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Nathan Heller, Blue Christmas Project & Mickey Spillane

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023

I have just completed my proofing of the typeset version of Too Many Bullets, the next (and perhaps final) Nathan Heller novel, coming from Hard Case Crime in the fall of 2023, which seems to be the year we find ourselves in.

A certain number of the hearty souls who check in here regularly (and also those who show up irregularly) are readers of my Quarry, Nolan and other series whose entries run in the traditional 60,000 words or so length. Some others may be comics fan who are interested in Ms. Tree, Road to Perdition and my other occasional forays into graphic noveldom.

This means, these readers have not yet sampled Nathan Heller, the series I consider my best and most significant work. It may be because the books deal with history and these readers are unaware that historical subject matter does not discourage me from trafficking in sex and violence; or perhaps they are put off by the length – these two HCC Heller novels are 80,000 words each. I say gently to these folks that another 20,000 words or so will not kill you, nor will the historical content, although the research for these two recent Hellers damn near killed me. I remind these readers that later this month (delayed by a dock strike in London) physical copies of the new Heller, The Big Bundle, will be available. The e-book and (I think) the audio versions are both available now.

But a certain kind of reader – I will not go so far as to invoke OCD or Anal Retentive tendencies, having both of those conditions myself – won’t start reading a new series anywhere but the beginning. Despite my concerted efforts to make each Heller novel stand alone, such readers are stubborn about starting at the start.

For that reason I am pleased to announce that True Detective (1983) will be promoted via Amazon Monthly Deals: starting 1/1/2023 and running through 1/31/2023, the first Nathan Heller novel (a winner of the Best Novel Shamus from the Private Eye Writers of America) will be offered on e-book at 1.99 USD.

True Detective Thomas and Mercer cover
* * *

Doing the read-through (and tweaking of) Too Many Bullets was an interesting experience. I felt generally very good about the book – in fact, I was really satisfied with it and felt like it showed me at the top of my game.

And I was writing well during the months of actual writing (many months of research preceded that), despite having health issues then, including two brief hospital stays related to my A-fib. But despite what I felt was a high standard of work, I also came across uncharacteristic lapses – word repetition, pronoun confusion, and occasional lack of clarity.

It was odd to see me with my powers intact but now and then flagging, probably due to those health issues. Thankfully I am doing much better on that front, but it was sobering to see the lapses. I’m sure advancing age is another factor. But I will keep at this as long as my marbles are more or less intact.

Still, I’m sure my HCC editor Charles Ardai will wince when he sees I am sending 44 correction pages out of 300 hundred pages or so.

As for whether there will be another Heller novel after Too Many Bullets, that depends on sales, frankly. I have yet to write the major Heller/Hoffa novel I’ve had in mind for, oh, thirty years.

But we are at least nearing the end of Heller’s run. The research is just too daunting for a duffer.

* * *

About a month ago, here, I wrote this (feel free to skip):

I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it again on the occasion of the Christmas Season. Just before Thanksgiving 1992 – right before – I received a letter from the Chicago Tribune Syndicate editor letting me go from the Dick Tracy strip after my 15 year run. Shortly thereafter Bantam cancelled Nate Heller and returned the novel Carnal Hours to me after the editor there had accepted it enthusiastically. (The previous entry, Stolen Away, had won the Best Novel “Shamus” award from the Private Eye Writers of America.)

On Christmas Eve 1992, still shellshocked, I wrote “A Wreath for Marley,” the lead story in the Blue Christmas collection ($2.99 on e-book). It has been published several times, including in the Otto Penzler anthology, The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries. The story is what they call (hideously) a “mash-up” – of A Christmas Carol and The Maltese Falcon. Its significance is that it showed me getting back into the game after two bad batterings. The story is a long one, probably 15,000 words, and was done in one fevered sitting. It remains my favorite short story of mine.

It almost became my second indie movie – there’s a script, you will not be surprised to learn – but the success of Mommy led to us deciding to do Mommy’s Day instead.

Since I wrote this post, I’ve been exploring – with Chad Bishop, who put together Encore for Murder with me as a video presentation (stay tuned) – mounting a production of Blue Christmas here in Muscatine that could be presented as a live performance but also shot as a feature much as we did Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life.

But Blue Christmas exists as a novella and as a film script, and no live performance version was ever written. Adding a second level of problems, er, challenges, a script for the stage is needed, with an eye on putting together the feature. So it needed to be a hybrid – a screenplay written for the live-performance stage.

Does your head hurt yet?

Still, I have long intended to someday take the time to write a stage play version of Blue Christmas. It’s a story I believe in and that has special resonance for me, as the piece of fiction I wrote on a long-ago Christmas eve that got me back up on the one-horse sleigh writing again after having my career get yanked out from under me.

Anyway, I spent a week on it, over Christmas (appropriately) and I’m very happy with it. Putting together a piece that was intended to have fairly elaborate special effects for a low-budget indie film and doing it instead live on stage…tricky. I am proud of how I solved the challenges…the problems…as the only stage play I’ve previously written is Eliot Ness.

But, as I say, it’s set up in a screenplay manner, in part because we are going after a couple of grants that are intended for backing low-budget feature films, not stage productions.

In the meantime, I’m entering Encore for Murder in a couple of Iowa film festivals, getting back in the game a little. As much as I love writing fiction – and even relish the solitary nature of it – I have to admit I’m never happier than when I’m in an editing suite working with my pal, Phil Dingeldein. And working with Chad Bishop has been a joy, as well.

Speaking of Phil, last Thursday he and a two-person crew – Justin Hall and Hannah Miner – came to Muscatine and shot the additional footage for our expanded version of Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane. The original documentary was shot in 1998 and released in 1999, and this brings the Spillane story up to date, from Mickey’s final years through the work I’ve done completing his unfinished manuscripts.

We are talking to VCI, who have released a lot of my stuff in the past (but never the Spillane doc) and hope to include Encore for Murder as a bonus feature. It’s a natural flow as we have Gary Sandy talking about playing Mike Hammer in the new documentary footage.

* * *

Here’s a two-party review of several of my Batman issues. These fans don’t realize that I was subjected to artist changes (artists who apparently didn’t have access to character designs from the previous issue!) and that no Batman “bible” existed, meaning I had to fly by my bat wings into unknown backstory territory. They do like my Penguin story, however.

Road to Perdition is back on Netflix.

Finally, here’s a great write-up on the forthcoming Nolan two-fer, Mad Money.

M.A.C.

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Encore for Hammer

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2022

The 75th anniversary of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer is really kicking in. Introduced in 1947 in I, the Jury, the private eye changed the nature of tough heroes even as his creator changed the face of publishing.

Not surprisingly, I’m in thick of that celebration, with Kill Me If You Can coming out next month. The novel is based on an unproduced teleplay written by Mickey in 1954, and it’s the bridge between Kiss Me, Deadly (1952) and The Girl Hunters (1962). Velda – his secretary/partner and the love of his life – goes missing, possibly killed, and Hammer wants to know why.

The book includes five short stories completed by me from Spillane material, two of which are Hammer yarns with particular significance to the canon.

In 1952 Mickey sold the film rights to the existing Hammer novels to expatriate British producer Victor Saville. The ink was barely dry when they began to feud over Mickey’s desire for input, including casting. Saville manipulated and handled Mickey, making promises he had no intention of keeping, i.e., casting Mickey’s cop pal Jack Stang as Hammer (who wound up with a bit as a pool hall thug). For that reason Mickey came to dislike the films Saville made and, frankly, Hammer’s daddy wasn’t always fair to those films, criticizing them in public. Taking the brunt of that criticism has been the 1953 I, the Jury with Biff Elliot.

The film has also long been dismissed by some critics (including latterday noir buffs) but they – and Mickey – are wrong. It’s a wonderful though hardly perfect movie, suffering from censorship woes but still a fine translation of Spillane to the screen, really capturing the feel of the early novels. Very few films noir were shot in 3D and this one was the work of cinematographer John Alton, widely considered the finest noir director of photography of the classic period. And only a couple of noirs were made at all during that first 3D wave.

For years now, the only place you could see the 3D version of I, the Jury was at an occasional film festival (I saw it in London at the Spillane retrospective where we showed my documentary, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane, 1999). And the film is a wholly different experience in 3D.

Now ClassicFlix is bringing out an elaborate Blu-ray that includes a 3D disc (for those of you who have the capacity for 3D) but also a 4K disc and a Blu-ray. Seeing it in 4K is almost like seeing it in 3D. Here’s the terrific cover.

I The Jury 3D cover

I have recorded the commentary and also have contributed a new transfer of the rare 1954 Brian Keith Mike Hammer pilot written and directed by Blake Edwards. My pal Phil Dingeldein and I created a new wraparound for the pilot that puts it into historical context.

Additionally, Phil and I are working on an expanded version of my 1999 Spillane documentary, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane, bringing the story of Hammer and Spillane up to date. It will be a companion piece of sorts to the biography Jim Traylor and I have written (years in the making!), Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction, which comes out in January from Mysterious Press, and includes a lot of rare pictures as well as personal memories of mine set off in Spillane-appropriate italics.

We already have a distributor interested in doing both a Blu-ray of the documentary and getting it out to the streaming services.

As I’ve mentioned here I am also co-directing (with local theater maven Karen Cooney) a one-night presentation of the radio-style play, Encore for Murder, starring Gary Sandy (of WKRP In Cincinnati fame) as Mike Hammer. The production, an otherwise amateur one but with a strong local cast, is a benefit for the Muscatine (Iowa) Art Center.

Gary and I presented Encore for Murder in Owensboro, Kentucky in 2010 as part of the International Mystery Writers Festival, and in 2018 in Clearwater, Florida, at Ruth Eckerd Hall Theatre. We may be doing a half-hour documentary about this latest production as part of (or perhaps a Blu-ray bonus feature for) the expanded Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane documentary.

Encore for Murder poster
* * *

Crusin’ played its final gig of its season at the Art Center’s annual Ice Cream Social. The crowd was large and appreciative on a lovely day. We were very lucky this year as all five of our gigs were outdoors and nary a raindrop in sight.

Crusin' at Muscatine Art Center Ice Cream Social 2022

The question is, was that the last Crusin’ gig ever?

It’s the old Godfather 3 thing – “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” With one notable exception, these were all excellent gigs, very well-received, and the last several showed this version of the band at its best.

That notable exception was a private party that came up out of nowhere, which we took because nobody could think of a reason not to. I was of course unaware that I had gone back into Afib and was sick as a dog all night, wishing I were anywhere else. But playing in a band is always that way – you have a miserable experience, and want to bail from the whole damn thing; then you have a fun, great night and amnesia about the bad gig sets in.

I continue to have an ambition to do one last original material CD. We began working on one the year before the pandemic began and rehearsals shut down. And these last two summers we’ve just had enough on our plates to get prepped to make our limited schedule of appearances in the summer.

On top of that – after an unexpectedly rough week following the cardioversion procedure designed to get me out of Afib (the three previous times had taken only a day from which to recover) – I am now feeling fine. Like Nixon, tanned, rested and ready.

So I find myself considering an encore for Crusin’. It’s hard to let go of something you’ve done since (choke) 1965.

* * *

Here’s an interesting review of Batman – Second Chances, which collects much of my Batman work.

I haven’t seen it yet, but here’s a magazine you can pre-order with a new Collins/Beatty Ms. Tree interview.

I’m quoted in this terrific look by the great J. Kingston Pierce (of Rap Sheet fame) at half-hour detective TV shows of the 1950s.

Finally, here’s an interesting review of Quarry’s Blood by a reader familiar with the first few novels colliding with the much older Quarry of this one. I have a response in the comments.

M.A.C.

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Bargains, a Nice Review Sparks a Rant & R.I.P. for Toaster

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2022

We did not attend San Diego Comic Con this year. Maybe next. We tentatively plan to be at Bouchercon (Barb and I, and Matt Clemens too, unless Covid scares us off).

Check out this Wild Dog cosplay pic from an unknown recent convention.

12 year old girl cosplays as Wild Dog
A 12-year old girl at a comic con appears as Wild Dog!

Some new bargain offers for Kindle on several of my titles are about to hit.




Midnight Haul will be promoted via Kindle Daily Deal starting 8/6/2022 and running through 8/6/2022 – 0.99 USD during the promotion peril. Midnight Haul is a 1986 eco-thriller with a Mallory-esque protagonist.

Supreme Justice will be promoted via Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle book deals starting 8/1/2022 and running through 8/31/2022. 1.99 USD during the promotion period. This is the first in the Reeder and Rogers political thriller trilogy.

Executive Order will be promoted via a $3 toward a selection of Kindle books starting 8/1/2022 and running through 8/31/2022. (I don’t quite know what this promotion is exactly, but maybe you do.) This is the third in the Reeder and Rogers political thriller trilogy.

The Reeder and Rogers books were just a little teensy weensy bit prescient. Supreme Justice (2014!) was about Roe V. Wade being overturned and somebody targeting Supreme Court justices for death to change the make-up of the court. Fate of the Union (2015!) was completely unbelievable – a megalomaniac billionaire runs a populist presidential campaign, breaking countless laws along the way (what will that Collins and Clemens think up next?). Finally Executive Order (2017!) finds the Secret Service participating in an attempted coup of the U.S. government (what, are Collins and Clemens kah-ray-zee?).

* * *
Girl Most Likely cover
Amazon

Longtime reader Joe Maniscalco has posted a Girl Most Likely review on both Goodreads and Amazon, but I’d like to share it with you here, as well. (By the way, as I write this both Girl Most Likely and Girl Can’t Help It are still offered at the 99-cents Kindle price on Amazon.)

I’ve been reading Collins’ novels since the early 1980s, beginning with protagonists, Quarry, and Heller. Tough guys all of them. Collins has even written Westerns and completed unfinished novels by Mickey Spillane. This may be his first (or at least the first for this reader), where the protagonist is female—a young Midwestern police chief who is working with her retired police officer father.

Girl Most Likely is a crime thriller that I chose to read on the plane to my own high school reunion. Could a serial killer be looking for victims who’ve attended a specific high school graduation class? And if so, why?
This appears to be one of Collins’ more traditional mystery novels with its closed circle of suspects, and an almost traditional detective team.

I selected this Max Allan Collins after recently reading his Road to Perdition trilogy and waiting for his next Heller historical mystery. I shouldn’t have waited so long. Collins seems to be exercising his writing chops with this different, but worthy addition to his resume.

Obviously I appreciate a nice review like this, but it does spark some thoughts I’d like to share.

I am well aware that not all readers are willing to try something different from a writer whose work they’ve liked in another vein. Joe is clearly an exception. Still, I do have a fair number of readers who, for example, like both Quarry (the most overtly noir) and the Antiques novels (the shamelessly if tongue-in-cheek cozy mysteries written with my wife Barb as “Barbara Allan”).

Joe viewing Krista Larson as my first female protagonist indicates he is not aware of the Antiques novels, with Brandy Bourne and her mother Vivian sharing lead honors, or of the Terry Beatty co-created comics feature Ms. Tree (not even in her one prose novel appearance, Deadly Beloved). He would probably like Ms. Tree and be open-minded enough to try the Antiques novels.

But, as I indicated, I understand not everyone can handle a writer doing different things. Barb, for example, writes very dark short stories and has for years; but the Antiques novels she and I write together are comic and fairly light. My long list of novels and stories are all over the place – the Mallory novels have been described as medium-boiled, Nolan is third-person crime, Quarry is first-person crime, the Eliot Ness quartet strictly police procedural, same with CSI obviously, the two Mommy novels psychological horror, Reeder & Rogers political thrillers, the Harrow novels with Matt Clemens are serial killer books…and so on.

For a lot of years – I am slowing down in my dotage – I published five, even six books a year. I did this because I had the temerity to want to try to make a living. This included movie novelizations and TV tie-ins, about which some discriminating readers might hold their nose in the air and squeeze those noses delicately shut with refined fingers and judiciously avoid. Back in the real world, I was making a living and getting on the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists with a lot of those novels, the varied genres of which allowed me to stay fresh, learn new things, and work muscles I didn’t know I had.

No publisher would publish five new Quarry books in a year. Nobody wants more than one Mike Hammer novel a year. I can’t write more than one Heller every couple of years or so because of the degree of difficulty, starting with voluminous research. And, anyway, I need to stay fresh. Stale is bad.

This is something of an old argument, of course, and a moot point really, because at my age doing four or five or six novels in a year just isn’t going to happen. But just understand that I don’t expect you to like everything I write. I love it when you do, but that’s not a requirement. Still, if you like my work, in the unlikely event you find something of mine you don’t like, try to keep it to yourself.

Is that really asking too much?

* * *

Last week I wrote about Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Tom Sizemore, Chris Penn, Quentin Tarantino, Bill Lustig, Larry Cohen and (not surprisingly) Mickey Spillane. But in the comments and e-mails about that update, nobody talked to me about any of those famous humans.

Everybody talked about Toaster Collins.

My tribute to our late little family dog, a lovably demented Blue Heeler, touched a lot of heart strings. I wrote my blatantly sentimental piece knowing it was not exactly expected of a hardbitten dispenser of noir like me. But I did it anyway, and my son Nate – Toaster’s real master – provided some lovely pictures of the little dog, representing well this small life that impacted our family in such a big way.

Some of these comments were posted last week (and you can go read them), but others came by way of e-mails. I even heard from some of my editors. I found myself reflecting on this outpouring – these were condolences that might have been about my mom or dad passing. And I asked myself how these creatures, these pets that can be so loving and so demanding, who have us growling when we have to board them to get a few days away, who want to go outside at the least convenient moments, who beg for food and attention but always on their terms…who needs them?

Apparently a lot of us do.

When I reflect too on how terrible we are to each other, everything from losing friendships over partisan politics to yelling at stupid drivers, I marvel at how these non-human creatures touch our humanity in a way other humans seldom do.

* * *

Here’s yet another indication that the film of Road to Perdition is becoming an American classic.

And Perdition is ranked one of the best 30 movies playing on Paramount-Plus right now.

Finally, Scar of the Bat is included in this article about Batman appearing in different eras.

M.A.C.

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Two Girls For Two Dollars!

Tuesday, July 5th, 2022

The Kindle editions of the two books in my Krista and Keith Larson series, Girl Most Likely and Girl Can’t Help It, are on sale this month – right now through July 31. You can buy them as a pair for $1.98, or 99-cents each.

Girl Most Likely Cover
E-Book
Girl Can't Help It Cover
E-Book

While these two novels have done fairly well, their sales don’t compare to the bestseller status of the three previous books I did for Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer line, the Reeder and Rogers Trilogy (Supreme Justice, Fate of the Union and Executive Order), which sold in the hundreds of thousands.

I had hoped to do a third Krista and Keith novel, but so far the numbers haven’t justified that. Maybe this Kindle sale will change that. At any rate, if you like my work, I hope you’ll give them a try.

Full disclosure. Not all of my regular readers have loved them, including some mainstream critics who would have preferred new Nate Heller books; and of course my hitman Quarry has his own dark appeal. But one of the ways I’ve stayed fresh and enthusiastic over the years has been to try different things. That – in addition to creating income – was why I wrote so many tie-in novels in the ‘90s and early oughts: the chance to do different things.

In the two Girl books I was taking a conscious swing at writing an American take on Nordic noir. Matt Clemens and I (the Reeder and Rogers team) had already done What Doesn’t Kill Her for Thomas & Mercer (also a strong seller), which was intended as an American “answer” to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. With the Krista/Keith books I was working another shade of noir, again an American variation on the Wallander novels, and such Nordic TV mini-series as The Bridge, The Killing, and (again) Wallander.

As I prepared to write Girl Most Likely, I used my brilliant in-house sounding board, Barbara Collins, to try to come up with a setting that had some Nordic flavor while being resolutely American. We discussed Pella, Iowa, home of the Tulip Festival (and boyhood home of Wyatt Earp), in part because I liked the small town with tourist appeal aspect of the place. Meanwhile, Barb and I had taken to going to Galena, Illinois, for short post-project getaways, and it seemed an interesting, even ideal setting for what I had in mind.

Galena – as many in the Midwest know – is scenic little hamlet on a bluff with a downtown right out of Norman Rockwell, a tourist destination all year-round (winter sports a draw, though not for me). It’s a town of 3000 that is home to a million or more visitors a year, with sixty-some restaurants and various comfy hotels and bed-and-breakfasts and a quaint Americana vibe.

I got interested in how a police department in a city that size dealt with those million-a-year visitors. I’d been noodling with the idea of a very young female chief of police in a small town whose recently retired father was a former homicide detective. This concept slipped in perfectly with the Galena setting, and when I began my research I was pleased, even a little astounded, to learn that Galena’s police chief was in fact a young woman.

Chief Lori Huntington proved to be not only cooperative but generous with her time and information, and the books would have been lesser things without her.

M.A.C. with Lori Huntington

I was pleased with the first novel, which dealt with a series of killings that accompanied a ten-year high school reunion (Krista’s class). Part of my self-mandate was to get away from the larger-than-life lead characters I usually write about in my mystery/suspense fiction – Quarry, Nolan, Nate Heller, Mike Hammer, even the CSI crew – and use more “regular” people for my protagonists. Folks next door who, in this case, happened to be a tourist-town police chief and her retired homicide cop father (from nearby Dubuque, just across the river), who had recently lost his wife to cancer and was flirting with suicide (a very Nordic notion).

As is the case with many thrillers, these regular people would be thrust into a situation ruled by larger-than-life crime and jeopardy. It’s a mix that has worked for everybody from Alfred Hitchcock to Mary Higgins Clark.

To me, my third-person, one point-of-view at a time approach – which included as much or more violence than I ever serve up – was business as usual. Only the subject matter, and the more normal protagonists, differed. But some self-professed “big fans” of my work – not many, but a few vocal ones – bitched about what they perceived as a radical change of pace.

A particular complaint of reviews (and, frankly, of my editor) was my somewhat detailed descriptions of clothing. I have always (and I’ve discussed this here) used clothing, grooming and the living quarters of my players to help characterize them. And anyone who’s attended a class reunion knows that how people dress at that event is very revealing of who they are (or who they’ve become, and who they want us to think they’ve become).

Did I overstep in this regard? Maybe. But my editor was so disturbed by this recurring criticism that she asked me to cut every clothing description in the second book – including that Chief Krista Larson wore a uniform. I resisted this request, as I don’t care to have my characters running naked through a book (in certain scenes, yes; but not an entire book).

Amazon is usually terrific at marketing, but I feel they slipped up with Girl Most Likely, which they debuted in the UK. That’s where the reviews got off to a bad start – the very American high school reunion theme was wrong for that audience, and some readers resented an old guy like me writing about a young female protagonist. And it may hurt the feelings of this Anglophile, but not everybody on the other side of the pond has a love for Americans.

The second novel, Girl Can’t Help It, represents only one of two times I’ve really addressed my rock ‘n’ roll years in a book (the other time was Scratch Fever, which is half of the current Hard Case Crime Nolan omnibus, Tough Tender). Again, while Krista and her father Keith are just folks, the killer is a dangerous, deadly force leaving a horrific trail behind her.

Yes, her. That’s another aspect of the novels that sometimes throws readers. In their point-of-view chapters, I don’t identify the killer (the first book’s homicidal point of view chapters are “he” and “him,” the second book’s are “she” and “her”), which limits the number of suspects. The mystery element is minor in both novels and it’s not terribly hard to figure out who is responsible in either one.

This seems to bother some readers, who brag about figuring out whodunit and then complain that they did.

If you have even casually followed my updates, you know that I from time to time offer book giveaways to prime the pump on Amazon (and other online) reviews of new titles. The review aspect of Amazon (primarily, but Barnes & Noble and various review blogs, too) is something relatively new. It used to be the newspaper and magazine reviewers were all an author had to worry about. The professional reviewers weren’t always nice, but they tended to be fair and accurate (they still do) (there are exceptions) (pretends to cough as he says “Kirkus”). I have mixed emotions about Amazon reviews. It’s an undeniably democratic method, but it also opens the door to readers with various agendas – everything from personal animosity to being the author’s mom.

But that’s the world fiction writers live in now. Girl Most Likely has a four-star ratings (averaged over 852 reviews) and Girl Can’t Help It a four-and-a-half star rating (averaged over 196 reviews). And yet here I am warning you (rather pathetically) that there are some Amazon reviewers who don’t like the books. It doesn’t help that the “top reviews” of both books begin with some of the worst ones. Why Amazon wants to discourage readers is beyond me.

Anyway, I like these novels, but I almost always like my own work, with reservations. When I listen to an audio book of my own stuff I am alternately smiling and wincing. I surprise myself when something strikes me as really good, and disappoint myself when something strikes me as not so good. I think that’s natural.

All I can tell you is these two novels came out exactly the way I wanted them to. And if you haven’t given them a try, I hope you’ll invest $1.98 (or at least 99-cents) and see what you think.

If enough of you do that, maybe I’ll get to do a third Krista-and-Keith. I promise not to over-describe the clothing.

* * *
Crusin' at Proof Social

On Saturday July 2, my band Crusin’ appeared in Muscatine at Proof Social on the patio in the late afternoon and early evening. It was a nice crowd, very responsive, applauding after each number.

Three-hour gigs wear me out. I admit freely to that, and the other two gigs this summer are two-hour ones, for which I’m grateful. I am very comfortable in front of an audience, generally, cases of nerves rare – the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction concert in 2018 gave me a brief butterfly flurry, but frankly that’s the exception not the rule.

(Girl Can’t Help It opens with an induction concert at the Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Also a murder.)

But in the second of three sets Saturday evening, my amplifier started acting up – distorting badly. I am told nobody but me noticed it, but brother I did. And it threw me. Suddenly I wished I were anywhere else in the world doing just about anything else. That’s one of the oddities of performing – when it goes well, or even just okay, it’s a pleasure; when it goes wrong, it’s the worst.

On the following day, Sunday, I – as usual – felt like a bus had hit me. That’s not old age (entirely), as that’s always been the case the day after a gig. Nonetheless, I set up my keyboards and amp and tried to figure out what had gone wrong, second set. It appears to have been a problem with my volume pedal. I ordered a new one for about two-hundred bucks.

I made $100 for the gig.

Why do I do this?

Because I love it.

* * *

Author Brandon Barrows (cool name) writes about his list of the best mob novels…and my prose novel Road to Perdition is one of them!

Some people think the Batman strip by Marshal Rogers should be reprinted. Gee, I wonder who wrote it?

This piece looks at Paul Newman’s last screen appearance…in Road to Perdition.

And, finally, yet another write-up about the gangster film you didn’t know came from a graphic novel (but you did, didn’t you?).

M.A.C.

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