For some reason I didn’t pick up a copy of the first issue of Needle. I rectified that when I ordered a copy of the second. I won’t make the mistake of ignoring one of these again.

I’ll admit; I was jaded. Every time I fall in love with a crime fiction outlet, it seems to go away. The list of tombstones in the graveyard is long: Plots With Guns (1.0), Demolition, ThugLit, Murdaland, etc. So, I foolishly thought, why get hooked on something that is going to go away?

Thing is, there is something about Needle that makes it feel like it will have legs. For starters, it is slick and very well made. Second, it has a good mix, in both issues, of known names and lesser-known writers. The work from the first will hook you, that from the second will surprise you. Third, it has a better business model: going through a print-on-demand outfit like Lulu, there is much less up-front cost. Editor Steve Weddle and Co. aren’t going to be stuck with boxes of these in the closet that represent a serious chunk of cash.

The two issues arrived in the mail yesterday, and I’m already two stories deep into the new issue. It’s darn near perfect: a dozen stories, 165 pages, all fiction. Weddle writes in the introduction about the decision to offer nothing but fiction: “From the outset we said no poems. No reviews. No crap. Just stories.” I’m not as strident as those who seem to have put him on that path; I’ll always welcome another outlet for smart, well-written reviews (particularly an outlet with the guts to run actual criticism rather than laudatory plot summaries) and well-researched non-fiction. But I can see his point. It’s hard to muck things up if you stick to one thing and do it very well. So far, Needle is doing short crime fiction very well.

Is 2010 the tipping point for ebooks? If a look at recent movements in crime fiction are any indication, that appears likely.

Let me qualify “tipping point.” It’s not as if crime fiction fans will sweep all of their musty paperbacks and cherished first-edition hardbacks off of the shelves and replace them with a well-stocked Kindle. It does mean, however, that the e-reader of choice will become a viable option (and at times, the only option) for reading their favorite work.

I haven’t bought a Kindle, nor do I expect to any time soon. I love books — the tactile experience of reading — and see ebooks as a vastly inferior alternative. But, I’m also a Lawrence Block completist, so when I learned that he has assembled a Kindle-only collection of the introductions he has written for various books over the years, I sought out a way to read it. I found the solution in Amazon’s Kindle app, which allows me to download books and read them on my computer and smartphone. That’s not ideal, but it works in the limited instances where it is required. I also picked up the reprint (is there a better term for the electronic version of this?) of Block’s early novel, Campus Tramp. That will be out on paper eventually, but I wasn’t willing to wait.

Then came word in recent weeks that favorites Marcus Sakey and Allan Guthrie were issuing ebook-only books. For Sakey’s, it was the short story collection, Scar Tissue: Seven Stories of Love and Wounds. Guthrie’s is the novella, Bye Bye Baby. Each had their own reason for going the ebook route.

“Ebooks are a perfect choice for this kind of project,” Sakey told me. “Traditional publishers aren’t terribly interested in short story anthologies, which means that shorts tend to vanish pretty quickly.  Obviously I wouldn’t complain if Scar Tissue sold a million copies, but the real reason I put it out there was because I wanted the stories to have more life.  I’m fond of these seven, and it makes me happy to know people are able to read them.”

In Guthrie’s case, it was a matter of timing. “The print version is scheduled to be published in 2013 by Barrington Stoke,” he told me. “The audio rights have also sold. I just didn’t want to wait until 2013 to get the book out, hence the decision to make it available myself as an ebook.”

Both are well worth picking up (particularly at the bargain price of $2.99), and offer a nice appetizer before the next full-scale hardback novels for each. In Sakey’s case, Scar Tissue collects seven of the dozens of stories that the author is happy with. “It’s mostly a feeling that they’ve come alive,” he told me. “There’s a sort of squirmy vitality to a short that’s working.” Bye Bye Baby, meanwhile, shows for the first time what Guthrie can do with a police procedural, putting him on the other side of the law for just the second time in his career (the first being last year’s visceral rush, Slammer).

It has been strange reading these works on the computer screen (and even stranger doing so a few words at a time on the phone), but what I’ve come to realize is that it is the words themselves, not the format in which they are presented, that is most important. Would I rather have these in printed form? Of course. Am I willing to print out and schlep around PDFs to make that happen (which is an option with both)? Nope. So, I do what I must, because I want to read these stories.

For Block, ebooks offer a way for the author to bring back to life the dozens of books he cranked out early in his career, often under pen names, and keep in print his later books that seem to go in and out of print every few years. Campus Tramp was the first such reveal, with others sure to follow. “I’ve been hugely impressed with the medium for 15 years now,” Block writes of ebooks on his web site, “but could never tell whether it would ever amount to much. Well, it’s amounting to more every day, and it’s starting to look like the future of publishing. (If publishing has a future…)”

Oddly enough, the latest news about a Block book serves as a repudiation of sorts of ebooks. Dorchester Publishing, which prints and distributes Charles Ardai’s Hard Case Crime imprint, announced last week that it would stop publishing mass market paperbacks in favor of ebooks and the occasional trade paperback title. Ardai made it clear that HCC and Dorchester would part ways, because he (rightly) doesn’t see his books as ebooks.

So, the first news he has about the line was a surprise: Subterranean Press will bring out a hardback under the HCC imprint featuring 69 Barrow Street and Strange Embrace, two more early Block titles. Is that a last gasp for print or the sign of things to come? Stay tuned.

To download “The Days When You Were Anything Else,” one of the stories in Sakey’s Scar Tissue collection for free, visit www.smashwords.com/books/view/19303, add it to your cart, and enter coupon code YB98Q.

So, a year ago, I decided to start keeping track of every full album I listened to. I did this in part as justification for my still-insatiable desire to acquire new music decades after my first purchase, and in part to simply help me to see if my actual listening was as broad as my self-image indicates.

The results were interesting. Over the course of an entire year, I listened to 732 full albums. That equates to 61 a month, or almost exactly two per day. That last figure is a bit misleading, as I would often go a day or two without listening to anything all the way through, while other days spent chained to the computer at work would find me spinning five or six.

I set ground rules: These needed to be albums, not EPs or singles. I needed to listen to them in whole. And once something was heard, it couldn’t be listed again, no matter how many repeat plays. So, while I listened to well over 8,000 songs in this exercise, the total is likely double that or more, as hours and hours spent with the iPod on shuffle, repeat listens of favorite discs and partial spins all were omitted from the total.

The most interesting thing I found is that I changed my listening habits because of this exercise. I’m often chided for not listening to things all the way through, often surprised when listening to old discs while distracted by other things to find an uncredited bonus track at the end or some other unknown treasure toward the end of the tracklist. Because I couldn’t record the album on the list unless I heard the whole thing, I forced myself to hear every last note.

I also listened to a lot more new music than I might have otherwise. There were few albums in the past year that earned a rave review anywhere (and that sounded like they would remotely fall in my musical wheelhouse) that I didn’t track down some way and hear. That expanded my palette, as I found myself embracing much more electronic music than ever before, but also led me to confirm the long-held belief that while an awful lot of of well-reviewed music might offer immediate visceral pleasure, they are lacking in the long run and rarely demand a repeat spin.

I set a goal at the beginning of this calendar year to listen to more classical music, hoping to move from completely ignorant to marginally knowledgeable of the genre’s best works. I did better given that concerted effort than I have in the past, but with only 18 classical collections having been played (though, in my defense, some were multi-disc sets), I have a long way to go.

A look at what I listened to the most meshes pretty well with a list of my favorite artists. Push comes to shove, a list of what I would have expected to listen to the most created at the beginning of this exercise would look a lot like the actual result… with a couple of exceptions. First the list:

That’s the top 10. I keep a blog about Robert Pollard’s music, and that coupled with the fact that he puts out 5 or 6 albums a year means he’ll probably always top this list. I’m a huge fan of Crowded House, R.E.M., Teenage Fanclub and Big Star, so those make sense. I got on a serious Steve Wynn kick last year that continues unabated. The Beatles boxed set accounts for their presence here, while reading the 33 1/3 series book on the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime helps explain their spot. Devo and Richard Thompson were both driven by live shows. However, I hadn’t listened to Devo in years before pulling them out in July, so their strong showing is pretty remarkable. I’m always listening to Thompson, so that’s no surprise.

My year came to a close on July 31. When Aug. 1 rolled around, I listened to a CD and then headed to the computer to record it. A funny thing happened, however; I decided to let it go. I have been listening to things at pretty much the same pace I did before, but in just a few days, I find I’m already more willing to listen to a handful of songs and then swap something out if it’s not working for me. If I can maintain the adventurousness and patience afforded by the exercise while injecting some much-needed flexibility, my listening experience is sure to improve.

I read enough mystery and crime fiction series to last me a lifetime. Literally; the pace some of my favorite authors crank out books, coupled with the back catalogs of those I came to late, I could read nothing but for the rest of my life. So, it is with caution that I take on a new author. Getting hooked on a first book will force me to shoehorn a new series of books into a schedule that already lacks wiggle room.

It’s a good problem to have, however. Who isn’t always in the market for a good thriller? So, when this pitch hit my digital doorstop, I was intrigued enough to add to my list. Here’s the premise: An anonymous letter arrives in the mail, telling the recipient to “think of any number.” He does, thinking of 658. The letter continues: “Now see how well I know your secrets. Open the little envelope.” He does, and finds a number scrawled within: 658, along with a little poem: “What you took you will give, when you get what you gave. I know what you think, when you blink, where you’ve been, where you’ll be. You and I have a date, Mr. 658.” (For a sample of how puzzling this seems, try this little game from the publisher.)

The recipient wants to know how the sender could possibly have known, and what more he may know. So did I. It’s a pretty amazing hook, and one that drove me through a story with many twists and turns, chills and thrills.

The author is a newcomer. John Verdon is a retired advertising executive from New York who moved upstate  when he left the job. The idea of writing a novel turned into Think of a Number, which promises to be the first of many books about retired NYPD detective Dave Gurney. Like Verdon, Gurney has retired and moved upstate. He is drawn into the case when he gets a call from an old college classmate, Mark Mellery, the recipient of the letter.

It isn’t long before murder and mayhem become part of the mix, and Gurney realizes he is facing a very formidable opponent. The book is not without its faults. An interesting thread about Gurney finding post-retirement work altering criminal mug shots to create art is pursued enough to create tension in his marriage and then abandoned, and too much time is spent making sure the reader is aware that nearly every other law-enforcement person Gurney works with is a pain in the ass.

But these are the flaws of a first-time writer (and frankly, the flaws of an editor who needed to spill more red ink before the book went to the printer), and the core of the book – the plot, the devices of suspense and the main protagonist – all are strong and bode well for what promises to an interesting, inventive series.

Verdon is on a virtual book tour, and his stop here at Things I’d Rather Be Doing is one of the last. For more information about the tour and to see links to the other blog stops along the way, click here.

TIRBD: Advertising executive is a fairly common resume entry for successful authors. Is that vocation – essentially selling things to people – a particularly valuable training ground for fiction writers?

JV: It may be that experience in writing ads is helpful in a couple of ways. It focuses the writer more on the discipline of communication than on simple expression – on what a particular audience is actually hearing you say rather than on what you think you’re saying. It also gets you pretty familiar with and accepting of the editing process – for example, the benefits of removing unnecessary words. However, that being said, I think there’s a second dynamic at work. Sometimes people who want to write fiction go into advertising because it’s a way to make a living, and when they’re finally able to make a living via their first love, they emerge from that “temporary” ad career.

What came first: The premise of that first note asking Mellery to “think of a number,” or the character of Dave Gurney?

In my own imaginative process, plot devices always precede character development – but that’s simply a matter of sequence, not priority. I may think of an intriguing situation – say the number device in this book, or the inexplicable footprints in the snow – and that leads me into imagining what sort of larger story that situation could be part of. Imagining that story then starts to bring to life the kind of people who would inhabit that world and do those things, what sort of people they’d come into conflict with, what those people might look and sound like and so forth. The further I get into that process, the more important the elements of character become and the more the goals and feelings of the characters start to take over.

The troubled cop is a well-worn cliche in crime fiction, but you’ve turned that on its head by giving Gurney a stable, if troubled relationship with a woman who is a fleshed out character rather than simply a foil. Were you consciously trying to subvert that trope when creating Madeline and her relationship with Gurney?

Books that feature one central troubled character surrounded by two-dimensional foils bore me to death. They’re about as interesting to me as watching TV at the airport.  Think of a Number has a real married couple – equal partners – in the center of the story simply because I like it that way. It’s more interesting, more alive, more fun. If it subverts the common trope, all the better.

You’ve said that you didn’t have any genre or rules in mind when devising this story. When it became clear that this was going to become a series following Gurney’s character, did that necessitate any changes to the story or the character to make the transition to a second and third (and perhaps beyond) book more seamless?

I wrote the first draft of Think of a Number with no thoughts about a sequel or a series. That draft was somewhat bleaker and ended on a darker note than the final version. The relationship between Madeleine and Dave was more contentious, less hopeful. My agent and later my editor nudged me the direction of making the characters warmer and more inviting. The change made them more viable as an ongoing couple by creating room for optimism and growth.

You and your wife moved after your retirement to upstate New York, just as Gurney and his wife do. Were you discovering things as Gurney discovers them in the story, and if so, did this help you to keep him grounded geographically as he dealt with the challenges of the case?

Basically, the answer is yes. The fact that the couple in the book moved to the same part of the world that my wife and I did gave me easy access to the details and overall impact of the environment, physically and emotionally – much as growing up in the Bronx helped me with Gurney’s visit to one of the crime scenes later in the book. No research necessary.

Some awfully high-profile writers have blurbed your book. How do you feel about becoming a part of that fraternity and what has that meant to you as a newcomer?

The generous blurbs and their famous sources staggered me. I never expected anything remotely like that. It is a very strange thing to have read a particular author for many years, to have worshipfully devoured each new book, to have been in awe at the talent on display… and then to have that very same author welcome you to the club! It really does leave me at a loss for words.

What is the most random thing that has happened to you that made you think that there were forces greater than chance or coincidence at play?

Everything in the publication process of Think of a Number has been weirdly wonderful. I don’t have to tell you that this is a business where an awful lot can go wrong, where the water is full of reefs and torpedoes. However, the happy fact is that from the very moment that Molly Friedrich (my agent) brought this book to Rick Horgan (my editor), everything has proceeded with a degree of smoothness and success that I am told is almost unheard of. So much good stuff: the amazing blurbs and rave reviews, the bidding wars for foreign publication rights, the book’s appearance on so many “recommended summer reading” lists, and now the latest news –one week after its publication in Spain, it’s on the bestseller lists there. And Spanish is just one of the 19 languages in which it’s scheduled to be published. It’s been one good thing after another – one better thing after another. Quite astonishing!

So, the Devo show in Des Moines on Saturday was great. My initial motivation, as outlined in this post, was to see a couple of old friends and finally allow 25 years of attempted indoctrination to drive me to see what the fuss is all about. It only took a song or two for my curiosity to evolve into excitement. It was the best show I had seen in a long time and left me wondering when we could see the band again.

Seeing the show with these two friends gave me a window into Devo obsession, allowing me to see the show through my own relatively-neophyte eyes as well as those of uber-fans. While I saw a performance by five musicians who were unbelievably tight with songs that seemed nostalgia-laced and timeless all at once, they saw ever-so-subtle nuances that altered the meanings of those performances. I saw lead singer Mark Mothersbaugh emulate the same sort of robotic mannerisms that are familiar from dozens of videos, they saw him make a subtle shift that he hadn’t made before and then puzzled over the meaning behind such a departure from the norm.

One could find fodder for fun-making there, but that’s not my intent. As I mentioned in that last post, Devo is one of the few bands that created its own mythology and did so in a way that enhanced rather than detracted from the music. The songs and performance were strong enough to grab my interest and hold it for the entire 90-minute set, but the extra-musical elements — costume changes, backing videos and more — will cement that hold on my attention and lead me to spend more time seeking out more information about those trappings.

The set was, as expected, light on new songs and heavy on the classics. They opened with “What We Do” from the new album, Something For Everybody, and also played “Don’t Shoot” and “Fresh” from that disc. After taking care of those within the first five songs, it was a mix of classics, near hits and deeper cuts that pleased my long-time fan friends: Peek a Boo, Going Under, Girl U Want, Whip It, Planet Earth, Satisfaction, Secret Agent Man, Uncontrollable Urge, Mongoloid, Jocko Homo,  Smart Patrol/ Mr. DNA, Gates of Steel, Freedom of Choice and Beautiful World.

The last two were the encore, the final song of which featured an appearance by Booji Boy — Mark Mothersbaugh in a strange boy mask singing in a high voice and telling a strange but amusing story about Michael Jackson.

With that experience under my belt, it’s time to go back through the back catalog again, and perhaps seek out some rarities to get a more complete picture. One worry: the band really rocked last night, playing a tight set that struck the right balance between keyboards and the deft guitar work of Bob Mothersbaugh. As I contemplate older recordings (save for the earliest songs on the band’s first album), they seem to skew a bit more toward the keyboard end of the spectrum. Perhaps live Devo is the best Devo for me. Only time will tell. Suffice to say that I was very pleasantly surprised and left the show considering myself a bona fide fan.

CONTEST: Leave a comment with your favorite Devo song and a bit about why, and on Friday, July 30,  I’ll randomly select one person who will win a brand-new copy of Devo’s new CD, Something for Everyone.

So, I’m going to see Devo for the first time on Saturday. For most people, that qualifier — “first time” — wouldn’t be necessary. Not because they had seen the band before, but because it would be obvious that they hadn’t. It’s not like saying, “I’m going to see ‘Star Wars’ for the first time.” It’s akin to saying, “I’m going to check out some avant garde absurdist theater for the first time.” That’s something not everyone can say.

At one time, seeing Devo was probably exactly like seeing avant garde absurdist theater. In the band’s earliest days, it was as much a performance art act as it was a rock band. Its theories about “de-evolution,” its emphasis on the visual as much as the aural and the entire presentation, made the enterprise an extra-musical experience.

Back when that was the case, two of my close friends were obsessed with Devo. They had every limited-edition 7″ single, had read every magazine article and, of course, had their own energy domes (those are the flower-pot hats for the uninitiated). I listened as they espoused the tenets behind the band and played its music. Some of it was catchy, but I was (and remain) more a fan of guitars than synthesizers, so it largely passed me by.

By the time Devo had its hit with 1980’s “Whip It,” the wheels were starting to come off creatively. One could say that Devo itself was de-evolving, its music regressing toward the same sort of bland pap against which it stood in sharp relief a just a year or two before. By the time of the band’s last two albums before what was effectively a two-decade split, all traces of that which had made the band interesting — its ideology and orthodoxy — had been shed in the pursuit of music pedestrian enough to appeal to the masses. This, of course, failed. To succeed, Devo needed to be strange enough to catch the public’s attention and overwhelm its aversion to anything outside the norm. Watered down Devo was simply oddball, and thus, unappealing.

Fast forward 20 years, and Devo is back. I was vaguely aware of the band’s return, having seen information about the focus groups it was conducting to select the songs for its new album, the appropriately named Something for Everybody. But it wasn’t until the band scheduled the tour in support of the record — including a stop in Des Moines, my hometown — that the band and the new album really popped onto my radar. After some not-so-gentle nudging from those longtime fanboy friends, I decided I should go with them to see the band at least once in my life. I probably know more about Devo and its music than any other non-fan in the world, and figured I should go all the way and experience it live.

A funny thing happened on the way to buying that ticket. I listened to the new album a handful of times, then went back and listened to the rest of the band’s back catalog. What did I find? First, the indoctrination from my friends in my youth took hold more deeply than I realized. I knew most of these songs, even the deep album cuts, even though I only ever owned one Devo album in my life (1984’s subpar Shout). Even more to the point, I liked some of them… quite a few of them, actually. Listening led to reading, and with the context and completeness afforded by 20-30 years of hindsight, I was hovering somewhere between interested and fascinated.

It wasn’t until listening to some mid-period R.E.M. today that I fully understood why. I got into R.E.M. as soon as I heard the band, entranced by the mystery, edginess and catchiness of the music. I remain a rabid fan and apologist (for everything but Around the Sun), but am certainly more fervent about the early work than what came later. Beyond the relative quality of the music from those two eras, I can chalk it up to two things: The sense of mystery in the early work, but also the sense of urgency. Yes, it was fun to listen to Michael Stipe through headphones again and again and try to discern what he was singing. But it was also bracing to put on this music and feel — even if I couldn’t have articulated it at the time — that these four guys had to get these songs out. They didn’t necessarily have a message to get out (that came later, with sometimes deleterious affect), but they simply needed to play, like a jogger chomping at the bit to hit the road the first sunny day after a blizzard.

For Devo, regardless of whether you bought the whole “de-evolution” argument (or if the members of the band truly did, for that matter), they made you believe that they did and that they were compelled to spread the word. All of the trappings threatened to overshadow the music, but taken as a package, it was entertaining and enlightening, and a hell of a lot more interesting that nearly everything else happening in 1978-82. When they lost that sense of urgency (or, in the parlance of the band itself, the “uncontrollable urge”) to communicate, and allowed it to be replaced with the desire to create product, things went south quickly.

With Something for Everybody, they are still in product-creation mode rather than compelled-to communicate mode (the title being the first giveaway), but there is enough of the latter in the mix to leaven the former. What they predicted two or three decades ago has come true, as any look at celebrity culture will prove, and now they’re here not to say “I told you so,” but, “OK, what do we do now and how can we capitalize?”

The result is the band’s best record since 1982’s Oh No, It’s Devo! We didn’t know how much we missed Devo, or more to the point, how much we needed them. Now that they’re back, I for one am finally ready to pay attention.

So, in the forward march that is the revision of history, R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction is now a classic, not the disappointment that the band and other declared at the time of its release 25 years ago.

That’s all relative, of course. I came to R.E.M. later than some (and well before most), jumping aboard with the band’s fourth album, Lifes Rich Pageant in 1986. Falling in love, I quickly went back and picked up its debut, Murmur, and the third album, Fables (in a fit of Puritan delayed gratification that would never again govern my purchasing decisions, I held off on Reckoning in a bid to save a great R.E.M. record for later. I didn’t get it until my freshman year of college in 1988, after the disappointment that was Green). To me, Fables was another masterpiece. A bit more difficult than Pageant, but no less satisfying.

I later read (in books!) that the band was not satisfied with the album. I read about the difficult recording process during and English winter with producer Joe Boyd. I foolishly developed an antipathy toward Boyd (then learned of all that he had done that made such a stance ridiculous at best). None of this affected my enjoyment of the album, which continued unabated for two decades.

Now comes the 25th anniversary remastered/expanded version of the album, which sheds even more light on the process. Plenty has been written elsewhere that ought to be read by anyone even casually interested in the subject — the true value of most reissues is not the remastering or bonus tracks, but the renewed analysis that is broader and deeper than any contemporaneous efforts simply because of the benefit of critical distance.

My point to add to this conversation is this: What Boyd brought to the project was a subtle nudge that pushed the band’s evolution a couple of steps further than it might have taken otherwise. That might sound slight, but the impact was huge. Hearing demos for Fables’ songs, I’m struck by how much many of them sound like a direct extension of the sound of Reckoning. “Green Grow the Rushes,” for example, would have fit comfortably on that preceding album. Yes, the dissonance of “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” was new, as was the frenetic claustrophobia of “Life and How to Live It.” But hearing those demos, I can imagine a very different Fables that would like have pleased listeners at the time, but that would have been seen as a troubling holding pattern in the rearview.

The other point brought up by the demos, however, is that the band, contrary to guitarist Peter Buck’s liner notes that mention feeling unprepared for the pending recording session, show songs that nearly identical to their finished versions. The various parts are in place, the arrangements, for the most part, are set. On first listen, I wondered why the band felt the need to go to such lengths to record the album — literally by flying across the ocean, and figuratively by leaving the comfort of friends and using someone like Boyd.

But Boyd’s gift, at least in this case, was the ability to simultaneously protect what the band had already created while pushing it ever so subtly toward something a bit more challenging and new. The result is the one R.E.M. album I gravitate toward when I want to my music to confront me just a bit, to force me to work for my comfort. It would be more than a decade before the band would veer so far from the obvious with late-stage curve balls New Adventures in Hi Fi and Up. Like no album before or since in the band’s catalog, it is the one where the level of challenge yields the greatest reward.

Want proof that Max Allan Collins works quickly? When I first conceived of doing this interview, it was to center around the publication of his latest collaboration with the late Mickey Spillane, The Big Bang. But, but the time I finished reading that book and prepped some questions, along came an advance copy of his latest Quarry novel in the mail from the kind folks at Hard Case Crime, Quarry’s Ex. Then, I learned that he would appear at the Iowa City Book Festival to screen the film version of his first original (as in non-reprint) HCC Quarry book, The Last Quarry, dubbed “The Last Lullaby” for the big screen. I decided that I had better get this taken care of rather than wait for a lull that likely would never come.

Yes, Collins is fast, and prolific. That wouldn’t matter if he also wasn’t good. These books are eminently readable. I was just reading one of the Chicago University Press reissues of Donald Westlake’s Richard Stark novels about Parker, and Luc Sante in his introduction to one volume wrote that you could read the entire series and never need a bookmark. That’s an apt description of a lot of Collins’ work as well. The Quarry books — and his collaborations with Spillane — are pageturners of the highest order. You want to know what happens next, and you don’t want to wait until tomorrow to find out.

As is often the case with those profiled on this blog, I came late to Collins, taking him for granted (much as I did his close friend, Ed Gorman) because of a sort of reverse local pride: He’s from just up the road in Muscatine, so how good could he be? Once I set aside that backasswards Iowa humble act and picked up one of his books, I was hooked. That was several years ago, and now, as with Gorman, the saving grace is that I have a few dozen books to catch up on.

For those new to Collins, they could do worse than to start with any of the works mentioned above. Quarry’s Ex is out in September, and The Big Bang is out now. The latter is a bracing read, blending Spillane’s proto-tough guy Mike Hammer with a churning plot and a bit of Collins’ humor thrown in to leaven things. It deals with the 60s drug trade and ends with, well, a big bang.

TIRBD: Big Bang was your third collaboration with Mickey Spillane to be published. In what order does it fall in terms of your actual work on the book projects? Does this get any easier, or is the difficulty of each specific to the state in which Spillane left the manuscript?

MAC: This has never been anything but sheer pleasure for me.  The three novels so far — Dead Street, The Goliath Bone and The Big Bang — have been published in the order I’ve completed them.  Kiss Her Goodbye is finished and will be published next year (Mike Hammer in the ’70s).  In some ways Dead Street was the trickiest, because Mickey had a fairly polished manuscript ready for everything but the last three chapters. So, all I did to the front end of the book was a fairly aggressive line edit, because there were some inconsistencies and plot holes that needed tending. Then I had to write three chapters on my own, with just a few notes from Mickey to guide me, and hope the blend was satisfying and not obvious to the reader.

The three Hammer novels I’ve done  were in various stages of completion. Goliath Bone was unusual because it was a rough draft of everything but the last couple chapters, and there was a rough draft of the concluding theater scene, as well. But Mickey knew he was in ill health, and worked quickly, and the manuscript was accordingly quite short — maybe 40,000 words. So, I wound up polishing and expanding the early chapters, which made the novel a true collaboration. I love working “inside” Mickey’s work, because I can really get into the groove.

The Big Bang had four or five very long chapters completed, and I expanded these and wove new material in and around Mickey’s so that those chapters lasted deep into the book, probably around chapter eight. That, too, made for a true collaboration, plus I had extensive notes from Mickey on where he was headed, including the shocking ending. The forthcoming Kiss Her Goodbye was unique in that Mickey had two substantial takes on the story, each going in a different direction — the two partial manuscripts had some repetition and some new material, and I wove these into a whole that, again, meant Mickey material went deep into the novel. Again, I had notes to guide me. What made this really different was that I used both directions Mickey travelled — one was a mob plot, the other a diamond robbery plot — and wove them into one story, so that I could maximize Mickey’s writing.

The end result in all cases (except Dead Street, which is more purely Mickey) is a genuine 50/50 collaboration.

You have mentioned that the sales of Big Bang will have a big impact on the future of other Spillane/Collins titles. Is it surprising to you that this is even an issue? Are there hard numbers the sales needs to hit? What happens to those books if you don’t reach that?

I don’t know what sales figures we have to hit, but I am astonished that we haven’t had more attention in the media, although Big Bang has received lots of Internet buzz.  I know Goliath Bone was hurt by when it was published — right in the midst of the financial meltdown, when all book sales were off — and I haven’t received any hard data on Big Bang sales. Goliath Bone comes out in mass market paperback next month, and that should be a boost.

There are three unfinished but substantial Hammer novel manuscripts left — Complex 90; Lady, Go Die! and King of the Weeds — and I feel confident someone will want them. There are around four more shorter manuscripts that can become novels if readers are responsive, and I’ve been turning even shorter fragments into short stories — two Hammer shorts have sold to the Strand.

By now everyone knows how prolific you are, but I wonder how you juggle all of your various projects. Are you able to work on many things at once, or do you finish something before you move on to the next? If it’s the former, is it a challenge to move from one voice/tone to another and to keep straight various plot points and such?

I work on one project at a time, with the exception of certain comics projects — monthly comic books (haven’t done one of those in ages), or a graphic novel, as if the case with the in-progress Return to Perdition that DC Vertigo is doing with Terry Beatty drawing. I sort of wait for Terry to need pages, then interrupt whatever novel I’m on and do a batch of ‘em for him.

I find moving from voice to voice, and sometimes medium to medium, keeps me fresh.

You seem to have become the house author at Hard Case Crime (you overtake Lawrence Block with Quarry’s Ex, your sixth; seventh if you include Dead Street with Spillane). What is it about that imprint and working with Charles Ardai that is so appealing?

Charles is a tough editor and he and I have had many, many fights over the books, so anyone who thinks I’m the Hard Case darling doesn’t know the real skinny. But I love being able to do short, tough novels of the sort I did at the start of my career.  I think why I’ve become a staple of the line is that I am the only author of the initial group of established mystery names that Charles intended to reprint who was also willing to do new work.

To what do you attribute the resurgent interest in a series that had been on the shelf for nearly 20 years?

Quarry, in my biased opinion, ranks with Heller as my most innovative work. Enough readers appreciated that to have a cult following group up around the novels. I sort of primed the pump by doing another Quarry novel in the ’80s and a few short stories in the ’90s.  The character was perfect for Hard Case and made a real connection. Also, we had the short film “A Matter of Principal” and the feature version that followed, “The Last Lullaby,” with me contributing as a screenwriter to both, and that attracted attention, too. I think these are very entertaining books — funny, sexy, violent. I don’t know what more a noir fan could want.

With all of that in the works, you also have your first new Nate Heller book in the pipeline after nearly a decade. What triggers your own renewed interest in characters that leads you to dust them off and check in?

Quarry came back chiefly because of the short film that led to a feature-length screenplay. The Last Quarry is a novelization of my first draft of that screenplay, and simply represents me recycling, frankly. Heller is more an obsession — I consider the Heller saga to be my main contribution to the genre, and potentially my legacy. I stepped away from it unwilling in 2001, and am returning to it eagerly now.

The 10 years away from Heller were productive, though, and probably good for me — the historical “disaster” series, the Perdition prose sequels, Black Hats, Red Sky in Morning, the latter two projects I had long wanted to do but Heller got in the way. Doing all those different lead characters in various time frames in the half dozen disaster books was extremely good experience for me — never too late to grow as a writer.

Despite your prolific nature, you don’t seem to write short fiction. You are a student of the form, however, if your introduction to the Thuglit anthology Blood, Guts & Whiskey is any indication. What do you think of the proliferation of web sites and magazines over the past few years that feature short crime fiction, and why don’t you write more of it?

I am not a short story specialist, but I actually have written quite a few.  I’ve even published three or four short story collections. My wife is a real expert at short stories, but she has been concentrating on novels, too. The problem is the shortage of paying markets, and I am endeavoring to make sure writing is my profession and not my hobby. But I’ve published stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and The Strand in recent years, and am always up for an anthology assignment. My only fiction Edgar nomination was for a short story, actually, the Ms. Tree story, “Louise.”

You have a full plate with Hellers, Quarrys, Hammers and everything else you’re doing. Is there room for new ideas to creep in, such as new protagonists or series ideas, or are you able to filter your ideas through existing outlets?

Matt Clemens and I just launched a new series at Kensington — J.C. Harrow, a sort of John Walsh type, in You Can’t Stop Me. We just delivered the second one, No One Will Hear You.  These are serial killer thrillers. Barb and I are exploring a second cozy series for the “Barbara Allan” byline — just talk so far. There’s lots of ideas to pursue — ideas are easy for me. But hope to be able to concentrate a lot of my effort and energy in a new group of Nathan Heller novels — Bye Bye, Baby, the Marilyn Monroe one, comes out next July. I’m prepping for the JFK assassination Heller novel right now — soul-crushing research on that one.