Three of Spades

Having read and very much enjoyed Max Allan Collins’ Return of the Maltese Falcon, his 2026 sequel to Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 Sam Spade novel, I was stoked to find this bit of news in Collins’ blog:

I’m pleased to announce I’ve signed with Hard Case Crime to do two more Sam Spade novels.

Launching a new Spade series wasn’t my intention in writing Return of the Maltese Falcon. I merely wanted to be out there first with a sequel to the classic original, now that it was in the public domain, and was presumptuous enough to think I could get it right.

As I’ve mentioned here, when I finished writing the book, and was pleased with it, my wife, Barb, warned me to brace myself –she said, Not everyone would like me appointing myself to a task that some might think ought never have been attempted. My thinking was, Somebody’s going to do this, and it might as well be me.

And I was surprised and pleased that the reactions were overwhelmingly favorable, generating some of my best reviews ever. A few naysayers weighed in, though were very much in the minority. Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t feel vindicated, I felt relieved.

Only when I saw how well Return of the Maltese Falcon was doing did I begin thinking about writing more Sam Spade. Spade is a character about whom Hammett might well have written another dozen or two novels, like Gardner with Perry Mason, Christie with Hercule Poirot or Rex Stout with Nero Wolfe. And of course Hammett, before turning his back on mystery writing, had written three Spade short stories, plus there’d been the popular Spade radio show with Howard Duff.

But what came to my mind was offering my publisher a trilogy, the first of which would be the already existing Return. I found it interesting to suggest two more Spade novels, each separated by ten years or so—to see what Spade was up to in the war years and then the McCarthy-era ’50s (which obviously have resonance with Hammett’s life).

I wrote a fairly lengthy proposal and Hard Case Crime’s Charles Ardai, with support from parent company Titan’s Nick and Vivian Landau and my editor Andrew Sumner, responded favorably. I am now about to begin work on Prey for the Maltese Falcon, set in 1939.

In some ways it’s more challenging than Return, which gave me the luxury of working within the parameters of the original novel—its characters, its locations, its themes. Now Spade is ten years older, and the case I’ve constructed takes him all sorts of places that the original novel and my sequel didn’t.

Wish me luck.

So when might readers be able to procure copies of Prey for the Maltese Falcon? Collins tells me to look for it in the fall of 2027, “no more specific than that as yet.”

Gittes’ Unfinished Adventures

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia to come out of blogger Scott Montgomery’s recent interview with Max Allan Collins, in The Hard Word. Amid their discussion about the still-new Return of the Maltese Falcon, Montgomery mentions that Collins and film historian Heath Holland provided the audio commentary for last fall’s Blu-ray release of 1990’s The Two Jakes, Jack Nicholson’s oft-derided sequel to Chinatown (1974). In response to Montgomery asking him what he admires about The Two Jakes, Collins says:

Everybody goes into The Two Jakes with a Chinatown chip on their shoulder and [they] don’t drink in the great Nicholson performance, the Robert Towne dialogue, the terrific cinematography and the resonance with the original. I love Chinatown and I love The Two Jakes. After Chinatown’s success, [screenwriter] Towne announced he was doing a trilogy about water, oil, and air. I tried, unsuccessfully, to get the rights to finish the [private eye] Jake Gittes trilogy as a prose novel, Gittes vs. Gittes, in part about divorce but mostly about pollution and the building of the freeways. Not sure whether Towne ever took it to the script stage. Jack Nicholson should be proud, and a lot of people are wrong.

Wanting to know more Towne’s prospective third Gittes story (of course!), I fired off an e-mail note to Collins, asking for details about his pursuit of the rights to the trilogy. His response:

About 10 years ago, I told my Hard Case Crime editor, Charles Ardai, I wanted to see if I could do Gittes vs. Gittes as a novel. My idea was simply to get whatever Towne had worked up on it and go from there—with his input and guidance, of course. How much he might have put together was uncertain—interviews with him indicated everything from a script to just an idea or even merely a title.

Charles thought we should go after the entire Gittes trilogy, including Chinatown, but I thought it was pointless to do Chinatown. Obviously, I’ve [written] plenty of movie novelizations, but I didn’t see any purpose in writing a novel version of a movie that perfect. I was in favor of doing The Two Jakes, however, because I knew Towne's several scripts differed in some ways from the film, and I thought The Two Jakes could use some attention that a novel might spark. I love that movie.

All I know is, Charles made some calls and they were somewhat serious, but ultimately nothing came of it. I’d still like to do it.

I guess we must add this to the “what might have been” file.

Spade Goes Back to Bird Hunting

Pinkerton detective-turned-author Dashiell Hammett realized he had something special on his hands when he submitted his revised, typewritten version of The Maltese Falcon to publisher Alfred A. Knopf in July 1929, asking that Knopf (who had previously handled his books Red Harvest and The Dain Curse) practice restraint in editing this latest manuscript. As Hammett scholar Richard Layman has explained: “He knew what he was doing, he said. Hammett wanted to get his third book right. It was a departure work for him, his attempt to break away from the formulas of pulp fiction to create a work with serious literary value.” Although the writer resisted changes by copy editors, he continued to tweak his own story—which had originally appeared (in slightly different form) in five monthly segments in Black Mask magazine—right up to when Knopf finally sent it away for printing. The completed novel was released on February 14, 1930.

Ninety-six years later, with the copyright on Hammett’s best-remembered (and most-filmed) tale having lapsed at the end of 2025, Iowa crime-fictionist Max Allan Collins seeks to add another “something special” to the Falcon legend. In Return of the Maltese Falcon, released this month by Hard Case Crime, he has boldly resuscitated the original book’s “hard and shifty” protagonist, San Francisco private investigator Samuel Spade, and sent him back out to locate the bejeweled bird of the title—which, you will likely recall, was never recovered in Hammett’s hard-boiled classic.

Penning a sequel to such a seminal genre work can only be characterized as intimidating. Indeed, Collins acknowledges that “avoiding strictly pure mimicry, and writing in my own style while honoring Hammett’s, was a tightrope to walk.” But the critical reception for Return of the Maltese Falcon has so far been generally favorable. Kirkus Reviews remarks that “Collins’ dialogue sounds pleasingly like Hammett’s; his plotting is even twistier; and if his descriptions mix Hammett’s terse, affectless minimalism with Raymond Chandler’s fondness for florid similes, that’s clearly, as he notes in an engaging coda, his intention. Fans convinced that nobody could possibly continue a tale that ends so definitely owe it to themselves to give Collins a try.” Reviewer Ray Palen of Bookreporter says Return is “a work of wonder, and I enjoyed every second of it. Collins has not just inhabited Hammett’s world but breathed new life into it and made it distinctly his own.” Finally, prolific author and blogger James Reasoner observes that, “stylistically, Collins’ fast-moving, straight-ahead prose isn’t quite as stripped down as Hammett’s, but it’s certainly in the same ballpark.” He adds: “The resolution of the mystery and the way the book wraps everything up are extremely satisfying.”

As Collins has stated in the past, he fell in love with The Maltese Falcon in 1961, when he was 13 years old and first watched the 1941 Humphrey Bogart movie adaptation on television. Not until much later did he consider recruiting Sam Spade into a new story—not necessarily a Falcon follow-up, but at least another novel starring the same principal. (Spade’s single other book-length appearance came in Joe Gores’ authorized 2009 Falcon prequel, Spade & Archer.) Collins’ idea for a sequel dates back to 2024, when he included it in a future-projects sales pitch to Titan Books, the British owner of Hard Case Crime. Like numerous other readers, Collins was curious to know what happened after the events recounted in Hammett’s yarn—not just what became of the ever-elusive falcon statuette, but, as he told CrimeReads recently, how Sam Spade might “extricate himself from the ruins he’s made of his life and business.”

To help him answer those questions in Return of the Maltese Falcon, Collins brings back most of the original novel’s cast—some in secondary roles—while beefing up the involvement of several players to whom Hammett had assigned lesser parts. (Have no doubt: You should definitely have read the 1930 book before tackling Return.)

His action begins in December 1928, shortly after Spade failed to locate the gold, gem-encrusted (but now black enamel-covered) falcon at the center of the earlier story, and handed over his fetching but deceitful client, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, to the San Francisco cops for the murder of his detective partner, Miles Archer. Effie Perrine, Spade’s “lanky, tawny-haired” secretary (at 23, a decade Spade’s junior), has erected a Christmas tree where Archer’s desk once sat, and their office is looking “moderately successful” despite the “bad publicity” of late. Through the door comes Rhea Gutman, the “pale and petite,” 18-year-old blonde “daughter” of corpulent criminal Casper Gutman, who supposedly spent years chasing after the Maltese falcon, a treasure crafted for the King of Spain in the 1500s, only to have it stolen by a Russian general named Kemidov, and replaced with a fake. It seems that, like her late progenitor, Rhea is hungry to get her hands on the black bird, and she’ll split the rich proceeds with Spade if he can bring it to her.

(Left) The Maltese Falcon, Alfred A. Knopf first edition, 1930.

Not surprisingly, the shamus accepts her offer. What he hadn’t expected was to then be approached by three more people wanting him to find the artifact (what he terms the “dingus”) on their behalf: Chicago gambler Dixie Monahan; a British Museum official, Steward Blackwood, who contends his institution holds true title to the falcon; and Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s younger sister, Corrine Wonderly. While raking in retainers from them all, he returns to his hunt for what has become the most famous “MacGuffin” in crime-fiction history. Spade’s investigation will eventually lead him to a violent clash with Casper Gutman’s erstwhile “gunsel,” Wilmer Cook; jail interviews with the aforementioned Miss O’Shaughnessy as well as dandyish Joel Cairo, familiar from the original tale and here claiming to know a private collector who’ll pay handsomely for the statuette; run-ins with police and the local district attorney; the discovery of an unidentified corpse in San Francisco Bay, in whose pocket is found Spade’s business card; a Golden Age-style gathering of suspects he hopes will flush out a killer; and late-in-the-game identity switches that I, for one, didn’t see coming.

When I first learned that Max Allan Collins would be revitalizing Sam Spade in a continuation novel—a sequel to one of American detective fiction’s founding yarns, no less—I felt a moment’s consternation. However, I reminded myself that Collins, who was named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master in 2017, is a crackerjack tale-spinner who has given us two estimable series (a historical one starring Chicago gumshoe Nate Heller, and a second featuring the hit man known only as Quarry), and that he’s already succeeded in extending the life of another notable P.I., Mike Hammer, writing 13 new novels to add to the 13 Mickey Spillane had produced by the time he died in 2006. Furthermore, Collins put another iconic sleuth—Philip Marlowe—through his paces in “The Perfect Crime,” composed for the 1988 collection Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration, edited by Byron Preiss. (He subsequently swapped Marlowe for Heller and added that story to his 2001 “casebook,” Kisses of Death.)

If anyone had the chops and chutzpah necessary to extend Spade’s otherwise brief career, it was definitely Collins.

With its text having now entered the public domain, this seems to be the season to celebrate Dashiell Hammett’s third novel. Publisher Poltroon Press has brought a new, photo-embellished hardcover version of The Maltese Falcon to market that also features a pair of Spade short stories inked by modern San Francisco-area author Mark Coggins. Blackstone has released its own “collectors edition,” complete with black-and-white illustrations and artistically sprayed page edges. Meanwhile, Steeger Books is selling hardback (or paperback) copies of the Falcon as it was serialized in Black Mask, with more than 2,000 textual variations from the final, 1930 book, and including the original pulp-style interior art by Arthur Rodman Bowker. Finally, notebook maker Field Notes has packaged that same magazine edit in imitation of the World War II-era Armed Service Editions.

Return of the Maltese Falcon is altogether something bigger, though. In this, his 53rd year as a published author (Bait Money, his debut novel, came out in 1973), Collins has given us not only an homage to Hammett’s most memorable composition; he’s drawn a direct line between himself and that august scribbler of yore, emphasizing the fact that he wouldn’t have the award-winning career he does without Hammett and other ink-slinging pioneers having laid the foundations of the popular field in which he toils. There will be Hammett purists who object vociferously to Max Allan Collins, or anybody else, employing Sam Spade in fresh adventures. Yet when the results are as delightful, dramatic, and downright satisfying as Return of the Maltese Falcon, it’s hard to argue that the effort should never have been made.

Below are a few questions I addressed to Collins about the devising of his latest novel. I had intended to post this interview earlier in January, but was delayed by computer problems.

(Above) The Adventures of Sam Spade comic strip from June 6, 1948. You can enjoy more examples of this strip, with their Wildroot Cream-Oil promotions, by clicking here.

J. Kingston Pierce: When, and under what circumstances, did you first discover Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade?
      
Max Allan Collins: I knew vaguely about him, as a kid, seeing Wildroot Cream-Oil ads in comic books and Sunday sections, tying in with the Sam Spade radio show. These were in comic-strip form and drawn, I believe, by the great Lou Fine.

The TV craze of private-eye shows, which followed the similar fad of TV westerns, led me to Dashiell Hammett’s novels when they were reprinted in 1961 with Harry Bennett covers. I thought then, and now, that The Maltese Falcon was the best private-eye novel ever.

JKP: And when in your career did you start thinking about writing a sequel to The Maltese Falcon? Did your ideas of what might happen in that book change significantly over time, or have the parameters of your latest novel been in place in your mind for a long while?
      
MAC: The Maltese Falcon’s 1929 publication date sparked the idea for my historical Nathan Heller novels—1929 was the year of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which meant Al Capone and Sam Spade were contemporaries—meaning the private eye now existed in a historical framework. My Nate Heller could bump up against all sorts of real people and real crimes.

Probably around 20 years ago, I looked into when the novel would come into the public domain. The copyright I was looking at was 1930, when the 1929 Black Mask serial was collected in book form by Knopf. I was just keeping an eye on Sam Spade with no exact thought of doing a direct sequel—just another Spade story.

But when it came time to actually pitch the notion to a publisher (Titan/Hard Case Crime), the idea of picking up the story where it left off in Hammett seemed a natural.

(Right) The Maltese Falcon debuted in Black Mask in September 1929.

My wife, Barb, with whom I write the Antiques/Trash ’n’ Treasures mystery series [under the joint pseudonym Barbara Allan], told me to brace myself for attacks.

JKP: Indeed, some people might scold you for your gall in capitalizing on this famous detective tale. Others would ask why we need a Falcon sequel at all. How do you respond to such critics?
      
MAC: I didn’t write it for the critics, particularly the naysayers who haven’t read, or have no intention of ever reading, my book. The novel is born out of my love for Hammett and the P.I. form (which he birthed). As a fan of The Maltese Falcon, I had been frustrated by its inconclusiveness. In certain respects, that unsolved ending seems perfect, the overriding irony. But some readers, myself included, couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened next.

JKP: What do you think you bring to Spade's story that another author might not be able or willing to bring?
      
MAC: I felt up to the job. I knew I could accomplish, or come close to, Hammett’s limited omniscience—his stingy third-person, in which we are never told what the detective is thinking. In a very real way, Sam Spade—not the killings—is the mystery at the heart of The Maltese Falcon.

Spade reveals himself in the original novel in the last few chapters—his strict adherence to his own code of ethics, a personal morality in an amoral world. My novel explores where that leaves him at the end of Hammett’s masterpiece, and how certain things might resolve.

JKP: How did you go about preparing yourself to write a tale in the fashion of Hammett? What characteristics of his writing or storytelling style did you adopt? What, if any, compromises did you make?
      
MAC: The most important thing was to maintain Spade’s lack of inner monologue. The approach in The Maltese Falcon is often described as objective when it’s really quite subjective—Hammett tells us all sorts of things that Spade doesn’t. Consider this line about Brigid: “Her eyes were cobalt-blue prayers.”

I tried to honor the approach of Hammett and the character of Spade without completely abandoning my own style. That my novel was written so many decades later required me to consider it as at least somewhat a period piece. I allowed myself to describe clothing in a way Hammett might not have, for example, although he does do quite a bit of that himself.

But I researched San Francisco in the late ’20s and took Spade to locations that Hammett didn’t. My descriptions of buildings and neighborhoods and such are a slight departure from Hammett and might be considered a compromise. I consider it a necessity.

JKP: Before composing Return, did you re-read the original novel as well as the three Spade short stories he left behind? Did you draw on any academic or critical sources in preparation?
      
MAC: I read The Falcon again three times, twice taking notes, as the novel was of course the primary research source. I consulted no academic studies of Hammett, nor did I revisit other biographies, all of which I believe I’ve read. In addition, I listened to an audio-books version of the original serial in Otto Penzler’s The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories.

I did not re-visit either John Huston’s classic film or Roy Del Ruth’s earlier one, although I have of course seen both, the Huston film numerous times. I wanted to keep Bogart and the other famous players out and use only Hammett’s vision as he reported it.

I read Spade & Archer, by Joe Gores, on its publication in 2009 but did not revisit it. I stayed away from the AMC-TV series, Monsieur Spade. I wanted my sequel to be as pure as possible. I did re-read the three short stories, but used nothing from them. They are rather perfunctory for Hammett.

JKP: There are a number of familiar players revitalized for your story, some of whom—such as Iva Archer, the faithless wife of Spade’s late business partner—win more time in your sequel than they did in Hammett’s original yarn. But which characters did you bring to life that Hammett only mentioned? And of those enriched figures, which one or ones did you most enjoying developing?
      
MAC: I have two favorites, but discussing them would reveal a plot point I don’t wish to expose. Almost every character in Return of the Maltese Falcon appears or is mentioned in Hammett’s novel—Dixie Monahan, for example, and even the late Floyd Thursby, who is explored in some depth. A few have more stage time than Hammett gave them. Really, only Casper Gutman is absent, and that’s because he was killed—typically, off-stage—in The Maltese Falcon.

JKP: Spade actually gets to have sex in this novel! Of course, it's written in a much different era than that in which Hammett was working. Do you think Hammett would approve of your giving readers such an explicit window into his affairs?
      
MAC: Well, Spade had sex in The Maltese Falcon, too. He beds Brigid O’Shaughnessy, cold-bloodedly leaves her sleeping while he goes off to search her place, and later makes her strip. (None of that happens in Huston’s movie, but the earlier 1931 version comes close). I didn’t go anywhere, in that sense, that Hammett didn’t.

JKP: Ach! It’s been long enough since I read The Maltese Falcon, that Huston’s post-Motion Picture Production Code version—sans Spade’s amorous exploits—has supplanted my memory of the original plot, to some extent. But let’s move on.

In both Hammett's original and your new Return, Spade's “boyishly pretty” secretary, Effie Perine, never becomes a subject of her boss' sexual interest, although she seems quite open to the possibility. Did you consider changing their relationship, or is there something essential in their association that you did not want to upset?
      
MAC: I kept it the same, which is ambiguous. Effie licks the paper for one of Spade’s hand-rolled cigarettes while Spade, seated, leans his “weary” head against her hip, calling her “Honey.” To me, the implication in Hammett is that they had either slept together once—giving in to natural urges—or had come close, and decided it was a bad idea for their work relationship. They remain in an uneasy sexual truce.

(Right) Author Dashiell Hammett.

JKP: I must ask about the story you have Spade tell the comely Rhea Gutman on pages 96 and 97 of your new novel, which involves his once having worked for the Continental Detective Agency (presumably in San Francisco) and how he was assigned to find “a young man named Collinson.” First off, that story reminds me very much of Spade’s Flitcraft parable in The Maltese Falcon. Second, “Peter Collinson” was a pseudonym Hammett used early on in his writing career. Third, this memory links Spade firmly to Hammett’s Continental Op, who also worked for Continental. And finally, some of the facets of the story Spade recalls make it clear that Collinson is based on Hammett himself. Brilliant! How much fun did you have in cooking up that digression for Return?

MAC: That was a good deal of fun, but a challenge. Hammett did seemingly discursive but actually pertinent parables, like the Flitcraft one in The Maltese Falcon and the dream referred to in the title of The Glass Key, in all five of his novels. Red Harvest has one, too, and you could argue that the background about the cult in The Dain Curse may serve the same purpose. It was a distinctive element in his style and approach, telling you what the book is about but even reveals something pertinent while seeming to be off on a tangent—for example, the Flitcraft parable can be read as an oblique warning to Brigid that Spade is onto her. I wanted to come up with something of that nature that wasn’t fashioned out of whole cloth. I combined an event from Hammett’s detective days and how his writing life evolved into an apparent block. That “Collins” was in “Collinson” was of course an element. But there had to be a Flitcraft equivalent in my novel. I required it of myself. And obviously Sam Spade had to be a former Continental op.

JKP: When Hammett wrote his novel, it was a "modern" work. Return is very much a historical tale. What efforts did you make to establish and build on the period flavor of Return? How much research did you do into San Francisco of 1928?
      
MAC: The major sources, beyond the original novel, were Don Herron’s wonderful The Dashiell Hammett Tour with its compact, excellent biography of Hammett as well as the locations cited and shown; the WPA guides to San Francisco and California, original editions; and the North Point Press presentation of The Maltese Falcon, which includes vintage photos of locations and is heavily footnoted. A friend also provided a historical photo book on San Francisco.

JKP: Do you appreciate The Maltese Falcon now more than ever, after having dissected it and worked intimately with its plot and players?
      
MAC: My deep appreciation for The Maltese Falcon began 60 years before the writing of this sequel. I should perhaps mention that one of my methods for learning how to write fiction was reading favorite novels as a writer and not a reader, analyzing them as to style and technique. What interested me, in reading Hammett’s introduction to the [1934] Modern Library edition, is his admission … or, anyway, claim … that he wrote the book without any plot outline or even vague idea of where he was headed.

That’s astonishing. But he’s a fiction writer and could be lying. Either that, or he had a hell of a subconscious pulling the strings.
      
JKP: Hammett wrote only one novel and a trio of short stories about Sam Spade. Had he not been enticed away to Hollywood and all but given up on composing fiction, do you believe he would have penned more Spade yarns? Was the protagonist interesting enough to him, or had he exhausted his use for that man called Spade?
      
MAC: That’s a hard call. The lack of enthusiasm that some see in the three Spade short stories might indicate Hammett’s disinterest in the character. But really, his disinterest came from other places—his drinking, the Hollywood and radio success making it unnecessary to write, the possibility he was secretly collaborating with Lillian Hellman.  The Hellman connection at least indicates the shift in his interest to more high-flown goals than writing mystery fiction.

If he had stayed in mystery-writing mode, I think he likely would have written more Spade novels. He wrote two Continental Op novels, didn’t he? And two more Thin Man screen stories—After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man.

JKP: Finally, who’s the woman artist Irvin Rodriguez portrays on his cover for Return of the Maltese Falcon? Or who do you think it is?
      
MAC: Absolutely no idea. I do think it’s a lovely cover, and hope it attracts readers.

Bullet Points: No Shutdown Here Edition

• I mentioned last spring on this page that Raymond Benson, the author of several James Bond continuation novels published between 1997 and 2003, had penned a thrilling adventure for Ian Fleming Publications (IFP) titled The Hook and the Eye, set back in 1952 and centered on ex-CIA op Felix Leiter. A Bond cohort familiar from several of Fleming’s novels, Leiter has become, in Benson’s yarn, a Pinkerton detective tangling with spies in Manhattan and tasked with safely transporting an “impossibly beautiful and impossibly secretive” woman to Texas. Hook was originally intended for release in 10 digital installments, beginning in May, and was then supposed to debut in print in October—this month. So far, however, it seems to be available in book form only for direct purchase from IFP. I don’t see the same edition listed on Amazon in either the United States or the UK, though that online retailer is still satisfying orders for the Kindle version. I asked Benson for an update on this situation. Here’s his reply:

IFP became their own publisher recently and they wanted Hook to be exclusive from them (for the time being). So, yes, right now, while the e-book is on Amazon and other retailer outlets, the print book can only be ordered from IFP. They will likely expand this rollout in the future like the old roadshow movie attractions, slowly offering it on Amazon and such, an audiobook, maybe a U.S. publication, maybe a limited-edition hardcover. It’s all new to them and they’re trying things out, like the e-book serialization that ultimately didn’t work technically (so they released the full e-book at once).

As to the possibility of The Hook and the Eye becoming the initial entry in a whole new Leiter series, Benson answers only, “Not known yet.” That isn’t a “no,” so keep your fingers crossed.

(Above) The full paperback cover of Raymond Benson’s The Hook and the Eye, designed by Thomas Gilbert.

• By the way, Terrance Layhew recently spoke with Benson about The Hook and the Eye for his podcast, Suit Up!

• I missed this news, so thanks to In Reference to Murder for bringing it to my attention. Writes B.V. Lawson: “The winners of the 2025 Lambda Literary Awards (fondly known as the Lammys), established in 1989 to garner national visibility for LGBTQ books, were announced this past weekend. The winner of the Best LBGTQ+ Mystery was Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco (MCD). The other finalists include: Charlotte Illes is Not a Teacher by Katie Siegel (Kensington); One of Us Knows by Alyssa Cole (William Morrow); Rough Pages by Lev AC Rosen (Tor Publishing Group); and The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani, translated by Sam Bett (Soho Crime).”

• Chicago Review of Books last week announced its shortlist of contenders for the 2025 Chicago Review of Books Awards (what other name did you think they would have?), and among the five fiction rivals is one that might be especially interesting to this blog’s readers: Vanishing Daughters (Thomas & Mercer), by Cynthia Pelayo, a novel of psychological suspense focusing on a Chicago journalist haunted—in more ways than one—by mysteries surrounding her mother’s death and her own hunt for a fiendishly successful serial killer.

• On October 1, Crime Writers of Canada opened the submissions process for its 2026 CWC Awards of Excellence, “celebrating the best in Canadian crime, mystery, and suspense writing.” Eligible for consideration are works published in 2025 by Canadian citizens and permanent residents. There are 10 award categories:

— The Peter Robinson Award for Best Crime Novel ($1,000 prize)
— Best Crime First Novel ($1,000)
— Best Crime Novel Set in Canada ($500)
— The Whodunit Award for Best Traditional Mystery ($500)
— Best Crime Short Story ($200)
— The Best French Language Crime Book ($500)
— Best Juvenile/YA Crime Book ($250)
— The Brass Knuckles Award for Best Non-fiction Crime Book ($300)
— Best Unpublished Crime Novel Manuscript written by an
unpublished author ($500)

Submission deadlines are here. Shortlisted nominees will be publicized next April 24, with the winners to be announced on May 29.

• Meanwhile, writers hoping to contribute articles or reviews to the Winter 2025 edition of Mystery Readers Journal will want to get cracking: the deadline is November 1. This will be the second issue in a row devoted to Northern California mysteries, tying them both in nicely to next year’s Left Coast Crime convention, which is set to take place in San Francisco from February 26 to March 1, 2026.

• Max Allan Collins has been noodling for years with a novel that would embroil his famous series private eye, Nathan Heller, in a 1960s-era investigation involving both labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He’s even suggested that such a book might be the last one he writes about Heller. Now, though, Collins says he “might not write it at all,” or might instead pen two more Hellers. He explains the situation in his blog:

I was watching TV and saw Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and
wondered if he had, if not damaged, the Kennedy name, brought it into a kind of doubt. He strikes me as a crank, and a dangerous one; some smart people disagree, but enough people share that view—that as Secretary of Health and Human Services he is a threat to health and human services—that the Robert F. Kennedy name is not something I dare, at the moment, hang a Heller on. It may already have hurt Too Many Bullets [2023], my Heller RFK assassination novel.

I don’t do this lightly. I first asked [my wife] Barb if she agreed that this was a bad time to embark on an RFK novel (the theme was to be RFK/Hoffa, as my previous Kennedy-oriented novels have more than hinted at). She immediately agreed and said, “Write something else.” I called my editor, Charles Ardai, at Hard Case Crime and asked if he thought I should do a different, non-Kennedy novel instead of the one we’d been planning (and that I was contracted to deliver). He was thrilled I was setting that subject aside (for now anyway). I asked my longtime researcher, George Hagenaur, what he thought. He, too, said it was a bad time to do a Kennedy book.

So. I am instead going to write [an early 1970s] Watergate novel, which was already one of two Heller novels I was considering doing, for quite a while now. It seems like a good time to deal with a cover-up.

Indeed, revisiting the paranoia and drive for power that led to the 1972 burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C.’s Watergate complex and Republican President Richard M. Nixon’s subsequent concealment of that crime, would draw obvious parallels to Donald Trump’s paranoia, corruption, and autocratic scheming. Personally, I prefer to see Collins’ Heller tackling older cases (the 1934 murder of bank robber John Dillinger, the 1937 disappearance of aviatrix Amelia Earhart, Los Angeles’ 1947 Black Dahlia murder, etc.), and Too Many Bullets did imply that an RFK/Hoffa story was next. Yet any new Heller novel is better than none.

• With The Last Death of the Year, her sixth Hercule Poirot novel, coming out on both sides of the Atlantic later this month, British author-poet Sophie Hannah talks to CrimeReads “about how she writes the Poirot novels, the taunting challenge at the beginning of this new novel, and what crime fiction and poetry have in common.”

• And the Web site Spybrary mentions that John le Carré’s fourth son, who pens fiction as “Nick Harkaway,” is encouraging other writers to “continue the adventures of his father’s famed spymaster George Smiley, opening the way for a potential new wave of espionage novels. Harkaway, who has already published one continuation novel, Karla’s Choice, and has another due next year, said the morally ambiguous world created by le Carré was ‘richer and wider than the original books ever had a chance to show.’ He urged writers to enter the Smiley universe ‘with due deference and due fearlessness.’”

• We’ve known for some while that a spin-off from Reacher, the Amazon Prime TV series based on Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, was in the works and that its protagonist would be Frances Neagley (played by Maria Sten), once a member of Reacher’s army special-investigations unit and now a partner with a Chicago private security firm. But not until the author was interviewed by Shots had we heard a recent update on that program’s development. Child revealed that Season 4 of Reacher, based on his 2009 novel, Gone Tomorrow, “is almost done … and the Neagley spin-off is almost through post-production.” As to Neagley’s Season 1 plot, Wikipedia says it will find the character “seek[ing] the truth after an old friend dies in a suspicious accident.”

• Since we’re talking TV, note that Season 2 of Karen Pirie, the ITV show based on Val McDermid’s now eight books about a young Scottish police investigator, will have its U.S. premiere on BritBox come Thursday, October 2. This new season will comprise three 90-minute episodes and is adapted from the second of McDermid’s Pirie tales, A Darker Domain. Mystery Fanfare provides a trailer.

• Lauren Lyle, who plays Karen Pirie, also headlines The Ridge, a six-part drama coming to BBC Scotland and Sky Open on Tuesday, October 21. The Killing Times explains that The Ridge “sees Lyle in the lead role of Mia, who is fleeing addiction and leaving behind a professional life in tatters in Scotland. She accepts a wedding invitation from her estranged sister in New Zealand—only to find the would-be-bride dead upon arrival. Caught up in grief and pulled by a dark attraction to her late-sister’s fiancé Ewan, played by New Zealand star Jay Ryan, Mia soon finds that familiarity among a small community breeds secrets and tensions, endangering the brittle fabric of the town itself.”

• Man From U.N.C.L.E. fans, pay attention! Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has scheduled eight telefilms, all edited from that 1964-1968 TV series but frequently boasting extra footage, to show back to back on Monday, October 13. Click here to learn more.

• One hundred fifty years after Edgar Allan Poe was reburied in Baltimore, Ed Simon considers his legacy, his interest in premature burials, and his Americanism in this splendid essay for Literary Hub.

• Included among Columbia University linguist John McWhorter’s choices of “10 Old Television Series Every Kid Needs to Watch”—prepared partly with his “tween daughters” in mind—is CBS’s Mannix (1967-1975). “Weird choice, I know,” he remarks in The New York Times. “But my girls should know the conventions of the once ubiquitous hourlong private-eye genre, including the way it reduced female characters to just dolls. I found that weird even when I was a kid, and I want my girls to see what we have gotten at least partly beyond. Plus, the look and sound of Mannix were a delight. The fashions, sets and even jazzy three-quarter waltz time theme song are groovy. Especially after the first season, when [Joe] Mannix has left a detective agency and goes it alone, the episodes are pleasingly interchangeable; choose the one with your favorite guest star.”

• “Why Do Priests and Vicars Make Perfect Detectives?” asks a headline in the TV-oriented blog The Killing Times. Editor Paul Hirons submits that it’s because mystery-solving clergy—whether G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, Sidney Chambers in Grantchester, or Daniel Clement in Murder Before Evensong—“offer not just the satisfaction of seeing a puzzle solved, but a meditation on what it means to be good, or to fall short. The crimes may change, but the questions of conscience, guilt and grace remain timeless.”

• We have a cover already for Hurricane Room, Kim Sherwood’s third and final Double O novel. Its tagline is certainly suggestive: “James Bond Is Alive.” Hurricane Room is being readied for release in the States and UK next May.

• Whenever I order something online from Blackwell’s Books in England (as I do rather frequently), I am impressed by an incidental legal notation at the bottom of its Web pages that reads, “©1879-2025 Blackwell’s.” In an era when bookshops struggle to stay afloat, you have to love an operation that’s been around for 146 years!

• Finally, let us wish a tardy but justly appreciative farewell to Ann Granger, the Portsmouth, England-born author of more than three dozen books in four different mystery series (her first being 1991’s Say It With Poison). She was 86 years old at the time of her death on September 7. An obituary in The Daily Telegraph observes that “Ann Granger’s mysteries were popular with British readers, but she secured her largest readership abroad, feeding the voracious global appetite for the gentle English style of violent crime. Translated into 10 languages, her novels were especially popular in Germany—where she sold millions of copies, with some 30 of her books entering the top-five bestseller list—and the United States. “The village mystery plot should be ingenious, the style witty, the setting picturesque and the characters amusingly idiosyncratic,” the New York Times Book Review declared in 1995. “Ann Granger knows the drill so well she could write a manual.” According to the Web site Fantastic Fiction, she has one further entry—currently untitled—in her series starring Victorian police inspector Ben Ross that’s still in the publishing pipeline.

News of a More Salutary Sort

• The Australian Crime Writers Association has announced its shortlist of half a dozen nominees for the 2025 Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut Crime Fiction:

— Down the Rabbit Hole, by Shaeden Berry (Bonnier Echo)
— A Town Called Treachery, by Mitch Jennings (HarperCollins)
— The Chilling, by Riley James (Allen & Unwin)
— All You Took From Me, by Lisa Kenway (Transit Lounge)
— Everywhere We Look, by Martine Kropkowski (Ultimo Press)
— Those Opulent Days, by Jacquie Pham (Atlantic Monthly Press)

A press release explains that these diverse stories cover “the claustrophobia of an Antarctic winter, the crippling effects of anaesthesia and memory, a deeply funny and tender portrayal of rural life, a sharp commentary on the social impact after a teen goes missing, the nuances of friendships after partner violence, and the opulence and staggering poverty of colonial-era Vietnam.”

Other Ned Kelly categories still to have their contenders declared this year: Best True Crime, Best International, and Best Crime Fiction. All of the winners are to be revealed in September.

• We heard last November that the family of author Bill Crider (who died in 2018) was planning to release new editions of his 25 police procedurals starring Dan Rhodes, “the thoughtful, hard-working sheriff of [fictional] Blacklin County, Texas.” Now the first entry in that series, Too Late to Die—which won the Anthony Award for Best First Novel in 1987—has been made available again, in both mobile formats and an audio version, with fresh cover art. In a video available here, Tom Neary, Crider’s son-in-law, explains the thinking behind this repackaging. Additional “refreshed” installments are expected every four to six weeks. There’s no word on new print editions of these yarns, but those of us who eschew electronic versions can only hope they’ll become available in that classic format soon. (Hat tip to Lesa Holstine.)

• Max Allan Collins reports that Death by Fruitcake, an indie film that brings to life the main characters in the Trash ’n’ Treasures mystery series he writes with his wife, Barbara, has “won Best Feature Film at the Star City Film Festival at Waukon, Iowa.” That picture has not yet been generally released, but Collins says to expect more publicity and an official opening in time for the late 2025 holidays.

• Mystery Fanfare reminds us that the new two-hour Netflix movie, The Thursday Murder Club, based on Richard Osman’s popular 2020 novel of that same name about elderly amateur detectives at an English retirement home, is to debut on Thursday, August 28. Starring in the picture are Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Celia Imrie, Ben Kingsley, and Daniel Mays.

• And the 1991 NBC-TV film White Hot: The Mysterious Murder of Thelma Todd has suddenly shown up on YouTube. That 90-minute feature cast WKRP in Cincinnati’s Loni Anderson (who just recently passed at age 79) as Todd, an American comedic actress and restaurateur whose 1935 murder in Los Angeles spawned countless headlines. White Hot attracted its own attention, some of it negative, but I remember enjoying its re-creation of the circumstances behind Todd’s death, and look forward to watching it again.

Tip-offs and Trifles

• French-Canadian director and screenwriter Denis Villeneuve (Blade Runner 2049, Dune and Dune: Part Two) has been tapped to helm the next, 26th James Bond film. “Some of my earliest movie-going memories are connected to 007,” he is quoted as saying. “I grew up watching James Bond films with my father, ever since Dr. No with Sean Connery. I’m a die-hard Bond fan. To me, he’s sacred territory. I intend to honor the tradition and open the path for many new missions to come. This is a massive responsibility, but also, incredibly exciting for me and a huge honor.” As The Spy Command observes, this will be “the first Bond movie since Amazon gained creative control of the franchise earlier this year.” There’s no word yet on a title for this picture or when it might be released to theaters.

• In Reference to Murder reports that

Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) will lead Apple’s legal drama Presumed Innocent for Season 2. The series hails from multi-Emmy Award winners David E. Kelley and J.J. Abrams, and executive producers Jake Gyllenhaal, Rachel Rusch Rich, Erica Lipez, and Matthew Tinker. Led by Gyllenhaal, Season 1 was inspired by Scott Turow’s courtroom thriller of the same name and tells the story of a horrific murder that upends the Chicago Prosecuting Attorney's office when one of its own is suspected of the crime. The book was published in 1987 and was turned into a 1990 feature starring Harrison Ford as Rusty Sabich, the same role Gyllenhaal took on. As reimagined by Kelley, Presumed Innocent will explore obsession, sex, politics, and the power and limits of love, as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.

• A hat tip to that same blog for sharing the news that Matthew McConaughey “is in talks to star in Skydance’s feature film based on the iconic private eye, Mike Hammer, from a script by Nic Pizzolatto, who collaborated with the actor in True Detective.” Deadline adds, “Skydance acquired the rights to Mickey Spillane’s and Max Allan Collins’ Mike Hammer franchise with plans to develop and produce the bestselling book series into a feature film. … Collins [who continued the Hammer series after Spillane’s death in 2006], will executive produce with Jane Spillane [Mickey’s widow] serving as co-producer.”

• R.I.P., Terry Louise Fisher, the co-creator of L.A. Law.

• Since May, when I mentioned on this page that host Barry W. Enderwick showcased the Officer Bill Gannon Sandwich (of Dragnet fame) on his YouTube series, Sandwiches of History, I have been checking up on Enderwick’s channel, well, pretty much every day. His latest episode takes us back to Dragnet, this time to sample the Officer Bill Gannon Garlic Nut Butter Sandwich.

• The New York Times asks, “What’s a ‘book boyfriend’?”

• Finally, Lee Child will headline England’s inaugural Whitby Literary Festival, to be held in that North Yorkshire seaside town from November 6 through 9. During a public interview with TV personality and author Rob Rinder, Child plans to talk about Exit Strategy, the 30th Jack Reacher novel (penned with his brother, Andrew Child), set for publication on both sides of the Atlantic come November 4. Also up for discussion will be Child’s “first-ever autobiographical collection,” Reacher: The Stories Behind the Stories, due out on September 9.

“Everybody Has Something to Conceal”

Seven months after news broke that author Max Allan Collins was composing a sequel to The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett’s genre-defining 1930 private-eye novel, the cover art for Collins’ Return of the Maltese Falcon has been released by Hard Case Crime.

This book is scheduled for publication in January 2026.

A plot synopsis says that Return “brings closure to this crime classic, reuniting all the surviving members of the original cast alongside femme fatales, crooked collectors, and greedy gangsters for one more thrilling, deadly chase through the streets, wharves, morgues, bars, and back alleys of 1920s San Francisco—and finally answers the question, Whatever became of the Maltese falcon …?”

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.

You can now purchase True Noir here.

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.