I didn't mean to have a Max Allan Collins month over the last few weeks, it just turned out that way. First came the posthumous Mickey Spillane novel, Dead Street, finished by Collins. Then came Collins' A Killing in Comics, an interesting mesh of vintage crime novel and a comic strip, and finally Collins' own Hard Case Crime novel, Deadly Beloved, the novel debut of his long-time comic creation. All three popped to the top of my reading stack in succession, and I was reminded again just how creative and prolific this author just down the road (that road being Highway 6 that connects Iowa City and Muscatine with much of the rest of the middle of the country) can be.

These three books, all of which came out in 2007, would constitute a banner year for any other writer. For Collins, it's just part of a fairly typical 365-day period. As he details below, he also published a pseudonymous novel, Black Hats, and oversaw a DVD project. That adds to an already impressive bibliography and filmography for Collins. Just listing his various series and projects can be a task. There's the hitman Quarry, the professional thief Nolan, Mallory the mystery writer, Nate Heller, the PI who solves historic crimes, a real-life Eliot Ness, the Perdition novels and graphic novels, the Ms. Tree comic series, his writing for the "Dick Tracy" comic strip and his numerous TV tie-ins and movie novelizations.

From the sound of things, he doesn't plan to let up soon. There is a sequel to A Killing in Comics in the works, he's finishing at least two other Spillane books for publication and he just started writing tie-in novels for the TV show "Criminal Minds" (after a long time doing the same thing for "CSI"). He took time, however, to answer a few questions about his various projects and what he has in store.

TIRBD: For a guy who has tried a number of different things over your career, 2007 will go down as a groundbreaking year: Your first novel featuring comic character Ms. Tree, finishing a Mickey Spillane novel and writing a hybrid of sorts in the book A Killing in Comics. Does a year like this tell you anything about avenues you have left to explore or give you more license to try new things?

MAC: It was a busy writing year as well, perhaps the busiest of my career. I probably should be slowing down, but as I get older, the reality that the time ahead is finite becomes all too apparent. So a lot of what I've been doing reflects me getting around to doing things that I've intended to do for a long time – the Ms. Tree novel, for example. Black Hats, the Wyatt Earp novel (written as Patrick Culhane), is a notion I've been nurturing for 10 or 12 years. My new DVD, “Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life,” is the culmination of all of my years of Ness interest as well as my desire to keep honing my filmmaking craft. I'm at a stage where about half of the effort is designed to make a living – the movie and TV tie-in work – and the rest is artistic ambition and working to get done all of the things I'd like to do.

It looks like I may get to do Nathan Heller again, and I will very likely write the final two books, to make sure the series has a sense of having been finished. If they are successful, I'll fill in with earlier stories, but I have always intended to do Marilyn and Kennedy as Heller's last cases.

What was it like to finish another writer's work? Despite the fact that you had his notes and conversed with him about the novel, you were still putting words in Spillane's mouth.

I've now finished the first of at least three Mike Hammer novels, working from a partial manuscript and notes – The Goliath Bone, for Otto Penzler at Harcourt. I'm tempted to say, "It was easy." Very early in my career I picked up “Dick Tracy” for Chester Gould, so I've been done this road before. Each of the Mickey projects is going to be different, because the manuscripts are in varying shapes. Dead Street, the Hard Case novel, consisted of eight fairly finished chapters and some notes, although nothing on how the mystery resolved. But in revising and shaping the first eight chapters, and going over the notes again and again, I became immersed enough in the voice that it really flowed quite naturally when I wrote the final three chapters.

Goliath Bone presented different challenges. I had nine chapters but they weren't as finished as the eight of Dead Street. But I also had a three chapter false start on the story that Mickey had done a few years before, on Goliath, and I was able to use material from there as well. And Mickey had written the climax of Goliath, which became the first half of the last chapter. More carpentry on that one, but I can honestly say I never had a better time than collaborating with Mickey (and that's what it is) on a Mike Hammer novel.

Comics are an increasingly accepted method of storytelling, yet you've moved in somewhat of an opposite direction by taking Ms. Tree out of comics and into a prose work, and you've written novels based on the Perdition project. Do you feel like your swimming against the current to an extent?

I am open to doing comics or graphic novels again, and I'm in talks all the time about doing more. Post-Perdition, I did a second Perdition graphic novel (On The Road To Perdition) and four or five CSI graphic novels. But I also had many conversations with mainstream publishers about doing graphic novels that always foundered when the editors discovered how expensive the artwork would be to produce. And I've always been a bit of a fringe guy for DC and Marvel, since I rarely do superhero, although I've done quite a bit of Batman – another post-Perdition comics project was the Batman graphic novel, Child Of Dreams, where I wrote essentially a new story to a Japanese artist's drawings.

I've been frustrated that I haven't been able to get a major publisher to bring the huge body of Ms. Tree work out in graphic novel form -- it's reprint material, but material little-seen by a mainstream audience, and Terry Beatty and I did it from 1981 ’til 1993, so there's a ton of it. Many small publishers have been after us, but I'm holding out for better presentation. The Ms. Tree novel, Deadly Beloved, flowed out of a screenplay I did for Oxygen network. They're apparently doing the film, but I've been much rewritten, so I'm delighted that the novel exists to represent my vision. The same was true of The Last Quarry, also originally a screenplay which has become a good little movie called “The Last Lullaby,” but I was somewhat rewritten there, as well, and I like having the novel exist to show what I truly intended.

Pulp novels are also coming into vogue thanks in part to the Hard Case Crime imprint. You've certainly taken advantage of that, with three books of your own and the Spillane book. Is the reception of your books different thanks to that Hard Case logo on the cover than it would be otherwise? Is there more to the resurgence than someone simply being smart enough to recreate the formula of action-filled stories inside alluring covers with a low price?

I love Hard Case Crime and Charles Ardai is a terrific editor, even though he and I squabble like an old married couple. I can tell you why I do books for Charles – he lets me do novels I couldn't do elsewhere, like Quarry and Ms. Tree; he pretty much says, "Write whatever you want, we're happy to get a book from you." So that's hard for me to resist. And the packaging, the covers – I've told the story that I agreed to do The Last Quarry chiefly because Bob McGinnis agreed to paint the cover. Plus, it gets my work out in front of the younger readers into noir who might not take time to read my work otherwise; some of these people have only a vague idea about who I am, possibly based on the CSI stuff and maybe Perdition, and few know the Nate Heller novels and Quarry and so on.

But there's a downside: some of the chain stores lump all the Hard Case books together, like Harlequin romances. You do not find The Last Quarry and Deadly Beloved shelved with my other books at most Borders, for example. And the Hard Case books all tend to get ordered in the same small quantity, two or three copies – even Dead Street, which got zero display in the big chains despite an “A” rating from Entertainment Weekly, who also made the novel No. 3 on their “Must List” a few weeks later. That's a problem. It's a cultish niche, and as Donald Westlake said, "A cult writer is two readers short of making a living."

In 2002, you explained your various pursuits to me this way: "I'm a pop-culture junkie. I love comics, so I have to do comics. I love mystery novels, so I have to write them. I love movies, so I have to make movies." Are there other things you love – I’m thinking of music, but know there must be others – that you simply don't have time to indulge, and how would you do so given unlimited time?

I've done a lot with music, actually – I still play a few times a year with my band, although since the death of my longtime partner in musical crime, Paul Thomas, a few years ago, some of the steam has gone out of it. I write songs for my movies when necessary, since I'm cheap help. I do have an unrealistic ambition to write a musical, words, music, book, the whole thing. That's something I may never get around to.

I also regret, a little, that I left acting behind. I was a lead in plays and musicals in high school, and part of me wishes I could do one more leading role in a good regional production. That probably won't happen.

With movies in particular, you've taken a much more independent stance than in your other pursuits. Rather than write for those who make them, you've decided to make them yourself. Is technology to credit for that – you'd put out your own books if able – or is there a deeper reason for wanting to have more control over film projects than your other work?

The indie route was mostly a necessity – I felt time was running out to make a mark in movies and started doing my own. I have sold things to other filmmakers – William Lustig made “The Expert,” Jeffrey Goodman has directed “The Last Lullaby,” and I've allowed all sorts of stuff to be optioned, lately Ms. Tree and Johnny Dynamite. Some things I write are too big for me to make, or frankly too hard, even if I had the resources – Black Hats, which DJ Caruso may do, for example, or the upcoming World War II novel, Red Sky In Morning (for Morrow as Patrick Culhane).

On the other hand, I've written a screenplay version of Road To Purgatory and we're working hard to get it mounted here in the Midwest. I love filmmaking. I love the collaborative nature of it, after so many years by myself. That may have something to do why I've started collaborating on fiction with two other writers, my wife Barb and Matt Clemens. The two places where I'm happiest are on a film set (if I'm directing) and in the editing suite.

Labels: crime fiction, Monday Interview