Murder, My Love

Co-Author’s Note

Being chosen by Mickey Spillane to complete the surprising number of unfinished manuscripts he left behind is, for me, practically the definition of bittersweet. And it is definitely my greatest honor.

When I discovered Mickey’s work I was around twelve — by way of the Darren McGavin TV series — and just starting to read the great hardboiled mystery writers. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were first, followed soon by James M. Cain. I was able to start buying Mickey’s Mike Hammer novels when I was thirteen, though I usually had to lie and pass myself off as sixteen. Spillane was thought of as writing “dirty books” back then, though many other storytellers have gone through the door he opened in a more explicit if less explosive fashion.

What remains shocking, in Spillane’s work from the ’40s through the ’90s, is the extreme, convincing and often visceral scenes of violence. Sam Peckinpah, the great and notorious director of The Wild Bunch, had white hair, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Mickey turned it that way for him, maybe with One Lonely Night, in which Mike Hammer, wielding a tommy gun, dispatches one hundred or so Commie spies.

Hammer was a character who grew and changed, as his creator sporadically recorded the detective’s cases. The iconic private eye began as brash, excitable, randy as hell and not just a little psychotic. As the character aged, he mellowed; but a mellowed Mike Hammer can still appreciate a beautiful woman licking her lips and can dispatch a villain with chilling coldness.

The unfinished work Mickey bequeathed me (and his wife Jane) shows the author’s own mellowing and the changes in his life. He was, at various times in his long career, a follower of the conservative Jehovah’s Witness faith. Criticism from some in his church hampered Mickey’s ability to tell the kind of tales expected of him. Often, during these periods, Mickey would begin a novel and then put it aside, when he decided someone high in his church might object.

His 1989 Hammer novel, The Killing Man, got him in dutch with the church elders because he used the words “shit” and “fucking” (sparingly) in the text. There wouldn’t be another Mike Hammer novel published (one minus those offensive words) until Black Alley in 1996 (I completed his sequel, King of the Weeds, for Titan in 2014).

Jane Spillane reminded Mickey, a few days before his passing, that “Max isn’t a Jehovah’s Witness,” and that I would almost certainly complete these novels in grand Spillane style — sex, violence, occasional “f” words and all. Mickey had no problem with that. He understood that we would be collaborating, and my sins would be my own.

In expanding Mickey’s partial manuscripts into finished books, I first turned to material that was usually a hundred pages or more, often with plot and character notes. A dozen books or so later, I am now dealing with shorter fragments, and this time I am working only from a synopsis. As usual, I have done my best to determine when Mickey wrote the material, so that I might set each novel in continuity, to give each entry its rightful place in the canon.

The nature of the plot synopsis suggests it may have been designed for one of the Stacy Keach-starring Mike Hammer TV episodes or telefilms, which wrapped up in 1989 (revived in 1997). I know that Mickey developed several ideas for TV producer Jay Bernstein, and in fact The Killing Man began that way, until the story idea inspired Mike Hammer’s creator to write a novel instead (“It was too good to waste on television,” he told me). Mickey also devised the ending of the otherwise terrible, Bernstein-produced, non-Keach Hammer telefilm, Come Die with Me (1994), a production Spillane disavowed.

Part of my reasoning regarding the origin of the synopsis is that Mickey includes scenes in which Mike Hammer is not present, inappropriate for the first-person approach of the books, while the TV episodes sometimes featured such scenes. I have, of course, kept the point of view consistently Hammer’s own in these pages.

The probable origin of the story makes this novel something of a departure, more typical of the TV series in that Hammer has a client, which he rarely does in the largely vengeance-oriented books. But as the plot here is predominantly the work of Hammer’s creator, I trust readers will enjoy what might be viewed as a partial change of pace.

All of this suggests the intended time frame of the tale was the late ’80s to the very early ’90s. The political subject matter reflects Mickey’s own distrust and even contempt for certain real-life figures of that era. Mickey and I did not entirely share political beliefs, which bothered neither of us a whit. We were friends, and we were pros — such a thing was irrelevant.

Besides, Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t vote.

Max Allan Collins

October 2018