Max Allan Collins is probably best known for his graphic novel that became the award-winning film Road To Perdition, but this Iowa native has more than 30 years of writing credits under his belt, from crime novels and screenplays to comic books and tie-ins for CSI and Criminal Minds.
Over the last decade, Collins has been working to complete the final works of the late Mickey Spillane, who created famed hardboiled detective Mike Hammer. Starting with Goliath Bone, Collins has been bringing to print Spillane's unfinished works. Their latest collaboration recently released by Titan Books was Complex 90.
TheCelebrityCafe.com spoke with this award-winning author about finishing Spillane's work, a sequel to Road To Perdition and what he's doing when he's not writing.
TheCelebrityCafe.com: You said in the book's intro this was one of the "more substantial" manuscripts that Mickey Spillane gave you (the other being Big Bang). How much of Complex 90 did Mickey write?
Max Allan Collins: There were six unfinished Hammer novels that I've designated as "substantial," to differentiate them from a number of other shorter unfinished novels in Mickey's files. These six were all in the range of one-hundred pages of double-spaced manuscript, often with notes on plot and character, occasionally with a roughed-out ending. The finished manuscripts are around 300 pages. Doing the math won't give you the true picture, though, because Mickey conceived each of these stories, created not only Mike Hammer but the majority of characters in each novel, and I always expand and extend Mickey's material so that it takes up around two-thirds of the book.
If that sounds confusing, let's just say I view the end product as a 50/50 collaboration.
TCC: Complex 90 isn't your typical Mike Hammer story; it's got the feel of a spy novel - at least in the first few chapters - before returning to a more traditional crime novel. How much of a divergance is that from crime writing? Did you read any spy authors (Fleming, Le Carre, MacInnes, etc) before digging in on it?
Max: I was a teenager during the spy craze of the 1960s - I was in junior high, reading the James Bond novels when Dr. No came out in the theaters. In fact, I saw it the day it opened. I was way ahead of the curve on that one, and experienced the whole spy fad. We used to carry briefcases to class in imitation of Bond's tricked-out briefcase. I was there for the TV stuff, Man From U.N.C.L.E., I Spy, The Avengers and so on, and the movies from Matt Helm to Derek Flint, from Harry Palmer to George Smiley. I also read a lot of the spy novels that became movies, like Len Deighton's Ipcress File, John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and the Matt Helm novels by Donald Hamilton, which were tough and in the Spillane tradition, not much at all like the Dean Martin movies. And Mickey wrote about espionage both in Mike Hammer - One Lonely Night, The Girl Hunters, Survival ... Zero! - and also in his four novels about his own secret agent, Tiger Mann, who is basically Mike Hammer.
I didn't re-read any other spy novels, but I did take a hard look at Spillane's The Girl Hunters, The Snake, The Body Lovers, and Survival ... Zero!, because they were written in the same period that Mickey began Complex 90.
TCC: What was your favorite part in Complex 90?
Max: I don't know if I can narrow that down - I really like this book, which is immodest, I guess, but I'm a Mike Hammer fan myself. The escape from the Russian prison is something I'm proud of - that's mostly my work, a flashback I added - and the revelation-filled love scene between Mike and his secretary Velda. But probably my favorite, if pressed, would be the last chapter. Endings were something Mickey was great at, and I think this one really stacks up.
TCC: This was a sort of sequel to 1962's The Girl Hunters, which was later made into a movie starring Mickey as Mike Hammer. If Complex 90 were to be made into a movie who would you like to see play Mike Hammer? What about Velda?
Max: Frankly, it depends on what age Hammer is going to be in the movie. But right now my favorite potential Hammer is Gerard Butler, who conveys a nice toughess without losing a sense of humanity. If Complex 90 were set in the '60s, allowing for Velda to be a woman in her forties, then I'd say Diane Lane or maybe Lucy Lawless.
TCC: How many more Mike Hammer novels are in the works? Can you tell us about the next one you have planned?
Max: The next, which I am beginning work on now, is King Of The Weeds, the last of the substantial manuscripts. It was written by Mickey around 2000, and was intended to be the final Mike Hammer novel. But when 9/11 happened, he decided to pit Hammer against terrorists, and set King Of The Weeds aside. He wrote a short rough draft of Goliath Bone instead. He knew he was dying and handed that draft off to me to complete. So the publication of these six novels began with Goliath Bone and ends with King Of The Weeds, his last two novels bookending the set. King Of The Weeds has a great Spillane premise: a serial killer's victims are all cops.
There are three more Hammer novel manuscripts, running more like 40 or 50 pages, but again with notes, that I would term as significant, and would very much like to turn into novels, if the public - and my publisher - wants it so. I have also been gradually turning shorter Hammer fragments into short stories, with an eye on an eventual collection. Beyond that, there are some non-Mike Hammer manuscripts, significant if not substantial, that could be transformed into Hammer novels, again if there's a demand. My initial goal was to get these longer manuscripts of Mickey's completed. He only published 13 Mike Hammer novels in his lifetime, a very short list compared to most other famous fictional detectives, and I felt it important to get these six more Hammers out there.
TCC: I've read rumors of a Road to Perdition sequel in the works. How accurate are they?
Max: I have written two prose novel sequels, Road To Purgatory and Road To Paradise, and two graphic novels as well - Road To Perdition 2: On The Road, which fills in gaps in the original graphic novel, and a conclusion to the saga, Return To Perdition. I have written a screenplay for Road To Purgatory and have, for several years, been trying to get it mounted. There is continuing interest. I do think it will eventually happen.
TCC: You seem to always be occupied whether it's a Mickey Spillane collaboration, a new novel, a tie-in, a new film, etc. What do you like to do when you're not working?
Max: Work is fairly constant. My wife Barb and I - we collaborate on a humorous "cozy" series together, as "Barbara Allan," the most recent, Antiques Chop, released concurrently with Complex 90 - usually take a two- or three-day getaway upon finishing a book. Our standard destinations are Chicago, Des Moines, and St. Louis, the latter being where my son Nate and his wife, Abby, live. We go to at least one movie a week, and I play in a rock band, Crusin', that takes two or three gigs a month. The band has been around since I was in high school, and we're in the Iowa Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. The group was also known as the Daybreakers, and our 1967 single "Psychedelic Siren" is considered a garage band classic - it's been covered a bunch of times (just check You Tube) and is on numerous compilation CDs, the last several from Sundazed.
TCC: You've got a prolific body of work. Have you done anything other than writing? Did you ever see yourself doing something else?
Max: As I mentioned, I am a rock musician, if that's the term for it, and have made my living that way from time to time. I did teach half-time at a community college when I got out of the University of Iowa, but I'd already sold two novels and that's where my focus was. The only other real jobs I've ever had are sacking groceries and bussing tables. I have been dabbling in filmmaking since the mid-'90s and have directed four indie features and two documentaries, and a handful of shorts. Several of my screenplays have been produced beyond my self-productions. I wish I'd gotten into film earlier, as I'm still learning.
I don't think I'm fit for anything outside the arts.
TCC: When did you decide to become a writer?
Max: When I was 13. Up till then I wanted to be a cartoonist, and I was making home-made comic books and passing them around school. But I got interested in the writing side and drawing fell away. I stayed interested in comics, though, and wound up writing my share of them.
TCC: Why do you write mystery and crime?
Max: I caught the bug, very early on. I mean, I was reading Conan Doyle, Ellery Queen, Leslie Charteris, Sax Rohmer, and Erle Stanley Gardner in grade school. Toward the end of grade school, The Untouchables hit the air waves. My favorite comic book, since I was six, had been Dick Tracy. So crime and mystery and detectives were there from almost the start. The private eye craze on TV in the late '50s and early '60s sealed it for me. I was watching Peter Gunn, 77 Sunset Strip, Johnny Staccato, and Mike Hammer (the Darren McGavin version). Perry Mason and The Tin Man were on TV, too, and that led me into the books by Gardner and Dashiell Hammett. I always read the books that were sources for TV shows and movies I liked.
I have kept at this genre in part because the die was cast, so to speak, but also because crime fiction deals with the big topics. Call them sex and violence, if you like, but sex is life and violence is death, and life and death are the biggest topics there are. The appeal of traditional detective fiction is that, within the covers of a book, order can be made from chaos, problems can solved, justice can be served. A lot of crime fiction has gone a more complicated way, but that basic appeal remains.
TCC: What are some of your writing habits? Where do you write? When do you write? Do you keep a schedule?
Max: Mostly I do business in the morning, including promotional efforts like doing this interview. The writing is in the afternoon and, sometimes, again later in the evening, after I've spent some time with my wife, usually watching something from my blu-ray and DVD collection, which is crazily extensive. I have an office at home, in an upstairs converted bedroom, with lots of art on the wall, paperback covers, comic book and strip art, pin-ups, all originals. I've written seveal books on pin-up art. This is usually a six-day a week affair, unless I have a band job, then it's five days a week - don't like to write when I'm going to be performing that evening, because it draws on the same energies and I'm no kid anymore. My schedule is driven by deadlines. Between books, I take it easier, catching up on smaller projects, like short stories and articles, that I've promised to do.
TCC: You studied in the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. What was that like going there as a crime writer?
Max: I almost didn't get into the Workshop because I was a crime writer. But the great mainstream writer, Richard Yates, God bless him, read my early novel Mourn The Living and liked it and set aside his prejuicide. I worked closely with Yates for three years and learned a lot from him - he got me my first agent, as well. Another writer I studied with at Iowa was Walter Tevis, the gifted author of The Hustler and The Man Who Fell To Earth (I got my paperback first edition of that signed by him at the time). Also William Price Fox, though he wasn't much impressed with me until I sold two novels while I was in his class.