Baby, It’s Murder

Co-author’s Introduction

Shortly before his death in 2006, Mickey Spillane gave me an assignment — develop decades’ worth of various uncompleted manuscripts and synopses of his into completed form for publication.

Several reasons are behind the surprising number of manuscripts the bestselling mystery writer of his day left unfinished. One is his struggle with balancing his new-found (circa 1953) religious beliefs with the sex-and-violence reputation his fiction engendered. The major reason, perhaps — revealed in my biography Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction (co-written with James L. Traylor) — is Mickey’s contract with director/producer Victor Saville granting the filmmaker screen rights to any yet unwritten Hammer (and other) crime novels.

Mike Hammer’s creator disliked the Spillane-derived films Saville made, although Mickey came to appreciate the enduring importance of director Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), that fascinating film in which a critique of Mike Hammer somehow perfectly captures the feel of the initial six Hammer novels.

At the time, however, Mickey simply waited out the duration of the Saville contract before returning to his famous detective with the novel The Girl Hunters (1962), which led to Spillane portraying Hammer himself in the 1963 film version, which he co-produced.

Baby, It’s Murder is the fifteenth Mike Hammer novel I’ve developed from unfinished, previously unpublished Spillane material found in the files of his three offices at his South Carolina home after an extensive search by his wife Jane, my wife Barb and myself. These ranged from substantial manuscripts — running to a hundred or more type-written pages, sometimes with plot notes and occasionally roughed-out endings — to one-page synopses for proposed Stacy Keach TV movies, and many stops between. This concluding Hammer novel was developed from several opening chapters and some plot notes.

Continuity is always an issue in Spillane’s Hammer, because the writer (never “author”) had a tendency to pay only lip service to it. On the other hand — unusual for a detective series — the impact of events from previous novels is often felt in subsequent ones. Deep into Spillane’s Hammer series, for example, the detective still feels guilt and loss over the femme fatale he dispatches at the end of I, the Jury (1947). So, in that sense, continuity was important to Spillane.

The bulk of the action in Baby, It’s Murder takes place in the early 1970s; but the framing sequences occur in the early 2000s, chronologically after what had previously been the final Hammer novel, The Goliath Bone: the first posthumous Hammer novel (and the first with a shared Spillane/Collins byline).

Completing the unfinished Hammer books has been both a challenge and a delight. Along the way I have also completed the long-anticipated second Morgan the Raider novel (The Consummata, a sequel to The Delta Factor); Mickey’s nearly finished last crime novel, Dead Street; and edited his final completed work, The Last Stand, all for Hard Case Crime. Additionally, two novels were developed from unproduced Spillane screenplays (The Menace and The Saga of Caleb York, the latter leading to a six-novel western series). And enough Hammer short stories were completed from shorter fragments to fill A Long Time Dead: A Mike Hammer Casebook.

That Mickey himself, shortly before his passing, asked me to undertake this mission is the biggest compliment I have ever received. That so many readers have accepted these collaborations as genuine Spillane novels is the best review I could ever hope for.

I am grateful to Nick Landau, Vivian Cheung, and Andrew Sumner, as well as Laura Price and the rest of the Titan Books staff, for their belief and support in the Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer Legacy Project. Mysterious Press editor/publisher Otto Penzler played a key role as well. All of you stayed the distance, understanding the importance to mystery fiction of sharing with readers these additional, final works from one of the genre’s key creators.

Max Allan Collins

July 2024