That’s One Hard-boiled “Carol”

(Above) The movie trailer for Blue Christmas.

Charles Dickens could have had no inkling, when he penned his 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, how durable or popular that tale about the grumpy skinflint Ebenezer Scrooge and a quartet of invasive night spirits would prove to be. The English novelist and journalist published myriad other yuletide yarns during his career, as well as further ghost stories. Yet most are long-forgotten, and not one of the others has been as oft-adapted for the theater, radio, and television as has Carol—or provided such rich inspiration for derivative fiction.

Case in point: “A Wreath for Marley,” which Iowa author Max Allan Collins concocted during a professional low point, in 1992, and first saw published four years later. “Marley” melded A Christmas Carol with Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon into a story—set in Chicago in 1942—that introduced Richard Stone, a dick of a private dick who, as Kevin Burton Smith remarks in The Thrilling Detective Web Site, “needed a little ghostly comeuppance and a spectral visitation or three.” Smith goes on to explain the tale’s set-up: “It’s Christmas Eve, and Stone is tying one on at his office Christmas party, celebrating his dodging of the draft thanks to a well-placed bribe, much to the disapproval of his secretary/girlfriend, Katie Crockett, whose brother is fighting overseas in the Pacific Theatre, while his squeaky-clean young op Joey is none too happy about all the divorce cases he’s been stuck with. Stone is also marking the one-year anniversary of the murder of his partner, Jake Marley—a murder he couldn’t even be bothered trying to solve.”

You pretty much know where this holiday fantasy is headed. But Collins’ elaborations on Dickens’ Victorian plot line—especially his casting substitutions of John Dillinger and Elvis Presley for two of the original yarn’s phantoms—lend “Marley” both intrigue and humor. “I am not by inclination a short-story writer,” Collins wrote in his blog a couple of months ago, “but as soon as I’d finished it, I knew ‘Marley’ was special.” So special, in fact, that he thought his novella could succeed as a movie. Unfortunately, other projects got in the way, and it was only last year that he finally began work on what he calls a “not-at-all lavishly budgeted” big-screen version of the story, retitled Blue Christmas. That one-hour, 19-minute feature saw its theatrical debut last spring, and is now available in both Blu-ray and DVD formats. (Alternatively, you can watch it online here.)

Although the picture isn’t quite so polished as many modern Hollywood blockbusters (reviewers have likened it to “a community theater production”), it has won its share of critical plaudits. The Aisle Seat, for instance, writes that it “outperforms its low budget with an effective script,” while Overly Honest Reviews says that Blue Christmas “offers a potent mix of suspense, humor, and nostalgia, promising to engage viewers with its compelling tale of personal redemption and the enduring power of the holiday spirit.”

‘Tis the season for films such as Blue Christmas, but that project is certainly not the only one on which the prolific Collins has been working lately. He also has a second film in the works, a final collaborative installment in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series due out just three months from now, a sequel to Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon recently completed, and True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak—a multi-part audio drama adapted from True Detective (1983), his Shamus Award-winning first novel starring Chicago gumshoe Nathan Heller—set to drop its initial three episodes this coming Friday.

I took the opportunity earlier this month to ask Collins about all of these subjects. The results of our exchange are below.

J. Kingston Pierce: You’ve said before that the 1996 novella “A Wreath for Marley,” from which your film Blue Christmas is adapted, is “probably my favorite piece of fiction I ever wrote.” You’ve written a lot of fiction. Why does this yarn stand out so?

Max Allan Collins: That was probably an overstatement on my part—“A Wreath for Marley” is my favorite short fiction I’ve written. I am not known as a short-story specialist, and in fact I’m not even the best short-story writer in my house—that would be my wife, Barb. I’m a novelist by nature, and it took me a while to sell “Marley,” because Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, for example, liked it but found it too long for their purposes. Probably the most prominent place where it’s appeared is in Otto Penzler’s Big Book of Christmas Mysteries. And of course it’s in my collection Blue Christmas and Other Holiday Homicides [2001].

JKP: I hear that A Christmas Carol is your favorite Charles Dickens story, at least in part because you so enjoy the 1951 Alastair Sim movie version, Scrooge. Had you long considered ways to re-conceive that story with a crime-fiction angle?

MAC: No, it was something that occurred to me at a specific time, an idea I knew was special and pursued it immediately.

I have told this story frequently, but it’s necessary to tell it again. In early December (or maybe late November) 1992, I was fired from writing the Dick Tracy comic strip by the new editor at the Tribune Syndicate. He and I agreed on only one thing: that we hated each other. The day I received word of my firing (after a very successful run on that strip) I heard from my agent that my current Nate Heller contract had been cancelled by Bantam. This was right after a Heller novel, Stolen Away, won the Best Novel Shamus Award, so to say I was blindsided is an understatement.

I went into a brief period of not writing (not writer’s block exactly, but the lack of a project to drive me) and was understandably at a low ebb. On Christmas Eve 1992, after everybody but me was tucked in their wee little beds, I wrote “A Wreath for Marley” in a fever pitch. In one sitting, I wrote the entire 50-page novella. And after that my juices were flowing again. I started doing short stories for Ed Gorman and Marty Greenberg, who were doing theme anthologies that my wife was contributing to, and Michaela Hamilton at Dutton picked Nate Heller up. Heller is now at his fifth publisher, Hard Case Crime, a bit of a Christmas miracle of itself in this market.

I should add that the Alastair Sim Scrooge and Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon represented two narratives I loved, and somehow something in my brain saw the way their core concepts could be combined.

JKP: Did you ever consider making “Marley” a Nate Heller story, rather than enlisting a new Chicago P.I., Richard Stone? There are definite similarities between those two protagonists. But was there something Stone brought to the plot that Heller didn’t have going for him?

MAC: Heller was never an option. Richard Stone is more of a stinker than Nate, and the novella needed a third-person approach, not the Heller first-person one. And Heller is always fact-based, and “Marley” was a hard-boiled fantasy. Also, the protagonist needed a rural, very homespun Americana-type background, which Stone had rejected.

JKP: Wasn’t it long ago that you first wrote the screenplay version of Blue Christmas? When was that, exactly, and what made you think the tale would satisfy a film audience?

MAC: When we did my first movie, Mommy, in 1994—which brought [actress] Patty McCormack back to her Bad Seed persona, but as an adult—it was part of my seeking a replacement in my working career for Dick Tracy. I loved The Bad Seed, both the [1954] William March novel and Patty’s film, and thought an adult variation on that kind of character would have appeal in a psychological, blackly comic thriller.

When our effort did well—we had a respectable indie budget (at the time) of half a million bucks—and we became a chain-wide Blockbuster buy and a prime-time movie on Lifetime, I knew we could move forward with another project. That was originally to be Blue Christmas—the script was written, locations were scouted, and preliminary casting was underway. But there was demand for a Mommy sequel, and that was fine with me—I had a notion of how to do a sequel that was its own thing, not a rehash. It didn’t do as well—Lifetime turned it down, though Blockbuster again bought it chain-wide—and some financial malfeasance on my producer’s end stalled my indie movie-making badly. We did a few more projects on criminally low budgets—Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market—and I made a couple of documentaries, and sort of moved on, occasionally managing to sell a screenplay (The Expert, The Last Lullaby).

I still thought Blue Christmas (as I titled the film project from “Marley”) would be a natural with audiences, combining a Christmas theme with a noir mystery, and tried a couple of times to get it done as a movie or as a stage play. But nothing came of it.

JKP: So you stuck that screenplay away in a drawer, only to more recently pull it out and finally turn it into a film. What motivated you at this stage in your life to venture back into movie-making?

MAC: A couple of years ago I was approached to do a radio-style Dick Tracy play as a fundraiser for the local arts center. I said no, that ship had long since sailed; but I offered them Encore for Murder, a [Mike Hammer] radio-style play I’d written for Stacy Keach to do as an audio presentation. I was invited to co-direct, and attended the first rehearsal expecting Amateur Night at Dixie but finding some really strong local talent. I took Barb along to the second rehearsal, to see if I was imagining things, and she said, “No, they’re very good.” I asked Gary Sandy, who had played Mike Hammer in two [stage] presentations of Encore for Murder (one in Kentucky, another in Florida) if he’d consider coming to Muscatine, Iowa, to help us out. I expected him to say no, but he generously said he’d love to do it. Gary, famously the star of WKRP in Cincinnati, had been in my movie Mommy’s Day.

Gary did a fantastic job, and as a last-minute thing we shot a dress rehearsal and the one performance, then edited it into a bonus feature for a re-do/updating of my Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane documentary on Blu-ray. The video company decided also to release the radio play as a separate DVD. Suddenly I was making indie movies again.

The editing for Encore was done at the local community college, where I saw their Black Box theater and thought, “This is a lot like a movie soundstage.” And just sort of automatically the notion of doing Blue Christmas in a one-set format came to mind. Previous versions, with bigger budgets in mind, would have followed the detective to various Chicago locations. The new version would stay at the office where, after a night of heavy office-party drinking, the detective falls asleep and the Christmas Carol-like dreams/visions ensue.

JKP: You had hoped for more money to make Blue Christmas, including support from Greenlight Iowa. That didn’t happen. You decided to go ahead and make do with a “micro-budget,” instead. What concessions were you forced to swallow in order to produce this picture?

MAC: We were going to bring Gary Sandy back in to play Marley. We’d have had more overtly period-specific costumes and better props and, not a small thing, my producer, d.p. [director of photography], and myself would have got paid. We would have shot more second-unit footage—hallways of the office building, etc., and perhaps used two (adjacent) sets, the office and Stone’s apartment. Ultimately I like the way it works on the one office set—where all the visions play out.

JKP: I recently decided to re-read “A Wreath for Marley,” and was surprised at just how closely the film follows that novella’s plot and dialogue. One major change, though, was that Stone’s first spirit guide in the original story was the colorful American bank robber John Dillinger, while in the film it’s another bandit, Bonnie Parker, who—with her partner, Clyde Barrow—was gunned down by law enforcement in the same year as Dillinger, 1934. Why the switch?

MAC: Re-reading the screenplay as originally written, I felt we needed another strong female role. And I think Bonnie and Clyde may be more famous now than Dillinger. A real consideration was the possibility of landing Alisabeth Von Presley to play Bonnie. Alisabeth is sort of a Midwest superstar—she was on American Idol and American Songwriting Contest, and is a fabulous performer. I wrote it with her in mind and, with the help of my lead actor, Rob Merritt (like Alisabeth a Cedar Rapids resident), got her to agree to play the role. She won a Best Actress award for it from the Iowa Motion Picture Association.

JKP: What’s been the reception like so far of Blue Christmas?

MAC: We’ve had the opportunity to screen it at a few actual theaters, though it was designed for streaming and physical media, and audiences took to it warmly. Of course we had hometown advantage on the court. The reviews have taken an interesting turn. We’ve had mostly very good reviews and several raves, but the couple of bad ones were really bad. Hey, it’s an $8,000-dollar micro-budget movie on mostly a single set. The cast is led by a couple of pros, Rob and Alisabeth, but the rest are from Quad Cities dinner theater and the same local talent used on Encore. If you meet our little movie on its own terms—as a bittersweet noir fantasy—you’ll have a good time. If you are expecting Wicked, you’ll be disappointed.

JKP: You have written that your work on Blue Christmas inspired you to try your hand at making a second holiday-themed film, Death by Fruitcake. This one brings to life the main characters from the Trash ’n’ Treasures mystery series you’ve been working on with your wife for the last two decades (all the titles of which begin with Antiques), and publishing under the joint nom de plume Barbara Allan. What’s the status of Fruitcake? Will it be available by next Christmas?

MAC: My wife, Barb, is a key element in my moviemaking, but she swore Blue Christmas would be her last film project. So I kind of tricked her back into it by doing an Antiques movie with our characters Brandy and Vivian Borne (we’re at 19 entries in the series). Over the last 10 years or so, several top TV showrunners have taken the property out for a possible series, and we’ve come very close but not caught the gold ring. We decided to show how effective and fun the Trash ’n’ Treasures mysteries could be on screen.

I’m proud of Blue Christmas, but there’s no question Death by Fruitcake is a step up. We have Alisabeth back (as Brandy) and Quad Cities broadcasting legend Paula Sands is Vivian. Paula had just retired from Channel 6 and was available (she also appears in Mommy’s Day) for a new kind of project. Both of them are terrific. Our Stone, Rob Merritt, plays recurring character Chief of Police Tony Cassato. And we have a bigger budget this time—a whopping $24,000. We did a two-night premiere at the local multi-plex and packed the house both nights. We haven’t taken it out to market yet, but it should easily be out there for Christmas 2025.

JKP: What did you learn from Blue Christmas that was helpful in putting together another modestly budgeted film, Death by Fruitcake?

MAC: Frankly, I wanted (and got) even more control. The six-day shoot of Blue Christmas found me leaving things to the director of photography while I focused on performance and story, just so we could make time. We had two weeks and some second-unit days on Fruitcake, and I was much more in auteur mode.

JKP: Do you think Death by Fruitcake might earn you more attention from hardened crime-fiction enthusiasts who believe the Trash ’n’ Treasures books are just too cozyish for their tastes?

MAC: I hope so. It’s a funny movie, with a share of dark comedy, that may introduce new audience members to the Antiques novels, which are after all on some level a spoof of the cozy genre and on another a two-detective approach not entirely unlike Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe.

JKP: While I have your attention, let me ask about a couple of other works you have in the hopper, the first being Baby, It’s Murder, which is due out this coming March from Titan Books. After penning 14 previous Mike Hammer novels, finished by you from material Mickey Spillane left behind when he died in 2006, this is to be Hammer’s last novel-length outing. Why end the series here?

MAC: Titan and I were at the point where I would have to start writing strictly original Hammer novels. The object had always been to complete the unfinished projects from Mickey’s files. The first eight or so were from substantial manuscripts. By the end I was using synopses he had jotted down. If there’s a movie or something, I’d consider putting Mike back out there. But for now, our goal of completing what Mickey left behind has been met.

Baby, It’s Murder has some special poignancy and is a good stopping place. Wait till you read the last line!

JKP: This is going to be a short novel (just 192 pages long, according to Amazon), but it must have been a very significant one to you. What have you learned about either Spillane’s storytelling methods or Mike Hammer’s character that you didn’t know before you started trying to bring the last of Mickey’s fiction to the reading public?

MAC: There’s enough Spillane in my native style to just ramp it up a little on these novels. I am strictly a Hammett/Chandler/Spillane boy—no other private-eye writers have influenced me a whit. I concentrate on the Hammer character, getting him right, and let the books write themselves. I do think there’s more humor in my Hammer, or if not more, then a slightly different style of humor—less Howard Hawks in tone. And I allow Mike to show a tad more humanity than Mickey did, although my take is probably just as tough—I think it’s scarier when a guy with a certain sensitivity does something really violent and vengeful.

JKP: What do you think you’ve added to our understanding of Hammer that we didn’t know by the time Black Alley—the final Hammer novel Spillane wrote by himself—reached print in 1996?

MAC: Mickey was struggling with Velda toward the end. He wanted Mike and Velda to be full partners, including sexually, but his conservative religious beliefs sort of hamstrung him. He would find excuses for them not having sex, and started denying that they’d ever had sex, though that was the pay-off of The Snake. So I made it clear that Velda and Mike were full partners. There’s a lot more full-blooded Velda in my collaborations with Mickey. Maybe that comes from writing the Ms. Tree comics character for a decade and a half.

JKP: In addition, you finally gave Velda a last name, Sterling.

MAC: That was Mickey’s last name for Velda, never revealed till I became involved. In the movie of The Girl Hunters, an “S” bracelet is shown. And, by the way, the last name of Patty McCormack’s Mommy character, in those films, is Sterling.

JKP: Although you won’t be writing any more Hammer novels, do you think the character might figure into future short stories?

MAC: Possibly, though there’s one major Hammer project left to do—a science-fiction-oriented one that needs to be set apart from the canon somewhat. Mickey called it Time Cycle, but I’m hoping to call it Mickey Spillane’s The Time Machine.

JKP: Now let’s talk about The Return of the Maltese Falcon, your sequel to Dashiell Hammett’s famous 1929 detective novel. How long have you been thinking about writing this book?

MAC: Oh, I have been thinking about doing it for maybe 15 years. Keeping an eye on the public domain clock. [Falcon is one of “thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 (that) will enter the U.S. public domain” beginning in 2025.]

JKP: What do you say when people dismiss the need for such a sequel?

MAC: Well, it isn’t necessary. But a surprising number of readers, and fans of the John Huston-directed movie, would have liked another ending. Even Bogart (who apparently came up with it) added a different last line. I think a good case can be made that Hammett’s ending is perfect, though. That doesn’t stop me from wanting more Sam Spade.

It’s disappointing to me, but not surprising, that some Hammett fans resent this project. Don Herron, whose The Dashiell Hammett Tour guidebook was a major reference for my novel, has made it clear in his Internet column that he won’t be reading the novel. He actually made fun of the idea. I was only half-way through writing Return and I already had a bad review!

JKP: Before we move on, just what was the different last line Humphrey Bogart proposed for The Maltese Falcon?

MAC: Technically, it’s “huh?” Spoken by the cop, Sergeant [Tom] Polhaus. But before “huh,” Bogart says, “The, uh … stuff that dreams are made of.” Hammett’s tag, an additional scene, has [his secretary] Effine Perine disenchanted with him and [his late partner’s wife] Iva Archer lurking to step in.

JKP: So can you tell us a little something about the plot of Return? Do you pick up right on the heels of Hammett’s tale, or is this a story set later in the Depression? And other than Sam Spade, which characters from the original book are you bringing back?

MAC: It takes place in December 1928, within two weeks of the end of the action in The Maltese Falcon. Most of the characters I use are either in the original novel (Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Joel Cairo) or are characters referred to in the original but who were never on stage (General Kemidov, Dixie Monahan). Rhea Gutman, who is in the original but was left out of the Huston film, is a major player. The idea was to work as much as possible within the confines of the Hammett novel—to make that the world.

JKP: In addition to The Maltese Falcon, Hammett penned three Sam Spade short stories. Now that you’ve made his San Francisco gumshoe your own, can you see using Spade again in your future short fiction?

MAC: Not short fiction necessarily, but possibly—if Return is well-received—another Spade novel or two. You make a necessary point: Hammett used, perhaps conceived, Spade as a series character. He was on that path when he stopped writing. Spade was of course [the star of] a very successful radio series, if a rather spoofy one, that Hammett licensed.

JKP: As if you didn’t have your fingers in enough pies already, you have also been working on a major Nate Heller project this past year.

MAC: Yes, a 10-part immersive, full-cast audio drama based on the first Heller novel, True Detective. Because of the HBO show, we couldn’t use the book’s title, so we decided upon True Noir. I’ve adapted [my story] myself, into a 400-page script. The episodes are each a bit over half an hour. Robert Meyer Burnett, who is a major YouTube presence but also a film and TV director, is directing and editing the production. Rob has been great to work with—having me sit in on all the recording sessions and offer my input, which is not usual director behavior. Our cast is unbelievably stellar—David Straithairn (as Frank Nitti), Vincent Pastore, Katee Sackhoff, Bill Smitrovich, William Sadler, Jeffrey Combs, Adam Arkin, and that’s just scratching the surface. Our casting director, Christine Sheaks, and Rob Burnett came up with the cast, though I also got my friends Bill Mumy and Patton Oswalt to participate. Nate Heller is played by Michael Rosenbaum, of Smallville fame, and he nails the character. Just great.

This is a dream come true for me, essentially a movie without pictures that really brings my vision to life. The initial three episodes will be “dropped,” as they say, very soon, followed by weekly, podcast-style distribution of the other seven episodes. Stay tuned.



JKP: True Noir reminds me of an old-time radio drama, with sound effects and everything. Are you a fan of radio mystery series?

MAC: I am a fan of old radio, though Barb and I lean more toward Fibber McGee and Molly and The Great Gildersleeve. Of the non-comedies, we like Dragnet. In my ways, including subject matter, True Noir is a big advancement over the traditional old-time radio dramas, which have their charm but can sound hokey to a contemporary audience. True Noir has first-rate sound effects and a wonderful, complete score.

JKP: What happened to Todd Stashwick (Star Trek: Picard, 12 Monkeys, The Riches). Wasn't he slated to voice Nate Heller in your forthcoming audio production?

MAC: Todd was hired to do the proof-of-concept mini-episode, with an eye on him doing True Noir. He did a fine job but we had some scheduling and creative issues we couldn't get past. We looked at some very big names for Nate Heller, and finally just auditioned a few people. Michael Rosenbaum knocked it out of the park—the moment Rob Burnett and I first heard Michael, we knew we had our man.

JKP: If True Noir is a hit, would you then adapt other Heller novels? I remember you’d actually thought initially to adapt Stolen Away first.

MAC: Yes, we’d do more, although we hope it leads to a long-form streaming TV series. We’re discussing The Million-Dollar Wound [first published back in 1986] at the present.

JKP: So what’s next on your writing plate?

MAC: Barb is working on her draft of Antiques Round-up. She’s almost done, so I’ll be starting that the first of January (or thereabouts).

JKP: Finally, I can’t leave off without inquiring about your health, as you often write about that in your blog--and it’ts affects your production as a fiction writer. How are you doing?

MAC: I am doing fine. The recurring joke around here is, “I’m in great health for somebody with this much wrong with him.” Doing a full two-week shoot on Death by Fruitcake was a sort of test to see what I can still pull off. The biggest problem for me, and anyone my age writing the kind of things I do, is the shrinking markets. My editors, even my publishers, are heading into well-deserved retirements. But I don’t know what to do with myself but write.