DONALD HAMILTON'S NIGHT WALKER: THE ISOLATION ROW REVIEWS III

With the Korean War underway, Naval Lieutenant Dave Young has been called back into service. Young, who had been doing a graduate degree in engineering on the GI Bill, is not happy with this, and he has drunk through the train fare the Navy sent him. So he finds himself hitching in Maryland on his way to Newport News. He's picked up by Larry Wilson, a former employee of the Navy Department, who agrees to drive out of his way to Washington and front Young bus fare. But he also explains he was fired from his design job for having Red sympathies (in the days before Tim Russert simplified everything, Red meant communist or socialist, not Republican). Young gets nervous right away, but while he's looking over Wilson's design for a yacht, he's knocked unconscious. And when he wakes up he's in the hospital, his head wrapped in bandages, being called Mr Wilson, and told he's been lucky to survive the car crash and ensuing fire. Then the beautiful Elizabeth, Mrs Wilson, shows up and without even a moment of surprise, takes him home.

Night Walker reads like a pure pulp nightmare, but actually it was published first as a serial in the slick magazine Colliers in 1951, called Mask For Danger. Dell reissued it in 1954 under its present title. Hamilton may not have worked his way up the pulps, but he certainly absorbed both their sometime frenzied pace, and, as with the best of the noirish genre, their sense of confinement, paranoia and hopelessness.

Most readers will know Hamilton best as the writer of the Matt Helm series of novels, which began in 1960 and were often held up as America's grittier more realistic alternative to James Bond, something the movie-makers who adapted them with Dean Martin as Helm never seemed to notice. Hamilton also wrote western novels, including The Big Country, and another adapted as The Violent Men,which were treated with more respect by filmmakers. Helm's world is one of cynicism, hard-edged betrayal and more than a little male-chauvinistic. Those qualities are all present here, but there is also a nightmarish mystery here worthy of Mickey Spillane, as Young struggles to escape from the quicksand of Commie espionage.

The opening car scene is beautifully over-the-top: it reminds me of nothing as much as Detour, and if you were thinking of filming Night Walker, you might see a mix of that classic noir film with another, Pickup On South Street. Casting the film would be fun: if you'd made it then you might have Richard Widmark or Sterling Hayden as Young, and Susan Heyward or Joan Bennett as Elizabeth, a classic femme fatale with a seemingly vulnerable edge. The doctor who plays along with the deception has his own motives and Wilson's Aunt Molly, with whom Larry and Elizabeth live, is suspicious from the go, but the biggest enigma is Bonita 'Bunny' Decker, Wilson's 'old friend', for whom he was designing the boat, and whom Young keeps calling 'Red'. It's claustrophobic, and it's set on the waters of Chesapeake Bay, seemingly always at night, which is a masterful bit of noirish writing. I've gone back once or twice to the Matt Helm books, without the same satisfaction I had when I was a youngster devouring them, but in a sense, even though written in the previous decade, this is a more mature Donald Hamilton, working in a mature genre, and for all its madcap reversals and unlikely situations, Night Walker is a treat.

Night Walker by Donald Hamilton

Hard Case Crime 2006, £6.99 ISBN 9780857683489

This review will also appear in Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

THE FAT MAN: SOLVING MURDERS IN A THIN MAN'S WORLD

The other night I watched The Fat Man, a 1951 mystery film that's sometimes billed as film noir, which is what got me interested. It's not a noir at all, not that I'm one of those authoritarian purists who insists on a strict definition of classic noir; it's more like a series B movie of the 30s or 40s, a Falcon or Boston Blackie kind of thing, a frantic mystery with a bit of comedy and a bit of action. The gimmick is that the detective is indeed a fat man. He's a gourmand, makes no bones about it, but as played by J. Scott Smart, he's comfortable in his role—at least until, as he squeezes out of a drugstore phone booth (no one under what, 50?, will understand what that is!) a mother warns her young son about growing up to look like him! Think William Conrad as Cannon, without the fat everyman action hero car chase bits. He's not as pretentious as Nero Wolfe, and unlike Wolfe, he does move.

The Fat Man was a popular radio show which ran for ten years from 1946, sponsored by Pepto-Bismol, an antacid. The opening has him stepping on a drugstore scale: “weight, 237 pounds; fortune: danger”. The show was ostensibly created by Dashiell Hammett, as a counter-point to the Thin Man, but it's most likely Hammett merely licensed his name. Originally billed without a character name, but then called Brad Runyan, he was given life by Smart's deep tones (Smart was also appearing on the immensely popular Fred Allen show).

Smart carries the character into cinema well. There's some foolery with his size, and his appetite, though his first scene is doing the gourmet thing with some French chefs who are very much impressed. There's also a scene where he dances with Julie London—who needs persuasion, in the sense that it never occurred to her that the Fat Man might actually be able to dance—and he struts his stuff as the whole dance floor stops, Hollywood style, to watch and applaud. If the fat-shaming might seem pretty offensive in today's PC world, don't worry, because Runyon calls all the frails 'sweetheart' too. And there's a scene that takes place with a blackface comic performing in the background; it is a 1951 B movie.

I said Julie London, and the singer has a straight dramatic part here. One of the two reasons people might think there is something 'noirish' about the film is that much of it is told in flashback—and part of that is London telling of her romance with Rock Hudson, who's just got out of prison and has come to collect his cut of the money from a race-track robbery for which he took the fall. London is very good; you have to think this was the kind of part for which she was better-suited than most, playing some scenes herself rather than as the love object. Watching the retelling of the robbery itself later, I couldn't help but think Stanley Kubrick must have kept it in mind when he wrote The Killing.

London and Hudson's scenes together work; the weakness underneath Rock's star appeal works. In general, the cast is actually better than the material. You'll see a number of familiar faces in small parts: Jerome Cowan (Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon) as a police lieutenant; Parley Baer as a New York detective; Peter Brocco as the racetrack bookkeper; Tristam Coffin (TV's 26 Men), among others. And one not so familiar face, Teddy Hart, playing a thief called Shifty as if he were Joe Pesci's father. Hart had a small part in Mickey One, and also seems to have played a character called Crowbar in three Ma and Pa Kettle movies.

Jayne Meadows is the dentist's secretary who comes to Runyon when her boss falls (is pushed) out the window of a New York hotel where he's attending a dental convention. The story takes the Fat Man, and his thin assistant Bill (Clinton Sundberg) to California, where two of the other robbers (one is John Russell, later TV's Lawman) have made it big. Russell's wife, played by Lucille Barkley, is also having an affair with the chaffeur, a sub-plot which, like Barkley's career, undeservedly never goes anywhere. But the other real star is Emmett Kelly, the famous clown, in his first dramatic role. He plays a clown who did time in prison, and if anything the film doesn't do enough with the contrast between his own face and the clown's face, not that it hasn't been done before. But Kelly carries a great deal of straight, not clownly, pathos, and the scenes shot in the circus wagons and under the tent are the most atmospheric of the film, and at times use shadow and darkness well enough to invoke noir.

The plot creaks—there is a moment when Meadows announces she can name the killer, while the killer is conveniently in position to overhear the call—but try as I might, I cannot figure out how she possibly could have encountered, much less recognised, him. And crimes themselves are probably a form of overkill (sorry) that keeps the plot moving before you have a chance to think about where it's going or where it's been.

The Fat Man was directed by William Castle, best known for theatrical gimmicks when his B horror or sf movies were shown (he's the character John Goodman plays in Matinee, and was supposedly the inspiration for Hitchcock to make Psycho, in that he'd shown Hitch these things made money. It was written by Leonard Lee and Harry Essex. The first time I heard of Essex was when I got Mickey Spillane's opinion of the film version of I, The Jury which Essex wrote and directed (“he rooned it,” said the Mick). It's not noir, it's not classic, but it is fun. And kudos to J.Scott Smart, who, like William Conrad, keeps his dignity while being laughed at for his size.

LAST CALL FOR THE MICK: In Memoriam: Mickey Spillane

Note: This remembrance appeared originally in January 2007, in issue 50 of Crime Time, when it was still a magazine, six months after Mickey's death in July 2006. I came across it misfiled in my computer, re-read it, and felt saddened again that I didn't get to write a proper obit of Mickey for one of the British papers. You'll find the Daily Telegraph version of my interview with Mickey on the site here, maybe I will go back and post the whole interview soon. Note in this piece, which is as I wrote it, not as it appeared, I mention Sax Rohmer's novel President Fu Manchu; didn't that turn out to be prophetic! Since Mickey was so derisive of 'that cocksman' Bill Clinton when I interviewed him, I would love to ask him his thoughts on Donald Trump. In the meantime, a heartfelt RIP to Mickey, and though Max has done a great job with his unpublished oeuvre, I still miss him.

LAST CALL FOR THE MICK

Respectability really didn't sit all that well with Mickey Spillane, although the world more than caught up with the sex and violence of his Mike Hammer novels, and like whores and politicians, crime writers become respectable if they hang around long enough.  Indeed, more people probably know Mickey from his days as the guy in the trench coat fronting Light Beer commercials.  'Hey Mickey, got a Light?'

He was due a re-evaluation anyway, which began with Max Allan Collins' excellent documentary Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane.  Those early novels,  the ones written in money-making pulp fever before he found religion, before he began making his living being Mickey Spillane, have real narrative drive.  They're structured solidly, and while the characters veer between stereotype and psychopathology, more than anything they present a picture of immediate Post-War America that most writers couldn't beat with the butt of Mike Hammer’s .45.

Not that there was anything wrong with Mickey making his living being Mickey, because his passing  really does mark the end of an era.  He was everything the generation that won the big war, and their younger brothers, wanted to be.  Handsome, successful, the best in the world at what he did.  I look at the photos of the youthful Mickey signing his first big contract and I see Ted Williams, or John Wayne.  Remember, Mickey played Hammer in The Girl Hunters, and didn't do a bad job. How many other writers could match that?

Mick represents an era when tough guys didn't swear in front of ladies.  Where men wore hats that could be knocked off in fights.  Where hair tonic kept your crewcut stiff.  Where strippers in pasties were hot stuff, suggesting sex you didn't have to sit through a TV dinner to get.  An age where people believed in things like truth, justice and the American way, and no one had yet proven them wrong.  Where men had to do what men had to do.  The Mick believed in this world, and his readers felt it in his writing, so they believed too.

When Mickey came to London in 1999 his BBC minders gave me 40 minutes for my interview. Mick was 80 something and had flown overnight from South Carolina. He kept shooing the minders away so we could keep talking. I ran out of tape. It didn't matter; Mickey was still telling me stories as they pushed him into the cab to Broadcasting House.  I told him my mother had named me Michael because she'd loved Mike Hammer, reading him pregnant at 19 and feeling very adult.  'Jeez ya shudda hoyed the names they gave me,' he said, a pitchman to the end.

Ironically, the film Kiss Me Deadly, which satirizes Spillane brilliantly, may be the most enduring part of Mickey's legacy.  For film buffs it might be John Alton's 3-D noir camerawork on I The Jury. It certainly won't be Biff Elliott, nor Stacy Keach, nor the underrated Armand Assante, nor any of the other actors who tried to play in Hammer time.  I suspect the Mike Hammer novels will live on, as period pieces perhaps. they might get studied in American Studies classes, the way mine under Richard Slotkin read President Fu Manchu back in 1971. But Mickey Spillane, who sold America on the virtues of the American way, via paperback sex and violence, will certainly live on, because he was his own most enduring creation. I'll miss him.

JESSE STONE DISCOVERS THE DEVIL WINS

A nor'easter hits Paradise, Massachusetts, and when the storm has passed, three bodies come to the surface, as it were. One is an unknown man, only recently killed, the other two are the skeletons of two young girls, gone missing on a Fourth of July some twenty-five years before. And as Jesse Stone discovers, no one in Paradise really wants to talk much about the girls, or their disappearance, not even Molly Crone, his best cop. It's a great set up, as Jesse has to work to get beneath the rubble of silence and memory, and the killers work to make sure he doesn't.

I've written before about the difficulties of continuing another writer's character, and indeed have reviewed Michael Brandman's Jesse Stone novels (you can link to the most recent here). Now Reed Farrel Coleman has taken up the mantle, and the result is again something different from Robert B Parker's original.

It's a bad situation: if you stray too far from the original, you risk alienating fans, but more importantly you risk losing what it was that made the character and the stories, compelling. I've just reviewed one of Max Allan Collins' Mike Hammer novels; Collins has the advantage of working from Spillane's starts or outlines or notes, and he stays pretty close to the original; his prose style is somewhat less direct, though the bigger problem is that Mickey's stories are generally set in times the reader doesn't necessarily identify with Hammer. Coleman's problem is somewhat different. Brandman's Stone was the one from the TV movies he produced; still large part Parker, but somewhat dominant over the supporting cast, whose parts became smaller largely because Parker was so good at delineating character in short scenes with compact dialogue.

Coleman has brought back some characters, but he also seems to have strayed further away from Parker's Stone. It's partly a question of writing: Coleman's style is not the swift clean prose that made Parker's stories flow and work; he does far more telling than showing. More importantly, his Jesse appears to have far less inner confidence to draw back on: Jesse Stone is like a part of Spenser, and he can do things Spenser can't, like enjoy other women while staying faithful to the idea of his ex-wife Jenn. Well, this Jesse Stone can't do that, and he's having more trouble with his drinking too. His shrink, Dix, is back, but this Dix isn't really as penetrating as Parker's. And most importantly, neither Molly, who is at the heart of this story, and Suit, who recovering from a shooting and therefore not patrolling, are drawn as fully as they should be; Molly should be because of her inner turmoil and also because Coleman seems to be foregrounding Jesse's attraction to her.

Coleman's big strength is plotting, and though some might find a few things easy to guess, there is a neat twist toward the end. In fact, a twist as neat as the one in The Will To Kill, the Spillane which was my previous review, and it helps the story to have it. 

Robert B Parkers's The Devil Wins by Reed Farrel Coleman
No Exit Press, £7.99 ISBN 9781843448464

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

MIKE HAMMER'S WILL TO KILL

It's the mid 1960s and it's a somewhat mellower Mike Hammer. Though some things never change for the hard-boiled dicks, especially when they prowl the mean streets down by the waterfront in the early hours of a cold winter morning. Mike is catching a smoke and catching up with his thoughts when a body, or half a body to be precise, drifts past him on a slab of ice. Some men attract trouble, and Mike Hammer has always been one of them. 

But this is a different sort of trouble, and a different sort of story Max Allan Collins has finished working off pages and notes from Mickey Spillane. It turns out the body belongs to a butler, who worked for the Dunbars, a wealthy family up the Hudson near Monticello. And it turns out the late Mr. Dunbar was a friend of Captain Pat Chambers, Mickey's buddy. Dunbar's been dead three years, and his four children all still live on his estate, await an inheritance that won't kick in until they reach 40. When the state police rule the butler's death is ruled accidental, Pat's not so sure, but there's nothing he can do officially. So the man who can do more unofficially goes up to Monticello to look into things on Pat's behalf.

The butler didn't do it, but the fact that it was done to the butler ought to signal you that this is in not a typical Mike Hammer. In fact, it's more like a cozy who-dun-it, with a raft of suspects worthy of Agatha Christie for Mike to sort through, a will whose value would increase as the number of beneficiaries decrease, and soon more bodies are dropping. There are a couple of Hammer set-pieces; the most interesting at a casino, which plays a bit like Bogart as Marlowe at Eddie Mars' place. And though there are only two women to find Mike irresistible (Velda is also back on the scene) and Mike only is able to resist one, it's far less violent and less steamy than it might have been.

In Agatha Christie who dun its, the puzzle revolves around someone who is not who or what they say they are; often these characters are disenfranchised nobility trying to get or sometimes innocently getting their just desserts. Hammer's world isn't quite so predestined as the English, but it will not be a spoiler to say that, as with Christie, the story hinges on people who are not quite what they are supposed to be; sometimes this makes things clearer when Mike figures it out, sometimes it gets figured out for him. And there is a nice little twist at the end, where Hammer's sense of justice rears its head unexpectedly.

As I said, this is a mellower Hammer in some ways. He's more erudite, and actually corrects people with some unlikely facts. The changes in society brought on by the Sixties are just offstage, for now Luckies and Pabst are not quite declasse. Watching the way Max has worked to finish Mickey's work, and had to adjust to Hammer's changing world, I've sometimes questioned things: for me the Hammer with a deep-down rage will always seem the most authentic Mike. But this novel is intriguing precisely because, in the setting of a who-dun-it, a different side of Hammer that makes sense in terms of age and changing times suggests itself. It really seems like the kind of thing Mickey would have come to had he finished his original idea.

The Will To Kill by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Titan Books, £17.99, ISBN 9781783291427

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

MICKEY SPILLANE & MAX ALLAN COLLINS' MURDER NEVER KNOCKS

I've followed Max Allan Collins' completion of unfinished novels left behind by Mickey Spillane, and Max and I have even discussed/debated our interpretations of Mike Hammer and his character on my blog after a couple of my reviews. Which is why my first thought about Murder Never Knocks, the latest of Max's collaborations with Mickey, was that it was to my mind the best of the novels set after the classic Fifties Hammer milieu. It may not be the best novel, but Mike, Velda, Pat and even Hy Gardner are all drawn as characters who have moved on from some of their tropes, and they have all moved into the mid-Sixties gracefully. It's New York after the close down of many of the great newspapers, after the twist craze has come and gone, and the newsstands now sell Marvel comics with the Fantastic Four, so you can date it pretty well.

And Mike seems totally in place. He's been the target of two hit-men, come after him for reasons he can't figure out, when he's hired to guard the shower for the young bride of a shlocky movie producer who's getting into Broadway theatre; the bride's father is a top producer. And when there's a seeming robbery attempt, which turns out to be another hit, Hammer discovers that he's the target of someone who sees him as the ultimate gunfighter.

The two stories mesh nicely, though I have to confess I had a different ending in mind, one that would've been, to my mind, more classic Hammer. But as I say, we've moved on from those days. In his intro, Max mentions this is another of the shorter manuscripts Mickey left behind, though most of the story, including the ending, was outlined, so it's as Mickey planned. But there's also a bit of humour that I find very much like Max's work, and in the context of Mike Hammer easing into the Swinging Sixties, that humour makes perfect sense.

There are a couple of classic set-pieces, the best of which is an encounter with a mob guy and his bodyguards at the Peppermint Lounge, already in its post-Joey Dee decline and now a tourist trap, and another worth noting is Mike's encounter with the young fiance. It flows well, and if anything the ending smacks of later Spillane.

And I even think I caught an anachronism, where someone refers to the Village Voice as a freesheet. It may be now, but in those days it was a weekly that you paid for. I'll wait to hear from Max about that one. In the meantime, this is one of the best of the Max and Mickey Mike Hammers.

Murder Never Knocks by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Titan Books £17.99 ISBN 9781783291342

NOTE: This review will appear also at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

KILL ME, DARLING: MIKE HAMMER IS BACK

Mike Hammer is back again! I've written about the posthumous Mickey Spillane-Max Allan Collins collaborations before, and indicated my distinct preference for keeping Hammer in period, and in character. And that's exactly what Kill Me, Darling does and does well: it's vintage peak-era Spillane so seamless it's hard to see where the Spillane ends and the Collins picks up.

As Max explains, Kill Me, Darling was originally conceived as a follow-up to Kiss Me, Deadly, published in 1952, and a massive best-seller in both hardcover and paperback. I, The Jury had appeared in 1947, but the next five Hammer novels all were published between 1950 and 52, a surge of creativity which followed a pause which I like to think may have been partially due to Mickey's surprise at his first book's success.

After Kiss Me Deadly no Hammer novel would appear for a decade, and The Girl Hunters (1962) was a different sort of Hammer. This ten-year gap is often explained by Mickey's conversion to Jehovah's Witnesses, but I find that glib. I think it's more likely that he'd written Hammer out for the moment, that the success of Kiss Me, Deadly allowed him to relax, and perhaps that he was tired of defending his writing against fierce critics (not least Robert Aldrich and Buzz Bezzerides, director and writer of the film of Kiss Me, Deadly, which deconstructed Hammer in the last flattering and most apocalyptic way).

But Mickey did start a Hammer novel after Kiss Me, Deadly. It began with Hammer drunk and abandoned by Velda, his secretary/partner/true love, as if he wanted to take away what had made his character work. Mickey reused that opening in The Girl Hunters, and it may be the best part of the book, but he took that story in a different direction. Here Collins has borrowed a different, but similar, beginning from another Spillane fragment, then followed the original story line, taking Hammer, after the murder of the vice cop who brought him and Velda together, to Miami in pursuit of his love, who's shacked up with a vice-lord, the kind of guy who should be her natural enemy.

Hammer is as out of place in Miami as he is at home in New York: a number of times he stands out to the point of literally seeming like a target. The story follows some familiar arcs: he hooks up with a friendly reporter and cop to help his investigation, and some less familiar ones, including an offer from the heads of Mafia families. He survives one beating and two attempts on his life, but one of the two most interesting parts of the story is the way the violence is toned down: Hammer is practical here, never reaching that white heat of rage, and having dried himself out, given up Luckies and restricted himself to a sobering four beers a day, seems like a more rational, if not cerebral character.

But the key to the story is sex. 'Sex was always in it somewhere,' as Hammer himself notes. Nolly Quinn ran a brothel in New York, but with reform taking place in Miami, he's looking to branch out in other directions. Quinn's handsome, fastidious, smokes with cigarette holder, and possesses a stiff sort of charm: I kept seeing George Montgomery playing him. Hammer's convinced Velda's actually undercover, and he becomes convinced that Quinn (whose very name seems ambiguous) isn't a 'threat' to her because he must be 'queer'. Here he presents an amazing rationale: Quinn must be queer because he hasn't tried to consummate his relationship with Velda. 'No guy with factory wiring could shack up with a sensuous female like Velda and not lay a glove on her,' is his logic, but of course one of the oddities of the Hammer/Velda relationship is that Mike himself has always been waiting to make 'an honest woman' of Velda before laying the big glove on her. The layers of ambiguity are almost priceless here.

It builds to a denouement which actually surprises, with a fairly predictible betrayal and a shock revelation that gives the book its title. Oddly enough, this finish would be even better had not Hammer been so true to Velda; had he given in to the charms of Quinn's former lovers who offer, as he might have in previous years, the shock ending would have carried even more impact. But this is, in some ways, a kinder gentler Mike Hammer, a white knight reborn. It works better in many ways than The Girl Hunters did, and is enough to make one wonder how Hammer and Velda might have progressed had Spillane decided not to take a break from his archetypical character.

Kill Me, Darling by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Titan Books, £17.99 ISBN 9781783291380

Note: this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

EAT YOUR HEART OUT QUENTIN TARANTINO: MY MICKEY SPILLANE INTERVIEW

 

NOTE: In the summer of 1999, Mickey Spillane arrived in London to be honoured by the late lamented Crime Scene festival at the NFT. He had just flown in from South Carolina, via Charlotte, that morning, and his BBC handler wanted to make sure I understood I had 45 minutes with Mickey, who was, after all, in his 80s. Then he would rest before taking a taxi to Broadcasting House for another interview. After 45 minutes, Mickey shooed the handler away, and I ran out of tape as we continued talking until, literally, he was being pushed into the taxi cab.Caspar Llewellyn-Smith ran what follows, my short version of the interview, in the Daily Telegraph that Saturday--I later transcribed the whole thing for Crime Time, and maybe I'll post that here sometime too; it's worth it!

I, THE JURY, Mickey Spillane’s 1947 best seller, boasts the most infamous ending in hard-boiled fiction. Mike Hammer knows the woman he loves has murdered his best friend. She is seducing him with a strip tease. She’s also reaching for a gun behind her back. Hammer plugs her in her naked belly with a slug from his .45.

How c-could you?" she gasped
I had only a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
"It was easy," I said.

Eat your heart out, Quentin Tarantino. More than 50 years after writing those words, the king of pulp fictions is in London. Spillane's 81 years old, but his handshake could still crush a hoodlum’s trigger finger. He will deliver a Guardian Lecture tonight to keynote a season of crime films at the National Film Theatre, which includes the debut of a Spillane documentary directed by award-winning crime writer Max Allan Collins. "He was savaged by the critics," says Collins, "so Mickey developed this persona, entertainer and pitchman." 

And how. Interviewing Mickey is like saddling a bronco who refuses to be broken, and knows all the cowpunchers’ tricks. Ask about critics and he’ll tell you about interpreting between Salvador Dali and Jimmy Durante, who were both speaking English, more or less. Ask about politics and he’ll tell you about being shot from a circus cannon. There's no slowing down. And he’s still answering the inevitable questions about Mike Hammer’s violence with laughter.

"I tell them, you know why Mike shot that woman in the belly? He missed!"

Nowadays the violence of so-called neo-noir is high fashion, while Spillane’s has become somehow declasse. On its 50th anniversary, I THE JURY went out of print in America for the first time. Mickey’s surprised to learn he’s coming back into print in the UK with Robinson Publishing’s HARDBOILED: A MIKE HAMMER OMNIBUS, released to coincide with his visit. (Note: You can find my essay on the two Hammer omnibuses here).

"Corporate turnovers," he shrugs. "They thought I’m old and passe. I tell them I’m not an author, I’m a writer. I’m a merchandiser. I did Miller Lite commercials for 19 years on TV. The Mike Hammer TV series has been brought back for the fourth time. People know me, they stop me on the street."

In the adverts, Spillane, in trench coat and fedora, played himself as Mike Hammer with enough ironic humour to launch a thousand Tarantinos. "Hey, Mickey, got a Lite?" "Sure thing doll." The series featured many of America’s most famous sportsmen, but he was the star, the one they all looked up to. Spillane, like John Wayne (who gave him a treasured vintage Jaguar as a reward for some script doctoring) was what American men aspired to be. "Things change," he sighs. Well, almost sighs. "The Blue Ribbon’s gone in New York. We have no leaders to admire, all we’ve got is that cocksman in the White House" 

Spillane isn’t crazy about any of the Mike Hammer films either. The first, I THE JURY, was made by Victor Saville in 1953. Its NFT showing will be its first British showing in its original 3D format, and with the 20 minutes of cuts by the censors restored. But Spillane has never seen it all the way through.

"I went once in Brooklyn. Biff Elliott walks on screen and says "I’m Mike Hammer," and a voice in the audience howled ‘DAT’S Mike Hammuh?’ I walked out." He laughs again. "Victor wanted to make an epic, THE SILVER CHALICE, which fell on its face with a deathly thud. So to save money he gets this slob writer, and he rooned it! They have Mike getting knocked out with a wooden coat hanger!"

Ten years later, Spillane was cast as his own hero. Can you imagine Raymond Chandler playing Philip Marlowe? Mickey looks at stills from THE GIRL HUNTERS. "Good grief, did I ever look like that? There’s Shirley Eaton. What a pro; no ego, she just played the character and made me look good." The filming was done in Britain, where he palled around with gangsters like Billy Hills and Jack Spot. "When we needed a .45 for Mike, Billy brought a sack full of guns to the set, with live ammo."

The best-regarded Hammer adaptation is Robert Aldrich’s KISS ME DEADLY, which ends in nuclear holocaust. Mickey hates it. "They never even READ my book!" Aldrich saw an apocalyptic strain in Hammer, and critics have recently tried to connect that to Spillane’s faith. He’s a Jehovah’s Witness, but the critics got it wrong. "It’s not the end of the world we witness," he says, "but parousia, the coming of the peace of God, the end of the system of things as they are. It’s taking in knowledge."

But confounding the critics is his favourite pastime. "It tears them up. I had seven books at once in the top ten best seller list. I said ‘you’re lucky I don’t write three more!'"

He’s written two children’s books. The first, THE DAY THE SEA ROLLED BACK, won the Junior Literary Guild Award. "I keep winning these crazy prizes," he shrugs. "It meant the book sells to libraries." And he’s still writing.

"I’m halfway through a new Mike Hammer novel," he says. "But I used to write fast…now my rear end gets tired. I’m not full of piss and vinegar any more. The vinegar’s all gone." He wrote I, THE JURY in nine days, originally plotting it as a comic book starring "Mike Danger". The book revolutionised the publishing industry.

"I knew it would be a hit. Paperback reprints were huge during the war, and I saw a market for originals. All those soldiers coming back. A little sex wouldn’t hurt, and they’d seen violence. I got a comic distributor to guarantee a paperback reprint, got a $1,000 advance from Dutton for the hardcover." Soon the only books outselling Spillane were the Bible and Dr. Spock. "I’ve gone downhill ever since," he laughs. 

Spillane has a radio interview next. He’s been talking for two hours; I’ve long since run out of tape. Across the room in the Savoy, a business meeting has ground to a halt, eavesdropping on Mickey’s spiel. After he leaves, they ask, "who was that?"

"Mickey Spillane," I tell them.

"Mickey Spillane! How do you interview Mickey Spillane?"

"It was easy," I said.

HEROES NEVER DIE: PARKER AND HAMMER

Note: this essay originally appeared as my twelfth American Eye column at Shots, in January 2009. I originally posted on this site a link to the piece, but the link no longer functions, hence my reprinting it now. But it prompted a spirited exchange with Max Allan Collins, which you can find with the original post here.

HEROES NEVER DIE

It's always sad to mark the passing of an era, and even sadder when you're reminded of another you'd marked already. This essay is dedicated to two giants of the field, which makes it appropriate that one of the books discussed is The Goliath Bone, the first of a number of Mike Hammer manuscripts Mickey Spillane left behind and which Max Allan Collins has completed. And at the end of January, less than a month after Donald Westlake's sudden death on New Year's Eve, Richard Stark's latest, and I suppose last, Parker novel, Dirty Money appears. It occurs to me you could argue that all the Parker books were begun by Westlake, and finished by Stark from Westlake's notes.

At one point in Dirty Money, the police release an artist's sketch which deliberately makes Parker kinder and softer, exactly what I mentioned when Westlake revived Stark and Parker in 1998 (was it really that long ago?). Kinder and gentler? Parker and Claire actually stay in a Berkshires B&B surrounded by leaf peepers, and Parker manages to blend in, as far as that goes. The subject of Parker aging never comes up, although his attitude toward Claire is somewhat less prehistoric than it was in the first series of books. He doesn't seem to have aged because Parker was never really a child of his time, or any time, but there is one problem: modern technology, surveillance, communications, forensics, have certainly made the life of the professional criminal more difficult.

The story picks up where Ask The Parrot left off, but the botched heist happened two books ago, in Nobody Runs Forever. I am convinced Westlake intended this story to be on-going, from book to book, for just as long as he could manage. Raymond Chandler once wrote that whenever your plotting gets stuck, have someone with a gun come in the room, Westlake has refined that dictum; the characters may or may not have guns, but they almost always have or can discover larcenous motives—double cross has always been the central theme of the Parker books. Parker is looking to collect cash he left behind in a church, and all sorts of people, from a tough-talking lesbian bounty-hunter to a hapless wanna-be true crime writer, are getting involved, and most of them are looking to take some of the dough, or all of it. They are introduced and described with such care, as are others, like the real Tony Soprano, New Jersey crime boss Frank Meany, or the Massachusetts state trooper Gwen Reversia, that you're certain they were destined to appear again. My feeling is that Parker's anonymity would continue to be compromised, book by book, until Westlake reached the point he couldn't write Parker out of. Things always came back to haunt Parker; if his life were easy, it would never have been fun to write about. Or to read. So I'm sad that my dream of Parker's Last Stand will never come about.

According to Mickey Spillane, there could never be a last stand for Mike Hammer, because 'see, heroes never die. John Wayne isn't dead. Elvis isn't dead...you can't kill a hero'. He said it to me when I interviewed him, he said it on stage the next night at the NFT, and I'm sure he said it a million more times. And it's true, but only to a point. The Duke didn't die, of course, but he went out perfectly before that death, in The Shootist. Even earlier he'd had the luxury of working his way through a host of different valedictory performances, among them The Cowboys (very good) True Grit (good) and McQ (not so good) before he and Don Siegel made their small classic.

Mike Hammer had no such luck; he's been out of print for a long time, consigned to being a relic of his era; Hammer is firmly entrench-coated into immediate postwar America, he's one of the best representations of the era's unconscious drives, and even though he moved reasonably well into the sixties, the ferocious drive and energy wasn't there; the times had changed (and so, in fairness, had Mickey). Mickey left six Hammer manuscripts in different stages of completion, and The Goliath Bone was the most fully finished, but it's also the most risky with which to launch a Hammer revival, because it's set in post 9/11 New York, thus taking Mike Hammer as far as possible out of own times and into a time warp.

Face it: Hammer has to be in his eighties by the time the jets crash into the World Trade towers. For the story's purposes, he's played as if in his late fifties or early sixties, I'd guess, and he's actually planning on making Velda an honest woman at long last, but it never jells. That's because it's not your disbelief you're being asked to suspend, but your belief, in the character Mickey created, and in the writing he did when he was young and hungry. The writing here, whether it's Mickeys or Max's, just doesn't have the same intensity; it's too knowing. The thing that made Kiss Me Deadly work so well as a film was that Robert Aldrich and Buzz Bezzerides recognised the primal drives that Hammer represented; they felt the energy in the prose, the manic power of the character. That's gone now; this Mike Hammer is far closer to Mickey doing his Miller Lite ads, or telling his fantastic stories; Stacy Keach could play this story in the TV series without too much problem; hell, Mickey might even be able to play it himself, in his 80s. But as Hammer fiction it just doesn't take off.

Not that they don't try. As Velda says, at one point, Mike is taking on, literally, the whole damn world, and the David and Goliath metaphor isn't lost on anyone. This is just before they actually do get married, and Mike turns down a hell of a seduction attempt on the eve of his wedding; this is a kinder gentler Mike Hammer too. Well kinder, maybe. And there are plenty of jokes about relics.

But even as the plot gets going, it winds up depending on his trusty .45 being not so trusty after all. The biggest twist is, if you know the Hammer novels, pretty obvious, and though it's fun, it just isn't the same thing. At one point, Pat Chambers, Hammer's long-time buddy, police foil, and longer-after Velda, says 'nothing lasts forever, Mike'. Velda tells him 'a relic is in the past, Mike'. That contradicts Mickey, who said that heroes never die, but they're both right. Heroes live forever, but they live in the worlds in which they are heroes, and they aren't always such heroes in other worlds. Apparently, some of the other unfinished Hammer novels are period pieces, and some take Hammer through the decades. I'll look forward to seeing what Mickey and Max do with Hammer in the world where he belongs. 

DIRTY MONEY by Richard Stark

Quercus, £16.99 ISBN 9781847247117

THE GOLIATH BONE by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Quercus, £17.99 ISBN9781847245953

MICKEY SPILLANE'S COMPLEX 90

The good thing about Complex 90 is that it reads like vintage Mickey Spillane, which shouldn't be a surprise, as Max Allan Collins, who has finished the book for Mickey, explains in the introduction. The title had once been announced for publication in the early Sixties, and Mickey gave him a partial manuscript to safeguard. It's set in 1964, with a new president in Washington and a new leader in Moscow, and Mike Hammer is hired as a bodyguard to accompany a straight-shooting (in the non Hammer sense) Republican senator to Russia, after helping said Senator survive an assassination attempt that killed his primary bodyguard. The novel opens with Hammer having got himself back to America after escaping from a Russian jail, and leaving a trail of (coincidentally enough) 45 Commies behind, meaning he's now an international incident.

Hammer then tells the first part of the story to the panel of US intelligence bigwigs, in flashback. This is always a dangerous thing, because you'd think he'd edit a few of the more lubricious details out of what he says (as opposed to what he tells us, the readers). This is the best pure Hammer in the book; his prison break is fast action set up by his hard-boiled resistance to his captors. As I said, vintage stuff.

Back in America, the question becomes why the Russians went after Hammer with such zeal. A question of revenge, against him and/or Velda, his former secretary and, as it turns out, an agent of the same top secret agency that employs Hammer? Or is there some other motive? Hammer investigates, Russians try to kill him, and he must beware of the motives of people who may appear to be friends, or, as always with Mike, potential lovers.

The story moves quickly, moved by its actions, as you expect from Spillane at his best. It's denouement is somewhat complicated, relying on an awful lot of engineering complicated plots which don't always seem necessary, and there's far more time spent on Hammer's head-butting with authority, establishing his own freedom to use his own methods, than there is on fleshing out (so to speak) some of the characters who are potentially villains. So when the truth is revealed, it's nowhere near as much shock as it ought to be.

My problem with the book is that this isn't a vintage of Hammer of which I'm particularly fond, although I thought The Big Bang, another of Mickey's posthumous collaborations with Max, set in 1965, was superb in many ways (you can read my review here). I remember liking The Girl Hunters (1961), but in Complex 90 the concept of Mike and Velda as secret agents gets carried to retrospective extremes—going back to the OSS during WWII for Velda—and Sixties spy excess. If the agency Mike and Velda work for really is so secret, why is Hammer carrying its ID around in his wallet, and how would anyone else know what the ID meant? I know this was the era of James Bond and Matt Helm and Man from UNCLE, but Mickey had Tiger Mann, and to me Mike Hammer is far more interesting as a private eye than a secret agent, especially since a good portion of his secret agency, as I mentioned, involves him arguing his bosses into letting him be a private eye. Call me conservative (which is what a Mike Hammer fan ought to be).

There is also an interesting private scene with Velda, which details her torture when she was trapped behind the Iron Curtain on a mission, which ends with something less than tender, but does go a long way into explaining why Mike and Velda never felt the need to marry—an issue in 21st-century set Goliath Bone. When I reviewed that book, it prompted a spirited exchange with Max Collins about what he called my 'distressingly literal' take on the book—and you can find that exchange here. I'm also going to reprint the original Shots review, as it doesn't seem to be up at their website any longer. And post the Telegraph version of my 1999 interview with Mickey. Meanwhile, enjoy...

Complex 90 by Mickey Spillane and Max Alan Collins

Titan Books £17.99 ISBN 9780857684660 

Note: This review, in slightly different form, will also appear at
Crime Time www.crimetime.co.uk

DON WINSLOW REACHES SATORI

Extending the careers of other novelists' memorable characters is a task which has defeated many big-name writers, some (like Sebastian Faulks with James Bond) almost before they've even started. On the other hand, there have been many characters written by ghost writers where no one has, at the time, noticed the difference (Ellery Queen springs to mind).

In the detective field, such franchises tend to be offered to likely suspects; Robert B Parker with Chandler, Joe Gores with Hammett, Max Allan Collins with Mickey Spillane; often writing sequels or finishing material left behind (see my take on Max's Mickey here). Recently Parker's work has been passed on, with Michael Brandman, who produced the Jesse Stone TV movies, writing new Stone novels (see my review here), and Ace Atkins a surprising choice to continue Spenser.

The difficulty is deciding how far to go on the road to pastiche. Can you remain true to the spirit of the writer while taking his character in new directions? Can you write in his style, or is it useless to avoid your own? The more distinctive the writer, and the character, the more difficult the task becomes.

On the surface, Don Winslow may have seemed an unusual choice to produce this prequel to Trevanian's Shibumi. Winslow is an immensely talented writer who has produced some fine, neo-noirish, California stories, a recent series of laid-back surfer detective novels, and two remarkable books centered on the drug wars, the majestic epic Power Of The Dog and the brilliantly bleak Savages. He may have been chosen because Hollywood has caught on; The Death and Life of Bobby Z has been, so to speak, filmed (see my take here); Robert De Niro and Michael Mann were at times attached to a film of The Winter Of Frankie Machine, Oliver Stone is adapting Savages. And you might argue his bittersweet novel Isle Of Joy (see my review here) showed a facility with spy tales that might have appealled to the Travanian estate.

What must be remembered is Shibumi, although Trevanian's most successful book by far, was an outgrowth of his earlier work, straight-forward Bondish stuff like The Eiger Sanction. He moved from them to The Main, a dark police procedural set in Montreal, which may be his best, but wasn't a best-seller, before simplifying his formula and hitting on a character, Nicholas Hel, who is, in effect a Super Hero, pitched beyond Bond and nothing like a Marlowe, Spade or Hammer. Hel beat Jason Bourne into print by a year, but whether there's any influence would be for the reader to decide.

The background was intricate, but the problem was that, as a super hero, Hel would always triumph in the ultimate shoot-out, and this is a dilemma that might constrain your story telling. As this is a prequel, Winslow has to conform to the Hel Trevanian created, but he is afforded some freedom in showing how he got to be who he is, and he uses this freedom well. After all, as the blurbs suggest, Hel is not only the 'world's most dangerous assassin', but a 'mystic, master of language and culture, and the world's most artful lover'--so Winslow gets to provide him with a French courtesan to instruct him in whatever he doesn't know, courtesy of the CIA. The multiple conflicts and contradictions implied are something Winslow has fun with, but his assignment, to kill a Soviet commissioner in China, becomes something more complicated.

This is where he is at his best, outlining multiple betrayals, warring loyalties, and as you might expect from the author of Power Of The Dog, following the drug trade through Asia alongside the budding conflicts in South East Asia. He is constrained, to an extent, by Hel's talents, the fact that he is a Superman, and at times the trying to draw all the strands together can have twists colliding with each other. But he manages to draw it all together in a climax that not only resolves his story but does leave Hel set up properly for Trevanian's own book from three decades earlier.

I think if you're a Winslow fan already you'll be impressed rather than enthralled. If you're a Hel fan you shouldn't be disappointed; the world may have caught up and passed Trevanian's super-assassin in 30 years, but Winslow, while taking him back in time, also brings him forward. The news that Leonardo di Caprio wants to play Hel in a movie makes a lot more sense than his playing J Edgar Hoover, and should help cement Winslow's name. Next he brings back Hel to the Manhattan setting of Isle Of Joy, say in the early 1960s, all hel breaks loose, and the adapters of Mad Men option the film rights.

SATORI by Don Winslow
Headline, £14.99 ISBN 9780755370207 (paperback published at £6.99)

BLAKE EDWARDS AND CRIME

Although Blake Edwards' British obituaries mostly mentioned Peter Gunn, if only for the Henry Mancini music, his television crime work deserves more attention. I wrote about the Brian Keith Mike Hammer in Crime Time 2.6, the Mickey Spillane special issue, and about City Heat in my Pocket Essential Clint Eastwood. It's nice to bring it all together here, because Richard Diamond and Peter Gunn were among my favourites when I was a kid, and impressionable...

In 1999, the National Film Theatre's Crime Scene festival honoured Mickey Spillane, and showed the rare 1954 pilot for a Mike Hammer TV series, written and directed by Blake Edwards. Edwards' got the job because he had created the radio private eye Richard Diamond, played by Dick Powell, which had cashed in on the wise-cracking hard-boiled quality which made his Philip Marlowe so convincing. Edwards' Hammer, Brian Keith, played the part with what I called at the time 'the right mix of violence and affability', tapping into some of Spillane's often-overlooked humour, and though the show wasn't picked up, the pilot became the basis of the Darren McGavin more tongue-in-cheek series a few years later, whose tone prefigured the Stacy Keach Hammer from its many different incarnations.

In 1957, when television asked for a Richard Diamond series, Powell wasn't interested, so Edwards cast David Janssen in his first major role. Diamond was a cool presence moving through a shadowy world, to which he was linked by 'Sam' the operator at his answering service, whom he called from his car phone! Seen only from the waist down, her legs, and voice, belonged to an equally unknown Mary Tyler Moore. But the real star was Henry Mancini's music, which began his long association with Edwards. When reruns were syndicated, they emphasised Sam by retitling the show 'Call Mr. D.' Diamond moved from NBC to CBS, and from New York to a less noirish Los Angeles, but Edwards had already reprised the character in New York with Peter Gunn, played by Craig Stevens, every bit as smooth as Janssen but with a lighter touch closer to Powell's, or indeed a small-screen Cary Grant. That's Mancini, on the left with Stevens and Edwards, on the Gunn set in the photo on the right.

Mancini's Peter Gunn theme has become an icon of 1950s cool, and fit perfectly with Gunn's base of operations, a jazz club called Mother's where his girlfriend, played by the lovely Lola Albright (see photo left), sang. With Herschel Bernardi providing a tired cop foil to Gunn's super-hip detective (basically the same role Ed Begley had played with Powell on the radio Mr. Diamond), the show ran for 114 episodes over four years. Edwards tried to cash in on the formula once again with Mr. Lucky, (1959) based on the 1943 Cary Grant film, but John Vivyan wasn't a Craig Stevens, much less a Grant, and it lasted only one season.

Edwards revisited Gunn twice, first in an underrated 1967 film, whose gender confusions prefigured Victor/Victoria, and whose climax, as Max Allan Collins has pointed out, was borrowed from Spillane's Vengeance Is Mine. But only Stevens returned from the original cast, and its 50s style didn't translate to the Sixties setting. In 1989 he wrote and directed a disappointing TV movie starring Peter Strauss as Gunn alongside Jennifer Edwards, his daughter.

Edwards made one other venture into period crime, writing the script which became the Clint Eastwood/Burt Reynolds film City Heat, set in early 1930s Kansas City. He was originally supposed to direct, but he wanted to cast his wife, Julie Andrews, in the role finally played by the much better-suited Madeline Kahn. Reynolds had not enjoyed working with Andrews when Edwards directed them in The Man Who Loved Women, and when he objected Eastwood sided with his co-star. Eventually, Richard Benjamin directed, and Edwards' screenplay was credited to Sam O. Brown, whose initials reflect the title of his 1981 film SOB.

Though Edwards remains thought of as a comedy director, his comedies are often less than satisfying. That's partly because they so often depend on the despair of the main characters, and partly because the casting and characters often lack subtlety but fall short of farce. I do remember being enthralled by Operation Petticoat when I was eight or nine at summer camp. But they lack edginess, as if the characters are being softened, despite their obvious faults; it's one of the reasons James Garner and Jack Lemmon (and Grant, for that matter) worked so well with Edwards, because they are essentially likeable; Lemmon's may be the best Edwards' performance, in Days Of Wine And Roses. But when you look, Garner is far better with Julie Andrews in The Americanization of Emily, which itself far outshone What Did You Do In The War Daddy; and he's better in Robert Benton's Twilight than in Sunset, which itself isn't as good as Hearts Of The West. He is the best thing in Victor/Victoria, where I find Julie Andrews' arch in the extreme, less funny than Grant in I Was A Male War Bride but with no real sexual edge to her cross-dressing.

But when Edwards worked in TV crime, his characters' flaws were minimal, and subsumed by their outward cool. They could move through a flawed world as, if not heroes, men to whom small problems were not problems. These characters stopped interesting Edwards when he got to the big screen; the 1967 Gunn is far more vulnerable than his 50s prototype. But you might argue he didn't quite know what to do with his flawed characters and their despair; like the Edwards who hurt himself trying to slice his own wrists, they're caught somewhere between angst and joy, somewhere he often can't define. Gunn's relationship with Edie reflects that: he's often cool to the point of detached with her, often barely smiling in the face of her affection. It's a peculiar sort of 1950's attitude, a bit of understatement somewhere between Hugh Hefner's Playboy and Mike Hammer with Velda.

This article will also appear at Shots (www.shotsmag.co.uk)

MICKEY SPILLANE'S BIG BANG

The Big Bang is the second of Mickey Spillane's novels left in manuscript form and finished by Max Allan Collins. When the first, The Goliath Bone, was published, Max and I had a discussion (which you can link to here) about the reasons for my dislike of Mike Hammer in a contemporary landscape, and at that time Max suggested I might like this one, set in the Sixties, better. He was right.

In fact, the 1965 in which this novel takes place would seem a perfect setting for Hammer, with the contrast between the nascent love generation and Mike's generation mirroring the tension between fathers who'd been to war and sons opposed to Vietnam, between parents and children over the concepts of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Mickey makes the most of it--better here, I think, than my dim memory of his 60s Hammers, or indeed the Tiger Mann books, neither of which I liked as much as those first six Hammers, the ones that seemed to have been written in a white-hot post-war rage.

The Big Bang is full of Mickey anticipating trends that had yet to manifest themselves in 1965. It starts off as if it will be another of those somewhat lighter 60s version of Hammer, the ones that seem to anticipate the Stacy Keach Mike. There's a scene where Velda sets Pat Chambers up with a retired stripper that is amusing in a very 50s way. But it contains that element of self-parody that you don't get in the early Hammers, which are relentless in their self-belief. Soon Mike finds himself caught in the middle of a battle for control of New York's drug trade, and after he gets his digs in at LBJ you wonder if he would have been comfortable, just a few years in the future, to join Elvis in Nixon's War On Drugs. But it is, in fact,very funny at times; Mickey's comic touch is much underrated. It also opens with graphic up front violence, almost as if Mickey were anticipating Bonnie and Clyde, Sam Peckinpah, The Man With No Name and the rest--but perhaps he always did. It wasn't so much that society caught up to Mike Hammer's violence, it's that they accepted it coming from anti-heroes, and the point with Mike Hammer is that, violent as he is, he is a hero, just one willing to make pragmatic decisions.

The first clue that Mickey might be moving in more dangerous directions was some extremely poignant description of the decay of the city--at one point he describes 'architectural dentures', an accurate and direct metaphor which suggests the way the changing world meets the old world at just the wrong time. From that point the story changes, and Mike, the great revenger, finds himself being used a part of someone else's bigger revenge. There is another bravura scene in which Mike takes an LSD trip: one which taps deeps into his psychopathology. Again there's a slight element of self-parody here, but mostly it's Mickey getting back to that sense of story being released from the driving need of his character which made those early Hammers so great. I'm not giving much away, because the basics of the plot are fairly obvious, and don't need the denoument scene to explain them, but where Mickey takes them is absolutely incredible, as Mike in the end makes a decision which is pure Hammer, and the book's final lines are as jaw-dropping as the close of I, The Jury, and almost as apocalyptic as the movie version of Kiss Me, Deadly. It's as if, in one bravura moment, Mickey tapped into the basic Mike and gave him his rein again, and it's hauntingly powerful.

The Big Bang by Mickey Spillane with Max Allan Collins
Quercus, ISBN 9781849160414, £19.99

HEROES NEVER DIE: WESTLAKE AND SPILLANE IN THE AMERICAN EYE

Yesterday's essay on the Watchmen film was the 100th post on Irresistible Targets. Thanks for all the feedback--leave it on the site if you can (rather than emailing me) so it too can be shared.

Meanwhile, my January (!?!) American Eye column has finally been posted at Shots, a double review of and tribute to Donald Westlake's last Richard Stark Parker novel, Dirty Money, and the first of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer mss to be finished by Max Allan Collins, The Goliath Bone. As the link to it at Shots no longer works, you can now find the whole piece reprinted at IT here. Mickey and Goliath. Sounds like the title of a biography. That's Mickey and Max above on the right, and Westlake and Stark together on the left.