Quarry « Friends/Family/Fans of Max Allan Collins

Sit Down and Read!

Tuesday, May 10th, 2022

STOP THE PRESSES: Supreme Justice and Midnight Haul are on sale for $1.99 each as Mystery, Thriller and Suspense Kindle book deals till the end of May. Amazon links: Supreme Justice | Midnight Haul

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Trade Paperback:

E-Book:

Stand Up and Die!, the new Mickey Spillane collection from Wolfpack’s Rough Edges imprint, goes on sale next week (May 17) as both a Kindle e-book and a physical book. I edited it (and introduced it) and contributed a new version of my very first collaboration on a Mike Hammer story with Mickey, “Tonight I Die” (originally titled “The Night I Died” and published in the Spillane/Collins-edited anthology, The Private Eyes, 1998).

These novellas and short stories are culled from two long-out-of-print anthologies I edited, Tomorrow I Die (1986, Mysterious Press) and Together We Kill (2001, Five Star). This represents all of the crime stories from both volumes collected here in one place.

Here are the contents:

“Stand Up and Die!” (1958)
“Everybody’s Watching Me” (1953)
“Together We Kill” (1953)
“The Girl Behind the Hedge” (1953)
“The Pickpocket” (1954)
“I’ll Die Tomorrow” (1960)
“Tomorrow I Die” (1956)
“Hot Cat” (1964)
“The Gold Fever Tapes” (1973)
“Tonight I Die” (2022)

The final story is a Mike Hammer tale, and the reason why I’ve done a new version – not radically different, but enough so to rename it – is a story unto itself.

The basic story of “Tonight I Die” appeared in three versions in Mickey’s files – a radio play, a thirty-minute TV show, and a sixty-minute or more TV movie. There are significant differences between versions, and I did not become aware of all three until much later.

In 1998, when we edited the anthology Private Eyes for NAL, I felt it was key that we include a Hammer short story. But there weren’t any and getting Mickey to write a new one would have tough to impossible. He had already begun to share his unpublished materials with me, just for my interest (and perhaps he was already thinking of what I might do with his unfinished work some day), and I had run across the radio play version. It seems to have been written for the radio series That Hammer Guy, possibly as a pilot. It was not to my knowledge produced, though the series ran three years.

The script was heavy with narration and I asked Mickey if I could turn it into a short story, sticking to his script. He gave his blessing. The script was heavy with narration and the transfer was not difficult, though I felt some of it could have used some work, chiefly for clarity. But I did as little as I could in that regard, basically turning the script’s present tense script into past.

Now that I’ve done so many posthumous collaborations with Mickey – with his blessing – I felt this story should be properly prepared for publication…again, without taking too many liberties.

The things I did not include from the Tomorrow I Die and Together We Kill anthologies in this new one are interesting but not vital – like the science-fiction tale “The Veiled Woman,” ghosted by Howard Browne when Mickey missed deadline; a few memoirs for True magazine; a comic book “filler” story (now available in Vintage Spillane); and the script of a Mike Hammer screen test film starring Spillane’s policeman pal Jack Stang (a short story version appearing in the forthcoming Kill Me If You Can, this year’s Hammer 75th anniversary novel, which includes five bonus short stories). Also intentionally M.I.A. is Mickey’s good but non-crime tale, “Affair with the Dragon Lady.”

Stand Up and Die! is the definitive collection of Spillane crime/mystery short fiction, and its existence is due to not just my efforts but also Wolfpack’s Mike Bray, Paul Bishop and James Reasoner.

Mickey allowed a number of his crime novellas to be collected by NAL as paperbacks, mostly two-to-a-volume. This was part of his effort to raise last-minute funds for the troubled production of The Girl Hunters film. Possibly because that need for money was over, he did not bother to collect his other novellas and short stories similarly. Over the years I collected these in their original men’s adventure magazine appearances, sometimes off the newsstands, other times in used book stores. Convincing Mickey to let me collect some of them for the Mysterious Press anthology led to our first professional project together.

Not our last.

I can’t recommend a collection of tough fiction more highly than this one.

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Here’s a good review of Quarry’s Blood by a reader who can’t seem to make up his mind whether he wants me to write more Quarry books or not.

This review of the film The Outfit, streaming now, says it’s a combination of Collins (me), Mamet (a writer whose work I don’t care for), and Sorkin (a writer whose work I do care for). So I went into watching it with one eye squinted. It’s an okay crime chamber piece, with a strong central performance by Mark Rylance. You may like it. I made it all the way through, Barb didn’t. Interestingly, Barb loves the film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (as do I), and the reviewer here in passing calls Tinker, Tailor “dreadfully boring.” Still, having my work referenced in a review like this was fun.

Some short, smart reviews here of three Quarry books and one Nolan. I’m blushing.

Road to Perdition is listed as one of the seven best movies debuting on Netflix in May 2022.

Here’s an interesting in-depth look at Wild Dog.

Finally, this brief, admiring look at the graphic novel and film of Road to Perdition.

M.A.C.

Tags: Mickey Spillane, New Releases, Nolan, Quarry, Quarry's Blood, Reviews, Road to Perdition, Short Stories, Stand Up and Die!, Wild Dog
Posted in Message from M.A.C. | 4 Comments »

A Late Announcement and Heller Behind the Scenes

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2022

This announcement is criminally late, and will serve only to inform potential attendees in the Iowa-Illinois Quad Cities area. How criminally late? The event takes place the evening of the day this update is posted.

I will be appearing at a screening of Road to Perdition at the Figge Art Museum, doing a post-film Q and A joined by my frequent collaborators, Barbara Collins and Matthew V. Clemens.

Here are the details as reported by Tristan Tapscott at QuadCities.com:

‘Road to Perdition’ Screening and Author Panel
March 22 at The Figge

Scott Community College, with the generosity of the Figge Art Museum, will host a screening of the award-winning film, Road to Perdition (2002), starring Tom Hanks on March 22, 2022, at the Figge Art Museum, 225 W. 2nd Street, in Davenport. The film screening will begin at 4 p.m. with the author question and answer panel to follow.

Following the film will be an author question and answer panel with Max Allan Collins, author of the graphic novel, Barbara Collins, critically acclaimed author and short story writer, and Matthew Clemens, author and frequent collaborator of Max Allan Collins.

This event is free and open to the public.

Road to Perdition by Max Allan Collins has been selected as the Great Scott Read 2021-2022. The graphic novel and text versions of Road to Perdition are being used by Scott Community College instructors in the classroom. Copies of the book and graphic novel are available to check out from the Scott Community College Library.

For general information, please call 563-441-4150. For venue information, please call 563-326-7804.

Okay, why such a late announcement? Two reasons – the official date of this event was originally announced at a time Barb, Matt and I had not cleared with our schedules. The correct information about a new date did not get announced until just recently, and that announcement did not fall neatly into when my weekly update/blog appears (each Tuesday morning).

Now, I could have done a special posting earlier last week, but I was caught up in writing the final chapters of the new Nathan Heller novel (for Hard Case Crime), The Big Bundle.

I’m going to talk about that now.

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As I’ve said here before, the Heller novels are my proudest achievement and the series is what I consider my signature work. Quarry, which after Heller is my favorite among my series, has become my signature work in the eyes of some. I don’t resent that at all – I like that two things of mine are viewed with such enthusiasm by readers. And of course Road to Perdition (and its sequels and subsequent graphic novels) is the most famous…though I should note that Road to Perdition was an off-shoot of the Heller saga.

Keeping Heller alive throughout my career has been tricky. The day when a mystery series could keep going at the same publisher over many decades had already ended when True Detective (the first Heller novel) was published in 1983. Spillane, Stout, Hammett, Chandler, Christie, and any number of less household-name authors were able to stay with one publisher and one series for a long, long time. But for some while we have been in a situation where publishers cancel a series – somewhat in the network TV mode – as soon as they deem it to have run its course, i.e., as soon as sales begin to drop at all. Often after one or two of three entries.

Heller has been cancelled and pronounced dead (even by my own agent) more times than Dracula at Hammer Films. I have been encouraged to leave him behind and write something new. Well, writing something new is no problem – I like doing that. But when I have hold of something special, I want to stick with it.

That’s why, when I had the opportunity decades later to pick back up with Quarry, I grabbed the chance. I knew Quarry was among the handful of innovative things I’d done in my career – a first-person hitman “hero” was, in a field that is built on recycling the ideas of others (and your own), something unique. When you have writers as gifted as Lawrence Block and Loren Estleman following your lead, you must be doing something right.

Heller is probably my major contribution to mystery fiction because he went somewhere no private eye had gone before: real crimes, researched as if this author (me) had been preparing to write the definitive non-fiction account of each crime…and with fresh solutions to those crimes. Additionally, he would age and change, would have a father and mother, would marry and produce an offspring, his one-room office would over the years become a coast-to-coast agency, and he would do human things like cry, fart, lie and cheat while not losing his P.I. credentials of having a code and being the best man in his world. I consciously chose to examine the cliches and tropes of the private eye, to find the reality behind them – to take Heller back to when Race Williams, the Continental Op and Sam Spade took the private eye into public consciousness…and when in fact there were real private eyes more or less doing for a few decades the fanciful things fictional private eyes would do for many decades.

But continuing the Heller series over decades has a downside that perhaps publishers anticipated. The novels get less frequently reviewed. New waves of fans ignore the books and don’t even try them. Their cultish status – their historical nature – get them ignored by mystery fandom publications. Reviewers who love the Heller novels and rave about them will forget to include them on their year’s end “best of list,” perhaps because the Hellers are in a sub-genre of their own. Or maybe Heller is just a been-there-done-that for such reviewers.

Keeping him alive meant somehow bamboozling various publishers into picking up a series that another publisher deemed had run its course. I started at St. Martin’s, moved to Bantam, then Dutton, and (after a decade-long break) to Forge. Now, Charels Ardai – who understands the hardboiled field, including its history – has picked up my torch at Hard Case Crime.

What has caught up with me, after all these years, is all these years. By which I mean, I am 74 and doing a Nate Heller book is a bitch. It really is. The joy of writing Quarry or Nolan or Mike Hammer is that a fairly minimal amount of research is involved. Some research is necessary, particularly since all the recent books in those series are set in period. Even though I lived through those eras doesn’t mean I was paying attention. I still have to check things like what songs were popular and what night TV shows were on, and fashions and brand-names, and on and on.

But generally there are great stretches where I can just write – I can just follow one of my protagonists into and through a scene, and dialogue can ensue as well as mayhem and eroticism. That’s when writing fiction is fun – when you have room in the kitchen to cook.

And Google has made much research both possible and easier. For decades, research associate George Hagenauer (who did not participate much in The Big Bundle) and I would both spend hours in libraries and other research-friendly facilities digging out all kinds of things. We both have built voluminous libraries of books and magazines that we have scoured over the years to produce Heller and other historically-themed novels. Google – added to those already assembled personal libraries – has made doing Heller easier.

But not easy.

Let me put it into perspective. Quarry’s Blood was written in three weeks. The Big Bundle took two months of reading/note-taking followed by three months of writing. (I got paid the same for both Blood and Bundle. Not complaining – that’s just the reality.) At my age, the degree of difficulty for doing a Heller is considerable.

I have committed to doing another Heller for Hard Case Crime, Too Many Bullets, which with The Big Bundle will comprise what I will likely call The Kennedy Quintet (Bye Bye, Baby; Target Lancer; and Ask Not being the previous novels in this cycle within the Heller cycle).

I find myself wondering – assuming I’m able to stick around on the planet a while longer – if I have the energy to keep Heller going. I have wanted to do a Watergate novel with him for some time, and have considered a Martin Luther King assassination novel (although in the current climate that may be a bad idea). I had a George Reeves/Superman novel in the research stage, but the film Hollywoodland came out and explored the same subject, so I shelved it; but enough time has passed that I might reconsider. There are several other smaller crimes that might become shorter Heller novels.

Perhaps he will have run his course by the end of Too Many Bullets. Lord knows I don’t want readers to say I’ve written Too Many Hellers. But the practical consideration of the degree of difficulty of these things may decide it for me.

I am picturing this week a page from the manuscript of The Big Bundle. I have circled everything that required me to stop and do research before going on. You will see, I think, what I am up against.

The Big Bundle Manuscript page showing researched text.

And yet I love having written The Big Bundle. Unintentionally, it became – like Skim Deep for Nolan and Quarry’s Blood for Quarry – a meditation on what had come before. Quite accidentally, Heller finds himself in situations that resonate with his past, starting with the case at hand being the kidnapping of a child – summoning both the Lindbergh kidnapping and his own fatherhood. If not a coda to the Heller saga (chronologically it appears before Target Lancer and Ask Not), it is a reconsideration and a revisiting of what has gone before.

None of this is bitching by the way, or if it comes across that way, my apologies. These are just the thoughts that occur to me as, with Barb’s help, I prepare to enter my final corrections into The Big Bundle manuscript and get it sent to Hard Case Crime yet today.

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In a list of favorite Paul Newman films, Connie Wilson includes a nice little write-up of Road to Perdition.

This is a lovely review of Quarry’s Blood, but BEWARE – it includes a MAJOR SPOILER.

And here’s a podcast featuring Brad Schwartz, discussing our Eliot Ness non-fiction tomes. (I passed on participating because I was deep in The Big Bundle.)

M.A.C.

Tags: Appearances, Nate Heller, Quarry, Road to Perdition, The Big Bundle
Posted in Message from M.A.C. | 7 Comments »

Nate Heller, Chuck Berry, and Five Free Books!

Tuesday, March 8th, 2022

E-Book:

Paperback:

Finally, our book giveaway of No Time to Spy, the massive collection of the John Sand trilogy, has arrived. We have only five (5) copies to give away. As usual, you agree to write an Amazon review (and/or at any other review site, like Barnes & Noble, Good Reads, your own blog, etc.). [All copies have been claimed. Thank you for your support! — Nate]

We really need the reviews, as No Time to Spy has stalled out at a meager 18 ratings. By way of contrast, the new Quarry’s Blood already has 34 (and thank you for that!). Now, I understand John Sand and Quarry are two different animals, but the individual titles in the Sand series have fared very well (229 ratings for Come Spy with Me for an average of four stars).

If you have read the trilogy as it came out, novel by novel, and liked what you read, please consider reviewing the collection at Amazon to help build up interest. Right now it’s looking like the fourth Sand, resolving a hell of a cliffhanger (if Matt Clemens and I may be so bold to suggest), will never be written.

On this subject – and I think I’ve made this clear before – I am well aware that not everything I write appeals to the same group of readers. Right now I’m working on The Big Bundle, the new Nate Heller novel (about 2/3’s in), and am cognizant of the fact that what some readers relate to in my work is my first-person voice. That’s not just one voice, of course – Mike Hammer and Quarry and Heller are not the same voice, but they are variations on my voice and reflect whatever facility I may have in first person. Some readers may not relate as well to a third-person voice, as used in John Sand, Nolan, the Perdition prose novels and more.

And some people who like, say, Quarry like to lambast me when I write anything else. But I need to stay fresh and nimble and that requires writing different things, although mostly I work in suspense/mystery. But I get it. I have writers whose work I like who occasionally throw me a curve I can’t catch. One of my favorite writers is Mark Harris – his baseball trilogy (The Southpaw is the first, Bang the Drum Slowly is the most famous) is to me a marvel of first-person storytelling.

Harris, who I met and then corresponded with, saw himself as a literary writer and throughout his career he tried all kinds of things. Usually I at least like what he did, at times I loved what he did, but on a few occasions I didn’t connect with him at all. When someone dislikes my work in general, I like to say the reader and I are not a good fit. When someone who likes some of what I do complains about a work that doesn’t work for him or her, I chalk it up similarly – that reader isn’t a good fit with that particular work.

A good example is the Antiques series that Barb and I write together. These are cozy mysteries, albeit somewhat of a subversive take on that sub-genre, told in the first person by two narrators. The novels combine what we think are good solid mysteries with a lot of fairly off-the-wall humor. A surprising number (surprising to me) of readers of noir-ish things of mine like Quarry, Heller and Hammer also like these books. But I completely understand the readers who, despite generally being fans of mine, don’t cotton to Brandy and Vivian Borne.

Writing this new Heller raises a number of issues in my aging mind. I understand that some fans of my Quarry and Nolan and Hammer novels don’t respond to Heller, despite my own feeling that the Heller saga is my signature work. While the Heller books have the violence and sex for which I am known and loved, they also are long books…this one will be 80,000 words and I believe Stolen Away was 125,000 words…and they are more detailed and explore the historical crimes they’re dealing with in depth. The violence and sex stuff is there, but not every other chapter.

Another factor I’m facing is the degree of difficulty. Even now I can write a Quarry novel in a month. The real-life case I’m dealing with in The Big Bundle is not as complicated (or frankly as famous) as, say, the assassination of Huey Long (Blood and Thunder) or the disappearance of Amelia Earhart (Flying Blind). But at this age I have to review the research extensively before working on a chapter covered by that material; this includes new research, beyond the several months of reading that preceded the writing, stuff I’m picking up on the fly.

I also find I am re-plotting several times as I go along. That happens with any novel, because I don’t let my synopsis dictate things – if characters want to do something different, I let them. If something occurs to me as an interesting turn to take, I take it.

That’s all well and good, but in a Heller novel I am dealing with history. The first book, True Detective, in the very title established the rules: these would be true stories. I allow myself some liberties – time compression and occasional composite characters are typical elements in a Heller. But mostly it’s just the facts, ma’am, presented in the context of a private eye novel and striving to come up with the truth…most happily (as has been often the case) with a new solution to a controversial real mystery.

What I am up against now is that pesky degree of difficulty. I think I’m writing as well as ever (possibly self-delusion, but it keeps me going). With Heller, however, the amount of time for me to feel I get it right is at odds with the speed at which I was long able to work. I understand that’s a function of old age; but knowing that doesn’t make it any easier. Just annoying. Frustrating.

I have committed to one more Heller after this one – the two books will complete the cycle of Heller novels involving JFK and RFK. Bobby Kennedy isn’t in The Big Bundle much, but he’s a vital element; next time he will be the focus.

I have been expecting to spend my remaining writing years with a focus on Heller. I am nearing the end of the Hammer manuscripts, and I’ve written and published endings to Nolan and Quarry (two each!). But I question whether I am up to the Heller degree of difficulty in relation to how much time it takes to arrive at what satisfies me.

On top of this are newer projects – like Fancy Anders and John Sand – that interest me. I am extremely proud of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton; it’s one of my best books (thank you Dave Thomas!). Barb and I are developing a standalone thriller, and I’m doing three novellas for Neo-Text on unlikely American heroes. There a few more Spillane/Hammer books left to write.

But Heller is what I’m proudest of. Probably the deciding factor will be if I can’t hit the mark, can’t write about him in a way that pleases me.

One interesting thing about Heller is how writing the books can lead me into rewarding areas that I didn’t anticipate. In Big Bundle, I decided to do a scene in St. Louis at a club where Chuck Berry was playing. Berry isn’t being used as a famous historical character in the novel – it’s just me looking for a fun setting for a scene.

That’s always a problem in private eye novels. The form is basically a series of interviews with witnesses and suspects – look at The Maltese Falcon. So I try in Heller (well, in all novels that touch on the PI form) to use interesting locations. With an historical saga like Heller’s, it’s an opportunity to suggest the times and put the place in context – using famous defunct restaurants, for instance.

I read about the Cosmopolitan Club, where Berry basically put rock ‘n’ roll on stage for the first time, and found that the documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll (1987) had refurbished the defunct East St. Louis club for a mini-concert celebrating (and sort of recreating) Berry’s tenure there. I got caught up in the documentary and it got me interested in Berry and his music, which I had frankly (stupidly) taken for granted. On reflection, I was reminded that everything from the Beach Boys to the Beatles came from him, and recalled how many, many songs of his my various bands had played.

So I sent for another documentary (Chuck Berry, 2018), and several books, and three CD’s. That’s a bonus that comes out of the Heller research – I stumble onto things that are only tangential to the book at hand but that roar into the centerstage of my personal interests.

If you’ve never seen Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, by the way, you haven’t lived till you watch Chuck Berry schooling Keith Richards on how to play rock ‘n’ guitar. One particular sequence is singled out as demonstrating how difficult Chuck could be; but for those of us who’ve played in bands, we know: Chuck was right.

One bittersweet aspect was my realization that I had blown a great opportunity. My son Nate lived in St. Louis for better than half a decade, and during that time Barb and I visited him (and later, Nate and his wife Abby, and later than that, grandson Sam too) often. Meanwhile, hometown boy Chuck Berry was playing once a month at Blueberry Hill, a fantastic club in the Delmar loop. And I – we – didn’t bother to see him.

As Fats Domino would say, “Ain’t that a shame.”

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This Paperback Warrior review of Quarry’s Blood appeared on my birthday, March 3, and I couldn’t ask for a better present.

The New York Times recommended ten books last week, and Quarry’s Blood was one of them.

Finally, Daedalus Books has the hardcover of Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher for $6.95.

M.A.C.

Tags: Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher, Fancy Anders, Giveaways, John Sand, Nate Heller, No Time to Spy, Quarry, Quarry's Blood, The Big Bundle, The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton, True Detective
Posted in Message from M.A.C. | 11 Comments »

Quarry Hits the Big Times

Tuesday, March 1st, 2022

It’s been ages since I’ve had a New York Times review of one of my novels. I’ve had some nice write-ups there – don’t recall a bad one – but this is the first ever Quarry novel the Times has reviewed. Here goes:

With QUARRY’S BLOOD (Hard Case Crime, 224 pp., paper, $12.95), Max Allan Collins finally bids goodbye to Quarry, his Marine sniper-turned-professional assassin, more than 10 years after The Last Quarry, by its title, promised to do so. This time feels like it’s for keeps, as the novel is set more or less in the present (there’s a reference to a character dying of Covid), and Quarry, pushing 70, is looking forward to retiring after all those decades of killing for hire.

Retirement, however, is put on ice when a true-crime writer, Susan Breedlove, shows up at Quarry’s door looking for some answers. Her arrival opens a portal into full-on metafiction, as the line between what Collins has published since the mid-1970s and what has spilled out into the actual world (like a television adaptation) grows so porous as to cease existing.

It goes without saying that the body count will pile up, and that Quarry, despite his aching body and slower reflexes, still operates at a more ruthless clip than almost anyone he encounters. This is a sure-footed ending to a series that marinated in the excesses of pure pulp.

That’s a swell review, but what’s interesting to me is to how the word “pulp” has become a compliment in recent years – possibly thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction – when for decades it was a pejorative. Now it denotes a certain style of fiction (often consciously retro) viewed with a positive, even affectionate spin.

Equally interesting to me is that this is the first I’ve had a paperback original reviewed in the Times, at least that I can remember.

So far the reader response, and reviewer reaction, has been very warm indeed to the new Quarry. It was a risky novel to write, as you readers of the book already know, because I ventured into “meta” territory, big-time. I don’t want to say more, but I will say that one of the things I dealt with is just what exactly Quarry has been writing in these first-person narratives all these years.

Digital Audiobook:

Out right now is the audio book of Quarry’s Blood, read by the wonderful Stefan Rudnicki. The cover is pictured here. I have not listened to the audio yet, but will begin sometime this week, when we take a day off to celebrate my 74th birthday. (It’s March 3rd, not yet a national holiday.)

Stefan has become the voice of Quarry for me, just as Dan John Miller is Nate Heller.

Check out an excerpt here:

* * *

I am working on the new Heller novel now, ridiculously immersed in it, and for that reason this will be a short update. I would like to respond to Bill P’s follow-up comment on a discussion about writing, readers and reviewers that’s been going on for a few weeks here. I misunderstood Bill’s use of “archetype,” thinking he meant the characters I write about; but he was thinking of the archetypical reader I envision.

I accidentally answered that, by saying that I write to please myself, and my wife Barb, who is my first reader as I go along (meaning she reads the chapters as I complete them). I do, however, envision a reader. I don’t think specifically of a male or female, just someone who shares my interests and tastes, and the ideal reader is probably of my generation or the generation or two on either side of mine. A major part of my approach is my assumption that the reader is at least as smart as I am. He or she might be smarter, but not so much smarter that my work seems childish or beneath them. I never assume – never – that the reader isn’t as smart as I am. I endeavor never to write down.

The only slight exception – the only “sort of” exception – is when I write a first-person story in the voice of someone not as smart as me. I’ve only done this a few times, and it’s tricky (Shoot the Moon is one). This relates as well to writing in the point of view (when in third person) of someone who isn’t as smart as me. Who might be dumb, like Lyle in Spree. All I can say is that these characters never think of themselves as dumb, just as the antagonists of the protagonists never think of themselves as the villains.

I’ve made it clear here that I abhor writing that tries to impress – that spends too much time showing off. In this approach, the story almost always pays the price.

* * *

La Guerra De Quarry (Quarry's War, Spanish Edition) cover

I wanted to share with you this cover of the graphic novel Quarry’s War in Spanish.

I don’t remember Quarry appearing in Spain before. Road to Perdition did, which may be what led to this edition.

Here is a very smart review of Quarry’s Blood. This reviewer is always worth reading.

M.A.C.

Tags: New Releases, Quarry, Quarry's Blood, Quarry's War, Reviews, Road to Perdition
Posted in Message from M.A.C. | 4 Comments »

Posts Tagged ‘Quarry’

Sit Down and Read!

A Late Announcement and Heller Behind the Scenes

Nate Heller, Chuck Berry, and Five Free Books!

Quarry Hits the Big Times