Kiss Her Goodbye

Coauthor's Note

In the week prior to Mickey Spillane's death, he told his wife, Jane, "When I'm gone, there's going to be a treasure hunt around here. Take everything you find and give it to Max—he'll know what to do." No greater honor could ever be paid me.

Half a dozen substantial Mike Hammer manuscripts were found in the "treasure hunt," frequently including plot notes, rough outlines, and even drafts of final chapters. These lost Hammer novels spanned Mickey's career, from the late 40s through the mid-'6os and up to The Goliath Bone, which he was working on at the time of his passing.

The unfinished manuscript for this novel, found on a desk in one of Mickey's three offices at his South Carolina home, included plot and character notes, as well as a shorter false start.

The theme of an older, ailing Mike Hammer returning to New York and finding it (and himself) changed was important to Mickey, and he revisited it in Black Alley(1996). But nowhere did he explore it with more passion than in the two partial manuscripts that I combined, shaped, and expanded into Kiss Her Goodbye—the "lost" '70s Mike Hammer, written as it was between Survival ... Zero!(1970) and The Killing Man(1989).

M. A. C.