Posts Tagged ‘Mickey Spillane’

55 Is Not the Limit! Barb and Me

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2023

Our wedding anniversary is coming up on June 1. It’s our 55th, a number that sounds more like a speed limit than a designation of how long two people have been together in a marital partnership. Barb and I have been a couple longer even than that – the fall of 1966 – and have known each other since childhood.

Barbara Collins

In the West Junior High band, here in Muscatine, Iowa, Barb was first chair trumpet and I was second chair. I was okay (not false modesty) but she was excellent. I tried several times to “challenge” her, the process by which you could unseat the person occupying the chair above yours. I failed miserably, and I would even say trying to play “Golden Gate” (the difficult piece she sadistically chose) was one of my more humiliating experiences, even in junior high terms, which is basically one humiliating experience after another. The band director actually interrupted my performance, saying, “I lost you somewhere, Mr. Collins.” Barb had already completed the impossible number flawlessly.

And yet I wound up marrying the girl who had visited upon me the most withering humiliation of my youth. This only goes to show how weak a male can be when a beautiful blonde is willing to go out with him. (I should also note that I quit band after junior high, concentrating on chorus.)

We were thrown together, in a way, because we were the only two of our extended crowds who had, after high school graduation, wound up at Muscatine Community College and not at the University of Iowa or some other institution of higher learning. Our first date in MCC days was to Wild Cat Den as part of a group that may have been a church one – I don’t recall. I only know I made clear to Barb how little I enjoyed the Great Out of Doors. Despite her lovely company, I had a terrible time, looking out for snakes and other small creatures bent on my destruction.

How we wound up on a second date, I will never know. We went to the nearby Quad Cities to a movie – possibly a drive-in – and I was trying to impress her with my brilliant gift of gab. She was quiet, occasionally nodding, and doing her best not to look glazed (she still does this when I am off on some verbal tear, which is frequent). She states that the moment she fell in love with me was when I put my hand in a water glass (during some brilliant monologue) and she had smiled and thought to herself, “He’s not so smart. I can put up with this.”

We were an item by Thanksgiving, disgusting our fellow students with our lovey-dovey behavior. It became obvious to me that, within this quiet lovely girl, was a smart, funny human being worth hanging out with forever. A crisis having to do with her mentally ill mother dragging Barb and two of her sisters across country (to Arizona) to get one of those sisters well from a supposed illness (undiagnosed) had only brought us closer together upon her inevitable return. Her mom’s general erratic behavior had a lot to do with why we decided to get married right after graduation from MCC – Barb was nineteen, I was twenty.

When I look back on these fifty-five years, I realize how very lucky I was and continue to be. While I tend to focus on my career, I don’t value anything more than my relationship with Barb. She has continued to amaze and amuse and delight me, and occasionally put me in my place. I had no idea – nor did she – that she would develop into such a wonderful writer. The Antiques series is a unique accomplishment and my co-authorship of Barb’s novels is among my proudest achievements. The son we produced, Nathan, is another.

Then there’s how beautiful she still is. I am obviously a shallow soul. I have been criticized for celebrating attractive women in my fiction – apparently I should have been celebrating harridans – but I admit that one of the great pleasures of my life is the many times each day when I glance at this lovely girl (yes, I know she’s a woman!) and think, “Wow. How can I be this lucky?”

On the other hand, it’s another reason for people to hate me. I get it. I would feel the same way. I’d be right there with you saying, “That lucky effing stiff.”

She may or may not read this. She reads my updates sporadically – after all, she is subjected to what I think every time we go out together. We’re easy to spot. She’s the beauty. I’m the beast with his fingers in the water glass.

* * *

The day this appears we will have seven days remaining on the Blue Christmas Indiegogo fund-raising effort. Just in case you were wondering what to get Barb and me for our wedding anniversary.

I will continue, this week, to honor requests from anyone who puts in $35 or more to do my best to fill in some blanks on their M.A.C. want list. Barb and I have sent out around fifteen packages so far, often containing one-of-a-kind items that I’ve parted with in gratitude for this support.

We do not know yet (soon, I hope) if we’ve nabbed a Greenlight grant, but even if we don’t, we intend to go forward with the best version of Blue Christmas we can. The Indiegogo $5000 (we are at 85% now!) will go toward matching funds, if we get the grant, or into the production itself, if we don’t.

Chad Bishop is the mastermind here, aided and abetted by Karen Cooney. Karen is the go-getter who went and got me to do Encore for Murder as a fund-raiser for the local Art Center. If I hadn’t had the experience of turning that one live performance into a multi-camera movie (or “movie”), I would not have got my filmic juices flowing again. Right now Chad and my longtime collaborator Phil Dingeldein (and a talented young woman named Liz Toal) are working hard to get other projects going, including Reincarnal and even Road to Purgatory.

I did not imagine at this age (75, choke) post-open-heart surgery that I would be back at filmmaking again. Few in that field have trod a weirder road than mine. Mommy and Mommy’s Day had respectable low budgets (half a mil and a quarter of a mil respectively); but after that, my then best friend slash producer stole most of the profits, and my subsequent productions have been put together with spit and chewing gum – Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life are respectively $10,000 and $15,000 productions but managed to get national distribution and some decent critical reaction.

And yet my graphic novel Road to Perdition became a $90 million movie (at the same time Real Time was shooting on a budget that maybe covered one day of stocking Perdition’s craft services table) and I made respectable money on two films I wrote but did not direct, The Expert and The Last Lullaby. The Quarry TV series at Cinemax, for which I wrote two scripts, also paid some bills.

Along the way there have been two documentaries (Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop) I wrote and directed, and three short films, and one I didn’t direct – A Matter of Principal – but wrote; that one was an award-winner and led to the feature, The Last Lullaby. By the way, that’s a Quarry movie with a great Tom Sizemore performance and it’s available on Amazon Prime right now.

I am the rare writer of prose fiction who will admit that he likes movies as much as books. I feel lucky, even honored, to have been able to do as much as I have in that arena, even if my own little movies have never made me a dime. The joys of collaboration – my friendships with the likes of Phil and Chad and the late Steve Henke, my creative collaboration with the late Mike Cornelison – are more reward than anyone could dream of.

Should I have gone to Hollywood and pursued that dream, as opposed to joining the fiction-writing ranks of Hammett, Chandler, Cain and Spillane? No. I do not have the temperament for what Hollywood puts writers through. Because movies are my side hustle, screenwriting for Hollywood on occasion is something I can abide. I would also probably have been married three or four times by now, and I refer you to earlier in this post for the reasons why that would have been a tragedy.

Last night I watched Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder on the local public access channel. Because we have landed a deal with VCI that includes both home video release and streaming for both the new expanded Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and Encore for Murder, we have decided not to offer either to the Iowa or Quad Cities branches of PBS. But my collaborator Chad Bishop runs Channel 9, Muscatine’s public access channel, and his participation in the project includes the right to show Encore there.

I had worked on Encore on a computer screen – on several actually – and have seen it projected on a full-size movie screen at our recent premiere showing. But this was the first time I’d seen it on my TV at home. And that was a thrill, because that’s the venue we had in mind. I refer to it as a “movie,” but really it’s a TV program. I thought it held up pretty well. When you consider that we only decided to record the play a few days out from dress rehearsal and its one public performance, it’s another of the small miracles that seem to litter my life.

And there’s nothing wrong with small miracles. You can enjoy them. The big miracles are so overwhelming, you can’t really enjoy them.

But I’m willing to try.

* * *

I did an interview with Jason Dehart on his podcast Words, Images, & Worlds that is fairly wide-ranging and covers some things that have rarely come up, like the influence of Hong Kong movies on my work.

This is a really good interview with my frequent collaborator, Matthew Clemens.

Here’s a way to access my Batman comic strip continuity with Marshall Rogers.

Here’s a free-wheeling interview that I really enjoyed doing – you might, too.

Finally, he’s a largely positive review of Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life.

M.A.C.

The Movies Keep Pulling Me Back In!

Tuesday, May 16th, 2023

I’ve spent a lot of time here, at this update/blog entries, over the past year or so talking about Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer, and my efforts to complete Mickey’s work and to specifically celebrate the 75th anniversary of Mike Hammer’s first appearance in I, The Jury.

Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction cover
Hardcover:
E-Book: Kobo
Digital Audiobook: Kobo Libro.fm

A good deal of these posts have centered upon the biography written by Jim Traylor and me, Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction (and published by Mysterious Press). The response to that book has been terrific, and I have reason to hope our bio will be considered the definitive work on Mickey and will play a major role in getting this great and very influential mystery writer his due.

Lately here I’ve discussed certain Spillane-centric efforts of myself and longtime collaborator Phil Dingeldein, the Director and Photography (as well as Editor) on my indie films Mommy, Mommy’s Day, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life. We have expanded my 1998 documentary, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane, from 47 minutes to 61, covering the later few years of Mickey’s life and work as well as my project of completing his unfinished manuscripts (at his request in the final weeks of his life).

We also – and as I’ve reported here, did so last-minute and somewhat on the fly – recorded the performance last September in Muscatine, Iowa, of my Golden Age Radio-style play, Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder, capturing Gary Sandy’s charismatic performance as Hammer (he had starred in productions of Encore at Owensboro, Kentucky, and Clearwater, Florida, previously, and of course was Patty McCormack’s co-star in Mommy’s Day).

This fall the expanded Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane with Encore for Murder presented as a second feature will be out on home video from VCI Entertainment. VCI will be taking both the documentary and the edited/recorded play performance out to the streaming services, too. We are also in early stages of putting together definitive versions of Mommy and Mommy’s Day, having finally located their un-Filmlooked masters (not coincidentally Mickey appeared as Mommy’s lawyer in both).

Things on these updates will begin swinging back toward my own (and Barb’s) work, as only two more Hammer novels (one already delivered, Dig Two Graves) are planned. That may change, as Skydance has optioned all the Hammer novels (the solo Spillane and collaborative Spillane/Collins ones). A renewed interest in Mike Hammer and his creator, due to a new big-deal movie, could inspire me to go back to the files and see what of Mickey’s unfinished work remains.

Encore for Murder has led to a reawakening of my interest in filmmaking. I’ve continued to do the occasional screenplay (director David Wexler is prepping Cap City, based on the Spillane/Collins novella, “A Bullet for Satisfaction”) but I had thought, after my heart surgery and other medical fun-and-games, my moviemaking days were over, save for the occasional scripting job.

But working with editor Chad Bishop has revitalized me, and so we are moving from Encore – that little “movie” that sort of willed itself into existence – to Blue Christmas, based on my novella, a sort of Scrooge/Maltese Falcon mash-up. We have only a couple of more weeks on our Indiegogo campaign to raise $5000 that will provide some of the matching funds needed if our Greenlight grant comes through (and if it doesn’t, those funds will go into the production itself).

A good number of you have supported this effort and I appreciate it…very much. I have been offering perks here that are not part of the Indiegogo descriptions of levels of participation. What I’m doing is working with contributors to fill items on their M.A.C. want list, according to the level of their contribution; most of you will be thanked on screen. Here’s a window on the Indiegogo page. We are at nearly $3000 at this stage.

Anybody who contributes $35 will be recognized on screen. (Keep in mind my postage and handling for your perk, once we’ve decided via e-mail what you’d like, comes out of that $35.)

Our budget is probably going to be around $150,000, with “in kind” figured in – in kind covers things like meager-to-no salaries for actors and crew, local businesses supporting us with free lodging and food, etc. We are seeking a relatively small amount but need it to secure matching funds, often a requirement with grants, or to help cover cash outlay. Much of what we’re doing is volunteer and includes the support of Muscatine Community College, where we’ll be shooting much of the production in their Black Box theater.

Really, I anticipate putting on screen something like looks like at least a half-million-dollar production. (We did Real Time and Eliot Ness for $10,000 and $15,000 respectively.)

I am a believer in the notion that if the story is strong, and the performances and production professional

enough, you don’t have to have huge stars and Hollywood production values to make a satisfying movie. It’s a small miracle that we’ve done five features, two feature-length documentaries, and three award-winning shorts right here in this corner of Iowa. If you want to help us work another minor miracle, consider stepping up.

We are coming down the pike here. If you’ve been thinking about participating, now’s the time.

* * *

While I did not attend the Edgars this year – I can lose so much more easily at home than in a New York hotel – I was asked by the MWA to write about Mickey for their nifty program book. In that publication, a number of mystery writers were celebrated by other pros in the field in brief essays about why each of the chosen artists were worth, well, choosing.

This is what I wrote:

MICKEY SPILLANE
by Max Allan Collins

In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, TV private eyes were the rage. Among the first was Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958) with Darren McGavin, which I started watching when I was ten. Video P.I. series were often directly based on literary sources – The Thin Man, Phillip Marlowe, 77 Sunset Strip, Perry Mason – with the biggest hit, Peter Gunn, a Hammer variation. I haunted the spinner racks, using my buck a month allowance to buy 25-cent paperbacks by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Spillane books were considered “dirty,” and for a while I satisfied my urge just reading the jaw-dropping endings. I researched Hammett, Chandler and Spillane, discovering the first two were admired and celebrated, whereas Spillane was attacked as juvenile delinquent-breeding trash. I loved all three, so this made no sense to me. So began a lifetime of reading, defending and eventually getting to know Mickey, and having the privilege of turning his unfinished material into books.

Mickey defies literary appraisal – he is an unpretentious blue-collar ex-comic book writer, his first seven novels (six Mike Hammer mysteries) his most popular, significant work. But his amazing first and last chapters, distinctive first-person voice, and noir poetry on every page makes him more than just a pop phenomenon. For reasons explored in Mickey Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction (2023, co-written by James L. Traylor and me), he stopped writing novels for ten years at his popular peak. Returning for a longer run in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, he was back on the bestseller lists but overshadowed by Ian Fleming, the obscure British thriller writer Mickey’s publisher promoted during their star’s absence. Much of Mickey’s later career was media-driven – he starred in two movies (as Hammer in The Girl Hunters, 1964) and spoofing himself in an eighteen-year (!) run of Miller Lite commercials. A household name in the 20th Century, Spillane demands reappraisal as the writer who re-invented private eye fiction, and whose success sparked the creation of paperback originals, with Hammer the template not just for Bond but Dirty Harry, John Shaft and every vigilante-tinged tough guy who came after.

* * *

Here’s a nice gallery of Hard Case Crime covers, including some of mine. [The site creates galleries from Tumblr hashtags and may contain NSFW content –Nate]

Here’s a mixed review from the somewhat accurately self-described B-Movie Enema. What this reviewer doesn’t understand is that reviewing a movie off You Tube is not the ideal place to judge its lighting, production values or audio (very hissy on You Tube, we’re told – like Gomer Pyle once said, “Surprise, surprise!”). Still, he makes some interesting points. But the major point he makes, inadvertently, is that we are lucky we found the original pre-Filmlook masters for a re-release of both Mommy movies next year.

By the way, the same reviewer liked Mommy a lot more. A lot. He really appreciates Rachel Lemieux’s terrific performance.

I do hope this reviewer will revisit the sequel when he realizes (a) you shouldn’t judge how a movie looks or sounds on You Tube, and (b) you shouldn’t expect the sequel to be exactly like the original.

M.A.C.

Encore for “Encore”!

Tuesday, May 9th, 2023

It was a big weekend for the movie version of our Golden Age Radio-style play, Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder.


M.A.C. and Editor/Producer Chad Bishop introduce Encore for Murder

Friday evening at Muscatine Community College, with much of the cast in attendance, Encore received its first public screening at the college’s “Black Box” theater. The turnout was fine – around 75 humans, some of whom came a considerable distance.


Uber-fans Mike and Jackie White from Bloomington, Illinois — they attended the live performance back in September, too!

My son Nate came from up the street, but that was a trip much appreciated by his pop. Others, like my old bandmate Charlie Koenigsaecker and his sister Karlyn (and a friend), came from Iowa City.


M.A.C. and Karen Cooney, co-director of the stage play, answer questions from the audience at the Muscatine Community College ‘Black Box’ theater.

I had not seen our little movie in a theatrical setting – or on a big screen at all – and didn’t know what to expect or how I’d react. The intention of editing our considerable amount of footage – four HD cameras shooting two dress rehearsals and the one-time-only performance – was to create (a) a record of what we accomplished, and (b) a video presentation that could be enjoyed at home.

The latter is how Encore will likely be experienced almost exclusively, as we have not entered it in further film festivals (more about that below) much less plan to offer it for theatrical exhibition. The most significant aspect of our little flick’s big weekend was that Friday afternoon I signed a contract with VCI Home Entertainment for them to bring out Encore as a sort of double-feature with our recently expanded (from 47 minutes to 61 minutes) documentary, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane, which we shot and assembled back in 1998. Encore is essentially a bonus feature, although it is actually half an hour longer than the film it supports.

It’s possible Encore will be issued separately and may be offered to streaming services as well. Seeing how well it played to the audience at MCC’s Black Box theater on Friday night is certainly encouraging. From the start, I wasn’t sure what we had.

The VCI release may happen as early as next October, by the way. Stay, as they say, tuned.

As some of you know, Encore began as one-page synopsis Mickey wrote for a book that he never wrote (it may have been intended to be a Stacy Keach TV movie). In 2009 I was approached to write two Mike Hammer audio novels, each of which would be around three hours long, with Keach as Hammer supported by full casts drawing upon Chicago talent, including the likes of Saturday Night Live’s Tim Kazurinsky, and with my pal Mike Cornelison as Pat Chambers. The first, The Little Death, came out in 2010 and won the Audie for Best Original work. The second, Encore for Murder, came out in 2011, and was nominated for the same award.

In 2010, I was asked to stage Encore, in Golden Age Radio style, at a mystery festival in Owensboro, Kentucky. Gary Sandy, an area resident there in Kentucky, would play Mike Hammer – Gary had been one of the leads in my movie Mommy’s Day (1996) and we were old pals. The director and several cast members were veterans of the great comedy group Firesign Theater, so I would be in good hands.

Encore was well-received at Owensboro, although the production was strictly Golden Age Radio-style – actors with scripts at microphones, a Foley artist in the pit.

In 2018, Encore for Murder, again with Gary Sandy as Mike Hammer, was staged in the Murray Theater at Ruth Eckerd Hall by legendary Broadway producer, Zev Buffman. Zev presented it as a hybrid of a Golden Age Radio-style production (i.e., actors using scripts at microphones) but mixed in theatrical elements, including costuming, and a musical score, with the Foley table on stage and utilizing a big projection screen for scene-setting slides. I had been skeptical of this approach, but I was wrong.

Last year, when I was approached by local theater maven Karen Cooney about doing a Golden Age Radio Show-style play as a fund-raiser for the local Art Center, I offered Encore for that purpose. Karen pushed me to approach Gary to reprise Hammer, but I was reluctant, as we had zero budget. But I gently broached the subject with him…and he was immediately on board. And he had no intention of asking for a fee for a fund-raiser.

The cast rehearsed without him for several weeks – I sat in as Hammer. We had two Iowa-to-Kentucky phone calls with Gary and ran the script in our first run-throughs with our star. Privately, he gave me notes for the cast, but was overwhelmingly positive and, like me, was surprised by how on target they were. I had already dragged Barb to the second rehearsal to see if my judgment was correct – were these people good, or did I just want them to be? Barb, a tough critic, said they were indeed very good.

Gary showed up a day early for the two days and one performance he’d agreed to, and I got in touch with my longtime movie collaborator Phil Dingeldein. I convinced Phil to shoot the performance and encouraged him to grab the two dress rehearsals. I was starting to think we had something.

So the shooting was both spur-of-the-moment and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants. Fortunately Chad Bishop – our contact with the college, where we’d been rehearsing, and the very funny, skillful Foley artist who would be on stage throughout – was adept with camera himself, and collaborated with Phil in camera placement. We would have a surprising number of angles to choose from, since we were shooting two rehearsals.

The audience at the live performance was pretty much standing room only, and the whole cast was good, but Gary – a very skilled stage performer – owned the place. His Hammer struck me as just right – tongue-in-cheek when he needed to be, gently kidding the material (much as Darren McGavin and Stacy Keach both had) but tough as nails when necessary. The audience got on board quickly with the potentially off-putting format of actors using scripts in what split the difference between a performed play and a staged reading.

It’s a bit of blur how we edited it together, Chad and I. But we did and I enjoyed working with this imaginative and very skillful editor. And I loved being back in an editing suite again, which is where a movie is made. I shake my head when I hear about bigtime directors walking away while an editor does a “first assemblage.”

When we finished, I was well aware we had something that was neither fish nor fowl. Encore really required an audience to get on board with the Golden Age Radio format to enjoy it. Live, Gary’s infectiously enthusiastic performance swept up the crowd. I didn’t know whether that would be conveyed in a recorded version, and was too close to the material to tell.

One of the first things I did, when we completed the edit, was enter Encore in the Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival and the Iowa Motion Picture Awards, competitions where I have done very well in the past. Cedar Rapids did not nominate us and that was a blow. But the four categories we entered in the Iowa Motion Picture Awards resulted in three nominations. Ironically, the one category in which we were not nominated was Editing, and I knew that if Encore was anything, it was a triumph of editing over material that had not been intended for the purpose we were putting it to.

For example. We had four cameras going on performance night, and only two camera persons on them – Phil and Chad’s assistant Jeremy Ferguson. One of those cameras shut itself off – the crucial angle – and did not record the last fifteen minutes of the performance. So we had to create a new last fifteen minutes from the recordings of the two dress rehearsals and the remaining three camera angles from the performance.

Other times, where a line was flubbed on performance night, we had to loop in dialogue from a dress rehearsal. All the sound mixing (music included) was done live, on stage, by Foley artist Chad. We turned the two-act play into one continuous narrative, cutting about five minutes.

Really, we shouldn’t have been able to come up with anything at all…and maybe Cedar Rapids was right.

Saturday night, in Forest City, Iowa, at an event I could not attend (more later), I won the Award of Excellence for Direction and the feature itself won an Award of Achievement (essentially, second place in the feature film category).

In defense of any judge looking at Encore, they would be quite within their rights to squint at what we did and shake their heads and say, “What is that, anyway?” Because Encore is something of a unique animal.

It has a strong, even charismatic performance by an actor with a classic TV sitcom and Broadway starring roles on his CV. But the rest of the cast is unknown – semi-pros and amateurs, all from a little town in Iowa. The actors hold scripts. Mike Hammer’s gun is a pointing forefinger. Actors play several roles. It’s radio. But you can see it.

I will not likely enter Encore in any festivals because what happened at Cedar Rapids is likely to happen again. The judges either won’t know what it is they’re supposed to judge, or they will only sample the piece – watch the first five minutes or so – and dismiss it…when you have to take the ride to get anywhere. If you experience Gary’s performance, and my snappy, pretty funny script, which progressively builds, you will have a good time.

I am told some excellent films were shown at Cedar Rapids, and I don’t doubt that. It’s a fun festival and I wish we’d been in it, and I think their walk-in audience – the theater is on Collins Road, after all – would have got a kick out of Encore. But we will settle for our two IMPA awards, and a signed contract for home video and streaming release.


Iowa Motion Picture Association President Jim Brockholn accepts two awards for the absent M.A.C. for Encore for Murder.
* * *

I mentioned in passing that Barb and I weren’t able to drive to Forest City, Iowa, to attend the Iowa Motion Picture Awards. Though it’s a long drive (four hours one way), we were looking forward to it. Hotel booked and everything. But then last Sunday I had another episode with a-fib and wound up at the hospital on Tuesday.

I wasn’t in over night, but I had what I think is my fifth cardioversion procedure, and this one has been a bitch from which to recuperate. Today (Sunday again) I am finally feeling like me. I was fearful I wouldn’t be up for attending my own movie premiere Friday night (!), but I did fine. Nothing like laughter and applause to make an old ham’s aches and pains go away.

My future likely holds another procedure – ablation – and I must assure my friends and readers that considering the laundry list of things wrong with me, I feel fine and am doing fine. But this has finally slowed me down.

On the other hand, I am at my best when I’m working, so I think you’ll see more stuff flying out of my printer in the days, months and maybe even years ahead. Maybe not as much, but more than most.

* * *

At the Encore premiere, we did something of a pitch for support (financial and otherwise) for our next planned production, Blue Christmas. We should know this month if we get a piece of that Greenlight grant. If not, we’ll find a way to make it just the same.

But I continue to offer perks here that are not on the Indiegogo site. Depending on how much you pitch in, I will work with you to come up with things from your M.A.C. want list that I can fill. Write me at macphilms@hotmail.com. Make your donation at the Indiegogo site and then e-mail and let me know how much you’ve kicked in.

In the Q and A after Encore, Barb called out that she had paid $500 to be an Associate Producer. I responded, “Young lady, if you sleep with the director, you can be an Executive Producer.” Got a huge laugh, including from her.

We are past the half-way mark money-wise with about twenty days to go. Your name will be on screen and NOT in tiny letters, I promise.

M.A.C.

About Losing the Edgar

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2023

Before I discuss losing the Edgar, I want to mention a winning promotion from Thomas and Mercer on certain of my titles on e-book.
True Detective () and True Crime () (the first two Nathan Heller novels) will be offered at $1.99 via Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle book deals in the US marketplace, starting 5/1/2023 and running through 5/31/2023. Also on sale at Amazon during that period are three titles by me and my buddy Matt Clemens – What Doesn’t Kill Her () ($1.99), Fate of the Union () ($.99) and Executive Order () ($3).

* * *
Quarry's Blood Cover
Trade Paperback: Bookshop Purchase Link Amazon Purchase Link Books-A-Million Purchase Link Barnes & Noble Purchase Link Target Purchase Link
E-Book: Google Play Kobo
Digital Audiobook: Audible Purchase Link

I, of course, did not win the Edgar for Best Paperback, but I assure you I was convinced I wouldn’t. I didn’t go to New York for the ceremony, which – if I thought I had a hootin’ chance in hell – I would have.

Quarry’s Blood is the 16th entry in a series that began in 1976 (actually 1971), and novels in long-running series almost never get nominated by the Edgars. Furthermore, the Quarry novels are perceived by more delicate readers as nasty, and they aren’t necessarily wrong. In any event, I am grateful to those of you who have made Quarry and me a cult success.

This experience – sitting at home, not even remembering that the Edgars were going on in New York while Barb and I watched a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode – was a very good one. Why? Because I have always taken awards too seriously. I have always wanted to win them, being naturally competitive, which has largely been a positive thing in my career, a driving force if you will.

But at this ripe old age I now realize how meaningless awards are. Well, relatively meaningless. If Jim Traylor and I do not get an Edgar nomination for Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction, I guarantee you it will disappoint me. But if we don’t get an Edgar nomination, what is the difference, ultimately? Our Spillane bio is no less definitive and ground-breaking if it does not receive a nomination.

On the most basic level, I have looked at awards as the kind of validation that can keep me in business – much the same way good reviews can benefit a writer’s reputation. A wise soul once said, “If you believe the good reviews, you have to believe the bad reviews, too.” So I have never allowed myself to believe that an award, or a good review, is anything but an opinion, and a potentially useful sales tool. Awards don’t make me a good writer, nor do good reviews. Readers liking my work make me a good writer; editors liking my work make me a good writer; sufficient sales make me a good writer. Or anyway keep me in business.

My father was a respected, even beloved member of our small community (Muscatine, Iowa, has a population of around 25,000 residents). In the early ‘50s, he was the first high school music teacher to mount productions of Oklahoma and Carousel, attracting national attention (they were excellent productions, too). When he left teaching to go into industry as a personnel man, he hired hundreds of people in this community who loved him for it. At the same time he directed a male chorus (the Muscatine Elks Chanters) – for fifty years! – that won so many national championships that the competition was shut down and the Chanters were made the permanent champs. That chorus is gone now because my father is gone – he was their engine and a genius who could make any group of random men sound like a professional chorus.

When he passed, Barb and I stood looking at a wall of award plaques and a tabletop of awards representing all his triumphs and achievements. All but a handful went into the trash. We did not do this cavalierly, but realistically – where would we display them? Where would we store them? We selected the most important ones and the rest of these once precious items, we tossed.

I have – what is the polite term? – a shitload of awards on display in my office and the really important ones are in the living room. Of these, I think my family is likely to hold onto the ones I prize most highly – my Grand Master Edgar from the Mystery Writers of American and my three Shamus awards. Maybe my lifetime achievement from the PWA. Otherwise, it’s probably into the landfill with awards that at the time (and for some time thereafter) meant a lot to me.

Artists – and I am one – are always looking for validation, because the two inescapable facts about all artists (every damn one of them) is their insane confidence in the value of their work and their inner fear that they are frauds. Too much confidence, and no confidence at all. That is the cocktail from which every artist drinks.

If they say otherwise, they are lying, or about as reflective as a broken mirror.

You bet I would like to have won an Edgar for Quarry’s Blood. But I was lucky, incredibly lucky, for that kind of recognition for my fifty year-old series, which happens to be littered with sex scenes and carnage and sometimes black humor (in questionable taste). There were over 250 submissions for Best Paperback, and I made the cut.

Charles Ardai, my great editor at the great Hard Case Crime, insisted I write an acceptance speech, “just in case” (he, too, accurately felt the odds were very much against me).

Anyway, this would have been my acceptance speech (delivered by Charles):

“Quarry was created at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop in 1971. Looks like we both have finally graduated. My thanks to editor Charles Ardai (who did not insist I say this) for giving me the opportunity to revive this cult character. And also, for inspiration, to my late mentor Donald E. Westlake, who reminded me that a cult author is seven readers short of making a living.”

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Paul Davis, who writes about crime fiction at the Washington Times, wrote an astonishing three pieces about Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction. This incredible attention was followed by a favorable reaction to the new Nate Heller novel (from Hard Case Crime), The Big Bundle. He interviewed me about it, and here it is:

A Private Eye Witness To History: My Washington Times On Crime Column On Max Allan Collins ‘The Big Bundle’

This interesting and insightful crime novel is about a fictional private eye traversing through a begone era and a true and once famous child kidnapping.

In “The Big Bundle,” Max Allan Collins’ 18th novel featuring Nathan Heller, the private detective appears alongside Robert F. Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa, as well as historical crime and law enforcement figures involved in the real-life kidnapping of a millionaire’s son in 1953.

I contacted Mr. Collins and asked him to describe “The Big Bundle.”

“In many respects, it’s a private eye thriller in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane,” Mr. Collins replied. “I was moving to a new publisher, Hard Case Crime, and knew their audience was steeped in hardboiled fiction and might be put off by the famous crimes I usually look at in a Nathan Heller novel. The real-life case in ‘The Big Bundle,’ quite well known in the 1950s but forgotten now, allowed me to put the emphasis on the noir aspect of the Heller novels and not be accused of teaching a “history lesson.”

How would you describe Nathan Heller?

“Heller is a businessman who starts out in a small office where he sleeps on a Murphy bed and winds up with a coast-to-coast detective agency. He is not the typical Phillip Marlowe-style modern-day knight who would never take a bribe or seduce a virgin — Heller has done both and often indulges in situational ethics. Unlike most fictional private eyes, he marries (more than once) and is a father and had a father and mother and even grandparents. He ages with the years. At any age, Heller recoils at injustice in society and serves up rough justice when he feels it necessary. He not only knows where the bodies are buried, he has buried more than his share.”

Why have you written a series of crime novels based on historical events with a fictional character interacting with historical figures?

“Rereading ‘The Maltese Falcon’ for a college class I was teaching in the early 1970s, I noticed the 1929 copyright. I had a light-bulb moment: The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was 1929 — Sam Spade and Al Capone were contemporaries! Instead of Mike Hammer meeting a Capone type, I could have Capone meeting a Mike Hammer type. It was a fresh way into a form that had gone stale,” Mr. Collins (seen in the bottom photo) explained. “What evolved, from the initial novel about Frank Nitti’s Chicago (“True Detective,” 1983), was Heller solving famous unsolved or controversially solved crimes, like the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Black Dahila murder, the assassinations of Huey Long and JFK. Often, I substitute him for a real detective involved in a case. Heller becomes a sort of ‘private eye witness’ to history.”

How did you research the history that you use in “The Big Bundle”?

“Less was available about the Greenlease case than with most mysteries Heller has tackled — both Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, the Roswell incident, required dealing with a staggering number of books and voluminous newspaper and magazine material. Only a handful of books about the Greenlease kidnapping existed to draw upon in “The Big Bundle.” But the political aspect — Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa’s involvement in the aftermath of the ransom’s disappearance — meant referring to several dozen nonfiction works, as well as the usual newspaper and magazine articles, which the kidnapping itself also generated. The idea is that I prepare to write the definitive nonfiction book on a real crime or mystery. Then I write a private eye novel instead.”

Did you discover anything in your research that surprised you about the kidnapping and other elements you use in your novel?

“Automobiles were everywhere in the narrative, befitting the postwar boom in car buying and interstate travel. Key events took place at a famous no-tell motel, the Coral Court, outside St. Louis. A crooked taxicab company was caught up in the probable theft of half the ransom, and every criminal in the case seemed either to drive a Caddy or want to — purchased inevitably at one of the many Midwestern Cadillac dealerships owned by the kidnap victim’s father.”

Do you plan to continue the Nathan Heller series?

“Too Many Bullets” has been completed, with Heller present in the pantry at the Ambassador Hotel when Robert Kennedy was shot. It’s an open-and-shut case, supposedly, yet the research indicates otherwise. In many respects, the real story is like something out of Raymond Chandler: hit men, crooked cops, a crazy hypnotist, a duplicitous showgirl. That comes out in October, again from Hard Case Crime. There may be one more after that. The degree of difficulty here is high, however, and I just turned 75, so it depends on how well Heller and I hold up.”

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CBR.com has this good article about the comic book roots of Mike Hammer.

Encore for Murder Screening Info. Friday, May 5 at 7pm, in the MCC Big Box Theater, Strahan Hall. Donations accepted.

For those of you close enough to Muscatine, Iowa, to consider attending, here’s the info about the screening of Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder starring Gary Sandy this coming Friday, May 5.

And finally thanks to those of you who have contributed to the Indiegogo campaign for Blue Christmas, and I hope more of you will consider pitching. We’re just under $1700 (of the $5000 goal) with about a month left to go.

M.A.C.