another one that has that early feel. Kiss Her Goodbye is more mid-stream Mickey — he designed it to be Hammer’s return to the book market after a long quiet spell…but during that quiet spell, he kept starting (and stopping) various Hammer manuscripts.

I would recommend you read my biography of Mickey, co-written by James Traylor — Spillane — King Of Pulp Fiction. I include as part of a back-of-the-book bonus content a lengthy article about how I came to write the books and how I approached each of them.

Thanks again, Andrew! Let me add to that one thing: I am very fond of Black Alley (and not just because it’s dedicated to me). I grew to respect it more working with it in depth writing its sequel from Mick’s existing chapters. My disappointment with the book was the way he softened a banger ending that he shared with me in conversation, which I wound up using in slightly different form in another Hammer.

M.A.C.

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Quarry Up for an Award, Mike Hammer’s Big Announcement

Tuesday, June 17th, 2025

Things have been popping around here. First came news that Quarry’s Return has been nominated for the Best Paperback Novel “Shamus.” The Shamus is an award that means a lot to me, because my late friend Bob Randisi and I, and a few others, were grousing to each other about the Mystery Writers of America ignoring private eye novels in their Edgar awards. Bob was not one to let the grass grow under his feet and very soon he’d created the Private Eye Writers of America and the Shamus awards.

Arguably, the Shamus awards became the second most-prominent and prestigious honor of its kind in mystery fiction. Others have come and gone, and some may lay claim to being more important now; but I know and remember what it meant to me.

In 1983 my novel True Detective was published and got quite a bit of attention in its approach to merging the PI story with historical crime, and for being the longest private eye novel ever written (later my novel Stolen Away would eclipse it). I was, predictably, ignored by the Edgars but got a Shamus nomination. I was a long shot to say the least, because I was up against a Murderer’s Row of mystery writers: James Crumley, Stanley Ellin, Loren Estleman and Robert B. Parker. But my book won, and I was boosted considerably in the business…and both Nate Heller and I are still around. Stolen Away won the Best Novel in 1992. The series went on to be the most-nominated in the history of the organization.

Anyone who says awards don’t matter (like me, when I lose) are full of it. If Bob Randisi hadn’t started up the PWA, I wonder if Heller and I would still be around.

Nate Heller and True Detective are the basis, of course, of True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, director Robert Meyer Burnett’s ten-episode audio drama from my adaptation. (truenoir.co)

Quarry has been nominated for the Shamus several times (my hitman even got an Edgar nomination last year for Quarry’s Blood) but I don’t recall him ever winning. Kind of makes sense in the PWA, because to make a private eye out of Quarry, you have to squint and look sideways. But the books are very much built on the private eye novel paradigm.

In other private eye news…

Matthew McConaughey is serious talks with Skydance about reuniting with True Detective writer Nic Pizzolatto in the Mike Hammer movie that has been threatening to happen for a decade or so.

Matthew McConaughey and Nic Pizzolatto

The film is based not just on Mickey’s work but draws upon the entire series (including the collaborative novels and short stories that share a Spillane/Collins byline). I have read the script and it’s solid; as an executive producer, I was able to provide notes, to get the characters and concepts in line with Mickey’s and my work.

This news exploded all over the Internet. I lost count at 21 articles. Here’s a typical one from Deadline.

It was everywhere, from Variety to the Hollywood Reporter. I am optimistic but I never believe this kind of thing till I’m on set and the cameras are rolling. But it has a real feel to it.

You will note a certain irony here: the title of my novel True Detective is of course the title of the (later) HBO series that brought together actor McConaughey and writer Pizzolatto – a highly rated and regarded series that I have never seen, since the use of the title irked me. On the other hand, I plucked the title from the vintage true-crime magazines that were on the newsstands when Heller was starting out in the other True Detective.

* * *

Here’s a cool review of The Last Quarry.

My band the Daybreakers has a Wikipedia page! And I didn’t submit it much less write it (a few inaccuracies, but hey).

M.A.C.

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Damn Fool Crusader, Dick Tracy, Wayne Dundee R.I.P.

Tuesday, June 10th, 2025

Through my dalliances with YouTube, I’ve been able to connect with some interesting people, who have become my friends or at least friendly acquaintances. I spend a little more time watching YouTube than I should, because my wife Barb and I almost always watch a movie in the evening, and sometimes my son Nate comes over (after he helps his wife Abby get his two kids to bed) (Sam and Lucy), making it a double feature. My beddy-bye time is, roughly, midnight and I sometimes have an hour or so to fill before closing out my day. The morsels of entertainment I encounter on YouTube are fun, often informative and, usually, not demanding.

This past week I did a commentary with Heath Holland of the respected Cereal at Midnight on the Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes, which is one of my favorite movies but not a terribly well-regarded film. It was my opportunity to defend the film and explain myself. This commentary was for the upcoming 4K Blu-ray to be released by Kino Lorber.

Heath is a knowledgeable pop culture expert with an emphasis on film and music, as well as a winning presence on Cereal at Midnight, which appears sporadically but frequently on YouTube. We’ve done several movie commentaries together for Kino, and have several more to do. He’s a pleasure to work with.

I of course have a great creative relationship and friendship with Robert Meyer Burnett. Here’s him talking about our collaboration, True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, as a guest on a YouTube show dating back a few months (we hadn’t announced Michael Rosenbaum as our Nate Heller yet). The passion, talent and skill that director Rob Meyer Burnett brings to True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak is on full display in this interview (done while we were stilling working on the True Detective adaptation – available at truenoir.co). (Not “com” – “co”!)

More recently I connected with one of the most unique presences on YouTube, Spencer Draper, who calls himself The Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader. He discusses pop culture with an emphasis on genre movies (and books), but has become known, well outside YouTube circles, as a watchdog for flaws on DVDs, Blu-rays and 4K discs. He points out mastering problems and particularly hones in on audio blunders. He is focused, relentless and very, very smart.

I reached out to him to inquire about his experiences on the Warner Bros “DVD rot” problem, which has to do with a batch of 2007-2008 DVDs that are out there rotting even as we speak. He’s been key in alerting collectors and a sometimes (sometimes) cooperative Warner Bros customer service about the problem, and the need – moral responsibility for – replacing defective discs.

There’s a spooky aspect to the contact between Spencer and me. I’ve never gotten in touch with him before, and I don’t believe he’s ever covered anything of mine on his YouTube offerings. I had no reason to think I was on his radar.

But it turns out he was, at that moment, doing a deep dive into my involvement with the Dick Tracy movie, studying my novelization and doing his general thorough digging job. We have now corresponded several times and the experience has been pleasant, even if the Warner Bros aspect hasn’t been. (I am definitely not talking about Warner Archive!)

For Spencer, and for those of you who are new here (even relatively so), I am reprinting an article about how I intersected with the Dick Tracy movie, Warren Beatty’s people, and the Good Folks at Disney. It’s an excerpt from an article I wrote for Lee Goldberg’s Tied In – The Business, History and Craft of Media Tie-In Writing. It is the behind-the-scenes amusing and horrifying story of my writing of the movie tie-in novelization of Dick Tracy.

I wanted to write the Dick Tracy tie-in novel because I’d been the writer of the syndicated strip since 1977, plus I was a mystery novelist. Landing the Dick Tracy strip was my first really big career break. I got the job after trying out for it, writing a sample continuity. I got the opportunity to try out chiefly because of some mystery novels I’d written as a kid that had a strong comics element (Bait Money and Blood Money, both 1973).

My re-boot of the strip got a lot of positive attention, and I loved the job, having been a stone Dick Tracy fanatic since childhood. Before getting the strip, I had even developed a friendship with creator Chester Gould – a rarity, because he was very private – although Chet played no role in my landing this plum assignment.

Some time in the ’80s, I was shown a potential screenplay for Dick Tracy, shared with me by my Chicago Tribune Syndicate editor. I thought it was lousy, and told him so, and he agreed. I figured that was the end of it.

But the Dick Tracy film was a project that wouldn’t die – Clint Eastwood was going to be the square-jawed dick for a while, which was exciting, and then finally Warren Beatty got obsessed with it, and it became a Disney project and a very big deal. I offered to do the novel version and, thanks to my credentials as the writer of the strip, got the gig. I was thrilled.

Then they sent me the screenplay – it was virtually the same lousy one I’d read seven or eight years before! I was shocked and dismayed. Lots of the classic characters, villains and good guys alike, some good situations…but no story. Not really.

I asked my agent what to do about it, wondering what kind of novel I could fashion from such weak material, and he said, “Just do whatever you want with it. Nobody’s going to read it at Disney – this is just small change to them.” Did I mention that my usually very savvy agent had never sold a tie-in before? And that this was the worst advice he ever gave me?

So I wrote a novel very loosely based on the screenplay. I added more characters from the strip, provided a story, even replaced what seemed to me to be unimaginative death traps with my own better ones. It was a terrific little novel, designed by and for a Dick Tracy fan like me.

I sent it in, went on about my business, and several months later my wife Barb and I were preparing to go on a research trip to Nassau (for my Nate Heller novel Carnal Hours) when my agent called with bad news. The Disney people hadn’t even made it through my book – got maybe a third of the way – before saying a faithful-to-the-screenplay page one rewrite was needed.

In seven days.

Dick Tracy is legendarily a movie that Warren Beatty micro-managed. Every tie-in aspect was overseen by Beatty and his top people. The novel I’d written was inappropriate for any film. To have taken these liberties on Dick Tracy was a blundering piece of farcical arrogance on my part that makes Fawlty Towers look like a documentary.

So with a 1989-era laptop (think about it), I went to Nassau and spent 70% of my time in the hotel room salvaging what little I could from my first version. Maybe 25% of it was workable. Actually, some of my non-screenplay stuff made it in, because it didn’t contradict anything (Vitamin Flintheart is in my novel, for instance, but not in the film, not even deleted scenes).

Barb and I were in Nassau four or five days, and I came home and wrote the rest of it, just blazing. What I came up with was pretty good. I was as happy with it as possible, considering the weak screenplay that was my source. But that, as they say, was just the beginning….

I spent many, many hours on the phone with the producer of the film, Barry Osborne (later involved in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy), a gracious, intelligent man, and way too far up the food chain to be giving a lowly tie-in writer such instructions as, “The chair on page 223? It’s green not red,” and, “You have 88 Keyes standing up from the piano too soon on page 187.” Most of the changes I was asked to make had to do with such surface things, and many substantial changes I had made in character motivation and dialogue were overlooked.

This was perhaps the most instructive thing I learned from the experience – if you follow the screenplay out the door, and do the surface of it accurately, you can slip in all kinds of substance where characterization and fleshing out of scenes are concerned.

Osborne actually liked the novel a lot, and he told me on several occasions that I had solved plot problems for them, which they had fixed by way of dialogue looping – and indeed the film has five or six lines I wrote.

Also, he asked me about a scene involving Tracy’s girl friend Tess and her mother, where Mrs. Trueheart says a lot of negative stuff about Dick, how she is delighted that Tess and Dick have broken up and how selfish the detective is, etc. I had softened this scene, making Tess’s mother much more positive about her potential son-in-law. The producer asked me why I’d done that.

“Because,” I said, “Tracy joined the police force to avenge the death of Mrs. Trueheart’s husband – Tess’s father, who ran a deli and got shot by robbers. Mrs. Trueheart adores Dick Tracy. Every Dick Tracy fan knows that.”

And they re-shot the scene along my lines.

So I take a certain pride in knowing that Dick Tracy is a film in part based upon its own novelization. The final battle, however, reached new heights of absurdity, and involved phone calls with high-level folks at Disney. How high level? How about Jeffrey Katzenberg? The “surprise” ending of Dick Tracy is that the mysterious masked bad guy called the Blank is actually Breathless Mahoney. Sorry to ruin it for you, but, yes, Madonna did it.

This surprise seemed painfully obvious to me, the kind of shocker you can damn near figure out in the opening credits. But Beatty, Disney and all associated were convinced they had a surprise on the level of The Sixth Sense (I figured that out, too, about five minutes in). So I was instructed to remove it from the novel.

Wait a minute, you’re saying. Remove what? The identity of the masked bad guy. The solution to the mystery. You know…who the killer is.

This surprise ending, the Disney folks told me, had to be guarded like the Coca Cola recipe or the unretouched Zapruder film. And when I pointed out that Dick Tracy was a mystery story, and that leaving the ending off a mystery story just might disappoint a few readers, this seemed of no particular import.

I did half a dozen rewrites of the ending, sneaking in hints of the Blank’s identity, such as, “Why, look who it is under the mask…” said Tess, breathlessly. No sale. About a page was cut from the book.

I won only one small concession – that any printings after the film came out would include the full ending. Only one small print run represents the complete novel (the sixth, distributed to school book clubs).

There can be no doubt that I hold a singular honor among mystery writers – I wrote a bestselling whodunit… without revealing whodunit.

Perhaps by way of apology, the Disney people flew my wife, son, mother and father and me to the film’s premiere at Disneyworld in Florida. They treated us great. Everybody attached to the movie treated us great, including Warren Beatty. We did a big press get-together with many of the stars. I was doing a Mumbles continuity in the Dick Tracy strip at the time, and Dustin Hoffman (who played Mumbles in the film) read me that day’s strip from a local paper, doing Mumbles’ dialogue in character. Doesn’t get much better than that.

Two postscripts: in our Disneyworld hotel, a coloring book on sale – an item that (it turned out) had been available to the public for several weeks – included the Breathless-is-the-Blank ending. As we say in the funnies, “Sigh….”

Also, the wonderful actress Estelle Parsons (who played Mrs. Truehart in the film) wandered into a bookstore at Disneyworld, where I was signing copies of my open-ended novel. We spoke, and she was very sweet, and I said to her, “You had to re-shoot your big scene, didn’t you?”

She looked at me, amazed. “How did you know that?”

And I told her.

* * *

I have no idea how long I’ve been writing these Update/Blog entries, but it’s been long enough that I’ve had to mark the passing of friends and heroes, as well as friends who were heroes.


Wayne Dundee

I can’t say Wayne Dundee, who passed away recently, was a close friend. There was a time when we were. Seeing him gone does make me feel like the Last Man Standing – of my closest mystery crew, we’ve lost Ed Gorman, Bob Randisi, Steve Mertz, John Lutz, Bill Crider and probably more that I am criminally forgetting.

Wayne was the founding editor of the long-running fan/prozine Hardboiled (more “pro” than “fan” because it was always a paying market). He was one of the first fans who reached out to me, and he specifically wondered if I had anything in my drawer that he might print in his ‘zine, which ran mostly to (as you might imagine) hardboiled crime and detective fiction. As it happened, I did. A novel called Mourn the Living with a character initially called Cord and later Logan and even later (and permanently) Nolan had been stored away long ago.

I got the moldering manuscript (literally, not figuratively) out of a box in the basement and talked Barb into retyping it for me. She did this, gracious partner and writer that she is; and I did a light edit, not wanting to interfere with what the young writer (I’d been 19 when I wrote it) had in mind. Wayne, who specifically described himself as a Nolan fan, eagerly took it and had me break it into several parts for serialization.

Eventually it was collected into a book, and it was recently a bonus feature of sorts in Mad Money, the latest reprint of my Nolan-heists-a-shopping-mall novel, Spree.

Thanks, Wayne.

I vaguely recall reading Wayne’s early work in manuscript, and providing some notes and encouragement; but that memory is vague. I do know he went on to do nine Joe Hannibal mysteries, wracking up several Shamus nominations. A career as a private eye writer is hard to maintain (tell me about it!) and he eased quite naturally into becoming a highly regarded western writer. The last time I heard from him, and it was a post here, was him encouraging me to show my grandson western movies, and to agree that Costner’s Horizon was woefully under-appreciated.

Wayne also appeared in one of my movies! He was the hulking, bearded prison guard who backed up the great Del Close in the scenes regarding the botched attempt to execute Mrs. Sterling (aka Mommy).

James Reasoner, one of the other last men standing, writes a brief but lovely tribute to Wayne here.

* * *

I seem to be a more or less contributor of a segment to Rob and Dieter Bastian’s infectious YouTube show, Let’s Get Physical Media. I’m on as a noir/crime/mystery expert. The weekly episodes usually are on Sunday afternoon, and I have been coming on around 2 pm Central for half an hour or so.

M.A.C.

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