Get Fancy, Stream at Your Own Risk & Plot, Plot, Plot

July 18th, 2023 by Max Allan Collins

Out of the blue, two nice reviews of my novella Fancy Anders For the Boys popped up on the Internet.

Here’s one from that pro’s pro, writer Ron Fortier, at his Pulp Fiction Reviews site. Ron has, in part, a very personal response that is quite fascinating.

FANCY ANDERS – FOR THE BOYS
By Max Allan Collins
Illustrated by Fay Dalton
Neo Text
118 pgs

This is Collins’ second book featuring Hollywood debutante turned detective, Fancy Anders, set in the early days of World War II. What with Pearl Harbor fresh in the minds of most Americans, the people in Los Angeles right worry about a possible Japanese invasion and the Army quickly establishes military outpost in the hills overlooking the city. Many of these set up with anti-artillery installations.

With that many boys in uniform soon flooding the streets of Hollywood, the movie community comes together under the leadership of actors John Garfield and Bette Davis to open a canteen exclusively to cater to these servicemen and staffed by cinema stars and young, beautiful ingénues.

When Army Intelligence learns of possible enemy saboteurs targeting the famous Hollywood Canteen, Fancy is recruited, along with several of her girl friends, to pose as canteen hostesses and ferret out the foreign agents. Once again, Collins uses his considerable imagination to drop the reader into the middle of one of Hollywood’s most memorable locales. Through his words, it is so easy to see the beautiful ladies, the eager young men away from home and hear the big band music. It all comes alive against a backdrop of a world turned upside in the throes of war.

“Fancy Anders – For the Boys” is a fun read. Especially for this reviewer, whose father, Pfc. George Fortier served on one of those gun crews and spend his 1942 Thanksgiving, along with two other men, at the home of crooner Bing Crosby and his family. All before he shipped out for the Philippines and three years of hell.

And here is another great review, this one from GoodReads (unfortunately, unsigned):

Fancy Anders plays hostess at the Hollywood Canteen where soldiers and sailors about to ship out mingle with movie stars in this second of three thrilling mysteries by Road to Perdition creator Max Allan Collins, with stunning illustrations by award-winning artist Fay Dalton.

October 1942. With her private detective daddy in the OSS chasing saboteurs, Fancy is stuck playing receptionist/cleaning-gal at the empty Anders Confidential Inquiries office. But then the 24-year-old Barnard grad – expert in shooting, flying and jujitsu – is recruited back into action.

Hollywood, with Bette Davis and John Garfield leading the charge, has put together a night club where servicemen are served by waiters and waitresses with famous faces, from Gable to Dietrich, from Abbott to Costello. With starlets acting as hostesses, gorgeous Fancy fits right in. But this pistol-packing mama knows her real job is solving the murder of Who Killed the Hostess – a Victory Girl who became an LA battle casualty. In the meantime, saboteurs are targeting the Canteen for maximum damage, hoping to wipe out half the stars in Tinsel Town and blast a hole in America’s morale.

Portraying the times vividly with his trademark historical accuracy, Mystery Writers of America grandmaster Max Allan Collins has created a series protagonist both of her time and far ahead of it. Lavishly illustrated by James Bond artist, Fay Dalton.

The three Fancy Anders novellas are designed as essentially a serialized novel, in the hope they will be collected (Fay Dalton’s great illos and all). My structural pattern was Hammett’s great The Glass Key. Fay is working on the third novella’s illustrations right now (Fancy Anders Goes Hollywood).

Fancy Anders Goes to War cover
E-Book: Amazon Purchase Link
Trade Paperback: Amazon Purchase Link
Digital Audiobook: Amazon Purchase Link
MP3 CD: Amazon Purchase Link
Fancy Anders For the Boys cover
E-Book: Amazon Purchase Link
Trade Paperback: Amazon Purchase Link
Digital Audiobook: Amazon Purchase Link
Audio MP3 CD: Amazon Purchase Link
Audio CD: Amazon Purchase Link

Neo Text bought them as e-books but, at my request, have also made them available in book form. This has caused some confusion from readers who can’t figure out why the books are so short, although the books at Amazon are clearly listed as novellas.

Fay’s illos (cover excepted) appear in black-and-white in the physical books and in color in the e-books. My hope is that they will be in color when the three novellas are eventually collected, and in fact I’ll probably insist they do. We have not gone out to publishers about the collected novel version as yet.

This was a Covid lockdown project, largely, and one I truly loved doing, from the research through the writing. Fancy is sort of a young Ms. Tree, though she definitely has her own personality. Within the context of my work, the novellas are reliably tough, though not as extreme in that regard as Mike Hammer, Nate Heller and Quarry.

You can get them at Amazon. Here’s Fancy Anders Goes to War.

And here’s Fancy Anders For the Boys.

As I’ve mentioned here before, Skyboat Media has done phenomenal audiobooks of the Fancy novellas, with full sound effects, music and a fine female narrator in Gabrielle De Cuir.

The Amazon links I provided will also take you to ordering info on the e-books and the audios mentioned above. But of course my preference is physical media.

Fancy Anders Goes to War is $6.99 and Fancy Anders For the Boys is $5.99 in physical book form.

* * *

My ongoing rants about my love of physical media and disdain for e-books and streaming video probably needs some clarification.

Nothing wrong with e-books. If I were younger, particularly if I were commuting by train to work or doing a lot of flying on commercial airlines for business, I would certainly have a Kindle. My son Nate has long read books on Kindle and, when he really likes them, gone on to buy those books in their proper physical media form.

A great deal of my income comes from e-books, as the links I provide here to Amazon sales on a fairly regular basis indicate. I have been very fortunate to have been one of the authors who early on was approached by Amazon, and they have kept me in print (and have sent regular checks) at a time in my career when that comes in very handy indeed. They publish physical media versions, too, but the e-books are the moneymakers.

Frankly, I was one of the handful of living authors approached by Amazon for my backlist – which included not only Nate Heller but Mallory and the “Disaster” series and a few standalones. Ian Fleming was one of the others, for example, all deceased except me. For a while they were publishing new novels of mine – including the very successful Reeder and Rogers political thriller trilogy, co-written by my pal Matt Clemens – though the current editorial staff expresses no interest in publishing new material by me.

No harm, no foul. What they already have continues to generate sales. The most recent titles are the two Krista Larson novels, Girl Most Likely and Girl Can’t Help It, which continue to sell if not at a clip at a steady pace.

But my frustration with the streaming services continues, and the writers and actors who are on strike are actively seeking help in that area, understandably. As a consumer, I am angry – but not even a little surprised – to see them (post-Covid lockdown) eliminating all sorts of stuff that I might have wanted to watch, and this includes things I bought for my library. Things like the 1950 Li’l Abner and the Sidney J. Furie The Lawyer have disappeared after I bought them, supposedly permanently.

If you drop by here regularly, you’ll know I set out to show Barb and myself every Raymond Burr-era Perry Mason episode that was based on an Erle Stanley Gardner novel or story. We have completed that mission, and I think it adds up to 90 episodes or so (remarkable that an American series did so many adaptations of the source material).

But during the relatively short time it took to do that, a whole season (season 7) disappeared from Paramount+, and a number of episodes from the other seasons disappeared without a trace much less a warning. These tended to be Gardner-derived episodes.

Fortunately, I owned the entire nine-season run on DVD and had been watching the Paramount+ episodes only because they were of the higher high-def quality. You haven’t lived till you’ve examined the wrinkles on the faces of Hamilton Burger and Lt. Arthur Tragg in high-definition.

“Incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial!” you say.

Well, I’m fussy. And some who’ve been witnessing these irrational tirades of mine frown and waggle a finger – maybe it’s all well and good for an incredibly wealthy, world-famous author (pause for my hysterical laughter) to spend some of his endless funds on one Blu-ray and actual physical book after another. And it’s true that I wallow in laserdiscs, DVDs, Blu-rays and 4K discs, and that books are stacked everywhere around here waiting in hopeless desperation to be read.

But I never meant to imply that the unreliability of the streaming services and the convenience of e-books meant that I expected you to spend your food money on physical media. Only an obsessive idiot like myself – and I am not alone, I assure you – would buy as many discs and books as I do, despite the dwindling number of years that I face ahead to actually watch or read them.

What I mean to suggest about DVDs, Blu-rays and 4Ks is that if you like a movie or TV series, if it’s one of your favorites or even if it’s just something you might think revisiting is a distinct possibility, buying those movies (and/or TV shows) on physical media is well worth considering.

And as for e-books, my son Nate’s approach makes a world of sense – read it on Kindle (or whatever), and if you really, really like it, invest in a physical copy for your book shelf.

Books by me, for example.

* * *

I intend to start writing a new novel tomorrow (Monday, July 17, as I type this) – Quarry’s Return. It is, not surprisingly, for Hard Case Crime.

I spent all of this past week (including earlier today) on plotting the novel – specifically, writing a 2500-word synopsis. In the past, I have not always plotted in this much depth. My first few novels – Bait Money, No Cure for Death, and The Broker (aka Quarry) – were not plotted at all. I just flew by the seat of my pants.

No Cure for Death – a mystery – found me having to write two chapters to explain what the eff had been going on. I swore to never put myself in that position again, and never did. Crime novels were less a problem, because they don’t always include a strong mystery element. But as the years passed, and boy have they passed, I gradually began to need to plot.

It begin with plotting just a few chapters ahead. By recent years, I’ve come to need a full chapter breakdown. On the other hand, I frequently depart from the synopsis when the characters decide to come up with things of their own to do that I hadn’t anticipated. So I almost always have to re-plot a few times during the writing of a novel.

The more detailed plotting began with True Detective in the early ‘80s – I was dealing with history and a certain amount of plotting had already occurred by way of events. Surprisingly, the historical nature of the material did prevent the need to re-plot as I went along, because the characters would again surprise me and, because I continue to research as I write, new information would present itself and demand attention.

* * *

The ESO network has published another Ron Fortier review, of the Spillane/Collins The Menace, a book you should consider picking up. It’s a horror novel, Spillane-style, plus two bonus stories. From Wolfpack.

Finally, this is a rather wonderful review (in French – you may have to rely on your browser to translate) of the graphic novel, Road to Perdition. One of the smartest, most in-depth reviews of that work I’ve seen.

M.A.C.

Heroes Never Die, But Do They Get Old?

July 11th, 2023 by Max Allan Collins
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, cropped movie poster showing Indiana Jones holding a whip.

The only thing I don’t particularly like about the film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is that uninspired secondary title. Oh, and a car chase goes on too long mid-movie.

Otherwise, I was swept up in the Indiana Jones-ness of it all, and have a hard time understanding why so many of the reviews have been tepid or even negative. Several people in the lobby afterward told me how unrealistic they thought it was (unlike, apparently, the incredibly real-to-life previous Indiana Jones movies) and my pal Leonard Maltin condemned it as formulaic (apparently this would have been a good time, in the final installment, to reinvent everything).

Well, I loved it, from the de-aged Harrison Ford in the epic Nazi opening, and the manner in which he kind of gradually eschews his grumpy archeology professor persona – which he’s apparently given in to for decades – and becomes recognizably Indiana Jones again. Right after the strong opening, moving from a Nazi encampment to a roaring train, we are in the present where we learn Jones is divorced from his love-of-his-life wife. Soon Ford strips out of his shirt to show us a decent-for-eighty-years-old physique, but definitely one that has seen all those years and plenty of wear and tear.

As usual, Indy is paired with a young woman, but this time not a love interest – in fact, it’s an apparent daughter (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who very much holds her own with the old boy. The villain, the reliably odious Mads Mikkelsen, is a worthy one, and complaints about the ending – which pays off the dial of destiny theme and ends with a sweetly satisfying coda – is apparently deemed ineffective by some audience members.

My suspicion is that older viewers are jaded, and younger viewers are not sufficiently aware of the magic of Indiana Jones – for all the complaints about the middle movie of the initial trilogy, those three films were almost as impactful at their pop-cultural moment as Star Wars – and possibly had only the weak Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (an even worse secondary title) to go on.

Look, the filmmakers were smart enough to kill Shia LaBeouf’s character (Mutt!) off between movies. What more do you want?

The soft response to an excellent summer blockbuster (or maybe would-be blockbuster) has to do with the same kind of ageism afoot in a country where that particular “ism” is the only one you can get away with. Ask Joe Biden.

For me, seeing Ford as Jones at his ripe old age (the guy is five years older than me!) is inspiring. No, I don’t believe Ford was doing all of his own stunts, just that I can see how interesting allowing an action hero to age can be. I recall the outrage (justifiable in my estimation) when the producers of a new Lone Ranger movie (in 1981) forbid TV’s Lone Ranger, Clayton Moore, from even wearing his mask at supermarket openings, let alone consider casting him in his iconic role. Hell, he was in his mid-sixties! Does the name Klinton Spilsbury ring a bell? (He’s 73 now.)

What it does for me, as an artist (note I did not spell that “artiste”), is provide food for thought. I would like, if my health cooperates, to write two more Quarry novels (one contracted for already) and two more Nate Heller novels (the subject matter chosen and research under way). The Heller novels require Nate to be the age he would be at the time of the famous historical events I’m planning to thrust him in the middle of. The final book would make him 67 and retired (67, coincidentally, is how old Clayton Moore was when they cast Spilsbury instead).

But I made Quarry around 70 in Quarry’s Blood. I am seriously considering keeping him in his early seventies for these last two books. Nobody complained about his age in Quarry’s Blood, so what the hell? Keeping his age close to mine allows me to write him from a point of view that continues the sort of through-a-glass-darkly autobiography that the Quarry novels represent. It’s, on one level, the story of what might have happened to me if I’d had to go to Vietnam; certainly it’s somewhat the story of what happened to my friend Jon McRae, whose career in the Marines was followed by mercenary work.

I know Mickey Spillane ducked citing Hammer’s age, and it got silly. Mickey insisted (in interviews, not the books) that Hammer was eternally 35. Yet Hammer remains a World War Two veteran in Black Alley, a book set in the year it was published (1996) with Hammer using a cell phone. At the same time, Mickey used health problems (echoing his own) in place of aging Hammer, to be able to present his hero as somewhat damaged goods. I have, in my novels working from Mickey’s unfinished manuscripts, attempted to adjust Hammer’s age (and Velda’s) somewhat closer to reality.

I have always been uncomfortable with series characters who refuse to age. My favorite mystery series, other than Mike Hammer, is Nero Wolfe; but Stout stubbornly refused to age either Archie Goodwin or Wolfe a day. The absurdity becomes abundant when a character from Too Many Cooks (1938) shows up in Right to Die (1964) having aged according to the calendar.

Poirot would have been well over 100, given the age Christie records in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), later reporting him in Beatle-era London in The Third Girl (1966).

Heller has been writing his memoirs and his age, though he’s vain enough to fudge a little, has stayed pretty much even with reality. That’s a set-in-stone aspect of the saga. Quarry has been established to be taking place primarily in two eras (roughly, the ‘70s and ‘80s/’90s). I made him my age when I returned with The Last Quarry for Hard Case Crime, to (I thought) wrap up the series. Quarry’s Blood, for reasons of the age of a certain character who turns up, had by necessity to be set when he was essentially my age.

And I liked it.

So that, for now anyway, is the plan. Of course, as John Lennon said, life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.

* * *

Among the plans I’m making, in my Pollyanna-ish way, is to do at least a couple more indie movies before I shuffle off to Buffalo (or meet the fate of buffalos).

My friend and longtime collaborator Phil Dingeldein and I are attempting to get a horror film mounted with a real budget ($1.5 mil). We will see if we can make that happen, but it’s not for lack of trying. The project is based on a novella of mine, Reincarnal, available in the collection of my horror short fiction of that name published by Wolfpack.

Reincarnal and Other Dark Tales, cover

Then there’s Blue Christmas. As I write this, we still don’t know if we got some funding from Greenlight Iowa – they are overdue in informing us (either way). But with my friend Chad Bishop – who edited Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder and helped Phil shoot the play and several rehearsals, from which we assembled a video – I will do it one way or another. The budget will be low, the cast largely pro-am. But it’s a way to get it done without the decision-making being controlled by Hollywood.

You can see “A Wreath for Marley,” the basis of Blue Christmas, here.

Reincarnal and Other Dark Tales, cover

I am working with Robert Blair at VCI Home Entertainment on getting the expanded Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane documentary out on Blu-ray before year’s end. It will include, as a bonus feature, Encore for Murder. We are also considering offering Encore as a DVD, designed primarily for the Golden Age Radio market (Radio Spirits, for example).

I’ll preview the Blu-ray and DVD covers here as soon as they are ready.

* * *

My listing of the Perry Mason TV episodes that appeared here a while back needs some revising, which I will do soon. But Paramount+ double-crossed me. Like so many streaming services, they drop stuff unannounced – and by “drop,” I don’t mean debut something, but literally drop it. A number of Mason episodes have disappeared from the service, including several Gardner adaptations. And the entire seventh season has vanished. The final season (the ninth) was never there, to my knowledge.

To fill in, I had to go to my DVD sets of Mason, which look good but not high-def like Paramount+ broadcasts.

Watching the Gardner adaptations in order, Barb and I find show always good, or at least fun; but it’s the first two seasons that are stellar. It’s interesting to note that by the time we get to 1960, the noir-ish flavor of the ‘40s and ‘50s that so permeates the first two seasons has disappeared…much like numerous episodes on Paramount+.

This all goes to show why physical media is where it’s at. I realize I am a nut about this stuff, and many of you could not care less about Blu-ray when you have a couple of shelves of DVD’s. Or maybe your VCR still works and you indulge in that flawed format VHS, which does have a nostalgia value for some, particularly those who raided the video store shelves on Friday to gather viewing material for the coming weekend.

But if you think “everything” is available, thanks to streaming, think again.

* * *

I mentioned Ellis Parker Butler last week, as the “other” somewhat famous mystery writer from Muscatine, Iowa. I should have noted another one, though this guy only wrote a few mysteries. His name was Samuel Clemens.

He lived in Muscatine for several years before he got famous; his brother ran the newspaper here.

It’s just possible I will never be as famous as Mark Twain.

* * *

THIS JUST IN: I completed this update – rather thought I had completed it – and then Barb and I went off to see the new Wes Anderson film, Asteroid City. I’d been looking forward to it, and both Barb and I really liked certain of Anderson’s other films, specifically Rushmore, Moonrise Kingdom, Isle of Dogs and especially The Grand Budapest Hotel. We were disappointed in Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Royal Tanenbaums and The French Dispatch. But this was clearly a gifted filmmaker with a distinct and unique voice.

We walked out of Asteroid City, which is an unbearable exercise in fooling good actors into thinking they are in a movie. And probably for scale. It’s the kind of film where you come out humming the art direction. It is intentionally stilted and very intentionally artificial, making sure the viewer has no suspension of disbelief to hang onto. Beyond arch, the definition of twee, Asteroid City is the worst film I’ve ever seen (or anyway forty minutes of) by a talented director.

Certain movies by directors (or in film series) ruin their other movies for me. This is one of those.

I do not like to write reviews that are critical of movies because it’s tough to make even a really bad movie. Anderson has succeeded in doing the latter.

M.A.C.

Half-Price Books, The Other Muscatine Mystery Man & More

July 4th, 2023 by Max Allan Collins

Barb and I, stepping our toes in the waters of life after Covid and heart surgery (me not her), took a brief getaway to Des Moines, where we’ve often gone to relax at a favorite hotel (the Wildwood), indulge in some favorite restaurants (Noah’s Arc, Ohana Steakhouse), and shop at some of our favorite brick-and-mortar stores.

Master Chef Cy Gushiken at our favorite Des Moines restaurant.
Master Chef Cy Gushiken at our favorite Des Moines restaurant.

Unfortunately, Barb’s favorite of that latter category (Von Maur at Valley West) has moved to upscale Jordan Creek mall. West Des Moines/Clive (they are adjacent) has a very nice Barnes & Noble that is still open and apparently flourishing, despite a second B & N opening a while back at Jordan Creek.

The dog in my hunt, chiefly, is the West Des Moines Half-Price Books. I go to the Cedar Rapids Half-Price frequently, but I always considered the somewhat larger Des Moines outlet an outstanding one. This time I was less enthusiastic.

Now, let’s take a brief side trip into the competing worlds of streaming and physical media. Physical media has taken a bad hit – Best Buy has all but phased out the home video that was for decades their chief loss leader/draw. They dropped CDs several years ago. The younger world (the same one inexplicably drawn to vinyl) has done its best to convince everyone over thirty that physical media has gone the way of the dodo and dinosaur. That we will be able to get every, movie and TV-wise, that we could ever want from the streaming services.

Right.

What we really have in streaming is a combination of charging for everything (even the oldest content) or foisting commercials on us, and gradually…well, not so gradually…dropping the movies and particularly TV shows you were paying to get.

Thank God for physical media.

And thank God for Half-Price Books, right?

Sure, they rape you when you sell stuff to them, and pretend to care about the environment by eliminating plastic bags (and selling you five-buck cloth ones, if you insist upon transporting your purchases to the parking lot without encountering bodily harm). But at least they are the home of physical media.

Right? Right?

My visit to the Des Moines Half-Price Books began by the book/video buyer informing me they were now paying less (!) because so much was so easily available from the streaming services (!). Muttering, I trundled off to the wall of movies and TV shows on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K to drown my sorrows in cinema.

What greeted me was indeed a wall of video. But it was also an ungodly video mosaic – DVDs were now interspersed with Blu-rays and 4K’s. No separation of titles – like Criterions, or classic cinema, or foreign, or any classification. Everything and anything that could be considered a “feature film” was lumped together – Bambi and Night of the Living Dead sharing only horrific death scenes. A secondary wall of TV series also consisted of interspersed DVDs and Blu-rays.

A few classifications remained, outside of the feature film area. In the Entertainment book section, you could find a row of interspersed opera DVDs and Blu-rays. And in the sports area was a row of wrestling DVDs. No opera-singing wrestler videos appeared to be on offer.

Here’s the thing: Blu-ray/4K collectors generally do not also collect DVDs. Nor do most people still buying DVDs want to be bothered with them uppity Blu-rays and 4K’s. And few of us in either group want to go through hundreds upon hundreds of unsorted (if alphabetized) mixed formats. I do not care to go through the entire inventory of a Half-Price Books looking for the five or six titles I might pick up. Nor do they benefit from people who come in looking for a title, check its alphabetical position, and find it, or not, make a paltry purchase and exit. Impulse buying? We don’t need no stinking impulse buying….

This unsorted morass is courtesy of (a) a generation or two who have contempt for physical media, with (again) the inexplicable hipster obsession with the delights of snap, crackle and pop common to Rice Krispies and vinyl records; and (b) corporate decision makers who don’t know what the fuck they are doing.

Imagine if the books within Half-Price were similarly rearranged – mass market paperbacks intermingled with hardcovers, cats and dogs living together, no separate sections for fiction or nonfiction, no categories like mystery or science fiction or true crime or humor. Madness. Lazy madness at that, with a complete disregard for customers.

I must add that the staff at the buying counter agreed with me whole-heartedly and hated the new corporate policy of shuffling the DVD and Blu-ray decks. In fact, they beamed when I complained, eager to hear (and pass along) the criticism. It was like sending your food back at a restaurant and having the wait staff say, “Damn right! This is shit!”

Some stores – Cedar Rapids included, so far – have ignored this idiotic policy.

* * *

There are three major mystery writers who were born in Muscatine, Iowa. My wife Barb is one of them. I am another. But arguably the most famous is Ellis Parker Butler, who wrote the very funny comic essay (published as a short book) Pigs is Pigs. Read about Butler at Wikipedia.

While Pigs Is Pigs is Butler’s most famous work, the second most famous is his detective character, Philo Gubb. (Butler’s Philo pre-dates Philo Vance, incidentally.) You can read about Gubb at Wikipedia, too, right here.

Philo Gubb Book Cover

Philo Gubb, Correspondence School Detective is one of Ellery Queen’s chosen best and most important mystery novels (though the book is a short story collection, really); it’s number 61 on their Queen’s Quorum. Here’s what Queen says about Philo Gubb:

“The year 1918 witnessed the arrival between covers of the first correspondence-school detective, a small-town paperhanger who commits a slight case of murder on the King’s English every time he talks. Philo Gubb performs his rustic ratiocination in a yellow-lemon book, its front-cover illustration showing a tall, gaunt Holmesian figure wearing a cap and dressing gown, a long pipe sticking out of his Sherlockian face, an enormous microscope on the table behind him, a beautiful damsel sitting in the client’s chair, a bookcase jammed with ponderous tomes in the background, and a framed diploma from the Rising Sun Detective Agency’s Correspondence School on the wall.”

It would seem Philo Gubb is more an ancestor of the Barbara Allan detectives, Brandy and Vivian Borne, than Nate Heller or Quarry. Like Barbara Allan (the Barbara and Max Allan Collins writing team), Ellis Butler Parker was noted for his stories being funny, even laugh out-loud funny. Not bad footsteps to walk in.

I was aware of Ellis Parker Butler, but only recently did I start collecting him. At an estate sale here in Muscatine, held at the Art Center where my band Crusin’ was playing (I was on a break), I picked up nine books by him, and have since ordered several more from e-bay and ABE Books.

Have to check out the competition, you know.

* * *

We have yet another Amazon deal for those of you who are e-book readers.

Thomas & Mercer team has announced that Fate of the Union will be promoted via Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle book deals in the US, starting 7/1/2023 and running through 7/31/2023 at 2.99 USD.

Also, the Amazon Encore team has informed me that True Detective will be promoted via a $3 towards this selection of Kindle books in the marketplace, starting 7/1/2023 and running through 7/31/2023. This promotion offers customers the opportunity to purchase books at a discount within a curated selection using a promo code offered to them in an e-mail. Customers who have purchase history within this genre will be presented this offer. Not all customers will be offered the coupon. But if it turns up in your e-mail, have at it.

Ordering info plus sample chapters and examples of Fay Dalton’s magnificent art for Fancy Anders For The Boys is right here. It’s a novella, remember, not a novel. Available in both e-book and physical (yay!) media.

* * *

I should note that I usually post a link to these updates on half a dozen Facebook sites where these missives might seem to have relevance. But last week I wrote almost exclusively about my weekend of playing two gigs with my band Crusin’, and ran a bunch of photos thereof, so I thought perhaps I shouldn’t bother people whose interests are old paperbacks, and noir mysteries and films and so on.

But if you’re reading this but missed last week, and think you might have been interested, just keep reading.

M.A.C.

Rock & Roll Happened…Twice

June 27th, 2023 by Max Allan Collins

This past weekend my classic rock band Crusin’ appeared twice in three days. Since we only perform in the summer and limit ourselves to around four bookings, this was unusual to say the least.

But the two venues – Ardon Creek Winery and the Muscatine Art Center (for their annual Ice Cream Social) – are regulars of ours and we weren’t about to turn either of them down.

I had some trepidation because of my ongoing health issues, which in particular make the load-in and load-out difficult for this 75-year-old rock-and-roller. But my bride Barb and son Nathan lent a hand in both instances, and that made all the difference. My bandmates Steve Kundel, Bill and Scott Anson were understanding, too, and both gigs went well. We were up against weather on Sunday afternoon for the Ice Cream Social, but the heavy stuff (as Bill Murray would say) did not come down until we were loading out.

This week for my update I am primarily sharing photos taken at these two performances. The photographers were Barb and Nate. Our grandchildren, Sam and Lucy, were in attendance for both events, and there will be an attack of cuteness included. Diabetics are forewarned.

Crusin' at Ardon Creek, June 23, 2023
Crusin’ at Ardon Creek, June 23, 2023
Granddaughter Lucy, a born rocker (Ardon Creek)
Granddaughter Lucy, a born rocker (Ardon Creek)
M.A.C. cues the boys at Ardon Creek
M.A.C. cues the boys at Ardon Creek
M.A.C. with grandson Sam after the Ardon Creek gig
M.A.C. with grandson Sam after the Ardon Creek gig
Crusin' on June 26, 2023 at Muscatine Art Center
Crusin’ on June 26, 2023 at Muscatine Art Center “Ice Cream Social”

Crusin’, at the moment, only has one more gig scheduled, but we are working on what is undoubtedly our last CD, which will be original material recorded live…or anyway that’s the plan. We hope to come out of it with both an audio version and a video (with audio of course) version.

Fittingly, this week I have a link to a nice write-up about my first band, The Daybreakers, focusing on our LP.

Here’s a good if patronizing write-up about my final Batman issue.

AV likes Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition, ranking it among his best performances. Me, too.

Finally, it’s yet another of these “movies you didn’t know were based on comic books” write-ups. But they like Road to Perdition, so what the hell.

M.A.C.