Masquerade for Murder

Co-author’s Note

Shortly before his death in 2006, Mickey Spillane 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.”

Working under the death sentence of pancreatic cancer, Mickey had already called me to ask if I would complete his final Mike Hammer novel for him, if that became necessary, which it did — the greatest, if most bittersweet, honor of my career.

Half a dozen substantial Hammer manuscripts of 100 pages or more were found in the “treasure hunt,” conducted by Jane, my wife Barb and me. These five lost Hammer novels spanned Mickey’s career, from the late ’40s through the mid-’60s and on up to (and including) The Goliath Bone, which he was working on at the time of his passing.

The six substantial manuscripts — often with notes, sometimes with roughed-out endings — were the first order of business; these have all been completed. A number of shorter but significant Hammer manuscripts — again, sometimes with notes and rough endings — were also worthy of completion, including the writer’s first attempt at a Hammer yarn (Killing Town, 2018). Some less substantial fragments became short stories, eight of which have been collected in A Long Time Dead, published by Mysterious Press.

This time — as was the case with the previous Hammer novel, Murder, My Love (2019) — I am working chiefly from a synopsis, with only a few tasty morsels of Spillane prose to interweave. As usual, I have done my best to determine when Mickey wrote the material, so that I might set the novel in continuity, to give the book its rightful place in the canon.

The nature of the plot synopsis suggests Masquerade for Murder may have been designed for one of actor Stacy Keach’s Mike Hammer telefilms or episodes of the TV series that ended in 1989 (revived in 1997). I know that Mickey developed several ideas for TV producer Jay Bernstein, and in fact his novel The Killing Man (1989) began that way, until Mickey decided to go the prose route (“It was too good to waste on television,” he told me). Mickey also devised the ending of the otherwise abysmal Bernstein-produced, non-Keach Hammer telefilm, Come Die with Me (1994), a production Spillane disavowed.

This synopsis would appear to have been developed either before or after The Killing Man, putting its action in the late ’80s. I am placing it in the continuity right after that 1989 novel (the text of which places the action in 1988). This presents a Mike Hammer in his late fifties, somewhat younger than the calendar would have him, a mathematical improbability that did not bother Mickey Spillane one bit.

You shouldn’t let it bother you, either.

Max Allan Collins

September 2019