Killing Town

  Contents

  Cover

  More Mike Hammer From Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Meet Mike Hammer

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  About the Authors

  Mike Hammer Novels

  Also Available from Titan Books

  KILLING TOWN

  A MIKE HAMMER NOVEL

  MORE MIKE HAMMER

  FROM TITAN BOOKS

  Lady, Go Die!

  Complex 90

  King of the Weeds

  Kill Me, Darling

  Murder Never Knocks

  The Will to Kill

  The Goliath Bone (February 2019)

  Murder, My Love (March 2019)

  The Big Bang (February 2020)

  Masquerade for Murder (March 2020)

  Kiss Her Goodbye (February 2021)

  MICKEY SPILLANE

  and

  MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  TITANBOOKS

  Killing Town: A Mike Hammer Novel

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785655500

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785655517

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: April 2018

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

  Copyright © 2018 Mickey Spillane Publishing, LLC

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  What did you think of this book? We love to hear from our readers. Please email us at readerfeedback@titanemail.com or write to us at Reader Feedback at the above address.

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  FOR MICKEY

  happy birthday, buddy

  MEET MIKE HAMMER

  AN INTRODUCTION

  BY MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  I have told the story numerous times since Mickey Spillane’s passing in 2006. If you’ve heard this before, perhaps more than once, skip ahead as much as you like… but be careful. There are surprises coming. This is a book with Mickey Spillane’s name on it, after all.

  In the final week of his life, Mike Hammer’s creator said to his wife Jane, “When I’m gone, there’ll be a treasure hunt around here. Take everything you find and give it to Max. He’ll know what to do.”

  Mickey had already called me, a week before, asking me to finish the Mike Hammer novel, The Goliath Bone, if he was unable to.

  I had been Mickey’s fan since the early sixties, when as an adolescent I’d discovered his fever-dream prose. I was led there by the Darren McGavin TV series (Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, 1958–1959). The late fifties and early sixties saw a wave of private eye TV shows, with the Hammer imitation Peter Gunn leading the pack, its creator Blake Edwards having written and directed a failed Hammer TV pilot.

  I became a fanatic about Spillane, whose noir poetry mingled with a level of sex and violence unavailable in other mysteries of the day, exploding my thirteen-year-old skull into fragments as if by Hammer’s .45 automatic. Within a year I was writing Spillane-style stories and sending them in the mail to publishers, none of whom seemed to be looking for teenaged mystery writers.

  But I began publishing by the early 1970s and, along the way, became known as Spillane’s defender—though he was the most popular American mystery writer of the twentieth century, Mickey’s work has been attacked with a fervor unparalleled in American letters. He was blamed for juvenile delinquency and for ruining the reading habits of adults, too. The Atlantic eviscerated him and so did Parents’ Magazine; self-righteous shrink Dr. Frederic Wertham singled out Spillane in his anti-comic book screed, Seduction of the Innocent (1954), the only writer of prose fiction to be so vilified.

  Because I’d written articles defending and praising Spillane, I was invited to be the liaison between him and the 1981 Bouchercon (the major mystery fan convention, named for New York Times critic Anthony Boucher, who was among the first wave of Spillane’s attackers). Held in Milwaukee, the con was tying into that city’s beer persona by having Spillane, then starring in very clever and successful TV commercials for Miller Lite, as a guest of honor.

  I had written Mickey perhaps one-hundred fan letters, but the only one he answered was in 1973, when I sent him my first published novel (Bait Money), and he welcomed me to the professional community of writers. So when I was introduced to Mickey, he said, “Oh, I know Max! We’ve been corresponding for years.” And I said, “That’s right, Mickey—one-hundred letters from me, one letter from you.”

  And we became fast friends.

  This led to me visiting him, from time to time, in his home at Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. I was there when he met Jane Rogers, who would become his wife (well, he’d first known her when she was a little kid before she moved away). He accepted when I asked him to be my son Nathan’s godfather. We collaborated on numerous projects together, including anthologies, an early 1990s comic book series (Mike Danger, a science-fiction private eye), and a biographical documentary (Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane, 1999, featured on the Criterion DVD/Blu-ray of the great Hammer noir, Kiss Me Deadly).

  During my visits to South Carolina, we would talk writing. He had many friends in that part of the world, but no writer friends. He liked to talk shop. Deep into the night, he would share with me his plans for various Mike Hammer novels, often acting out the wild endings that were his trademark. On one visit, he sent two one-hundred-page-plus unfinished Hammer manuscripts home with me for safekeeping, as if prescient about Hurricane Hugo, which would soon destroy his home.

  With my wife Barb—she and I write the “Antiques” mystery series together, as “Barbara Allan” (Antiques Wanted)—I went down to Murrells Inlet for a special post-funeral celebration of Mickey’s life. We stayed on to go through the many stacks of unpublished material that Mickey had left behind. For days, Barb, Jane, and I sat around the big Spillane dining-room table—piled with stacks of manuscript pages—and would sort through. Now and then someone would shout, “I’ve got a Hammer!”

  Why Mickey left behind so many unfinished works— particularly since his prose was so valuable commercially— cannot be answered simply. Part of it had to do with his religious conversion to the conservative Jehovah’s Witnesses, who at least twice disenfranchised him due to the level of sex and violence in his work. In other words, Mickey Spillane’s church told him to quit writing like Mickey S
pillane. They did not, however, ask him to quit tithing.

  But there were other factors. Mickey often had more than one novel going—he would get “stuck” on one, and turn to another. Also, he loved doing beginnings and endings—and no one in the genre was ever better at either—but sometimes got bored in the middle. His favorite form was the 20,000-word novelette, and he spent almost a decade at the height of his fame writing them for low-end men’s magazines that paid him a pittance. His fertile imagination sometimes worked against him—he’d get a new idea, and set aside a manuscript to pursue it.

  Unlike Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, and Erle Stanley Gardner— his contemporaries—Mickey did not write scores of novels about his famous character. There are around one-hundred Perry Mason novels, but Mickey published only thirteen Mike Hammer novels. This made the half-dozen significant Hammer manuscripts—again, usually in the one-hundred-page range— such an exhilarating find.

  One particularly brittle, discolored manuscript—in the treasure hunt Jane, Barb, and I conducted (beautiful women are always around when Mike Hammer is involved)—stirred my memory. Mickey had shown this one to me! It had been special to him.

  On my visits to his Murrells Inlet home, late at night, we would repair to his third-floor office—he had two others on the now rebuilt property—and we would talk writing. In particular, he would regale me with ideas he had for future Mike Hammer novels. The subdued lighting invoked the beachfront campfires where young lifeguard Frank Morrison Spillane would “scare hell out” of his friends with spooky stories; but that lighting also had an appropriately noir flavor.

  After all, we were talking Mike Hammer.

  It was in that office, during one bull session, that he shared with me the endings for King of the Weeds, The Big Bang, and Kiss Her Goodbye—novels in progress that I would have been astonished to learn would eventually be completed by me… including putting Mickey’s mesmerizing endings into prose.

  On one such occasion, he withdrew from somewhere—like Bugs Bunny summoning a carrot or a machine gun—a browning, crumble-edged, fairly lengthy manuscript. It ran about thirty dense single-spaced pages, the equivalent of sixty-some double-spaced pages. I began reading.

  “You wrote this a long time ago,” I said.

  He had pulled up a chair, turned it backward and sat, studying me, wearing a devilish, little-kid smile that threatened to turn to laughter at any moment. He nodded.

  I kept reading. “This is good.”

  Soft chuckle. “I know.” That laugh-threatening smile.

  “Is this what I think it is?”

  A sly nod. The smile continued.

  For half an hour, he sat enjoying me enjoy what was clearly an early appearance of Mike Hammer. But it was different from anything else about Hammer I’d read—he was even more of a lone wolf. Velda wasn’t his secretary yet. He was doing an undercover job in a small, corrupt town. Some of the flavor of the famous early non-Hammer, The Long Wait, permeated the ancient pages.

  “This is terrific,” I said, when I’d breathlessly raced through the chapters. “Where does it go from here?”

  He shrugged, collected the pages, stowed them somewhere, and we moved on to other subjects.

  In the surprising wealth of unfinished Hammer novels and short stories we discovered, two stood out as something really special. All were interesting, and several were recent, including his final Hammer, The Goliath Bone, and the penultimate King of the Weeds. Several others were clearly “comeback” books—novels that would reintroduce the famous detective after a sustained absence, as in the disco-era Kiss Her Goodbye.

  But these other two manuscripts were really, really old, interior evidence dating them to early in the post-World War II period— around 1945. Lady, Go Die! had revealed itself as the second Mike Hammer story, the unfinished sequel to I, the Jury. Yet this other manuscript indicated I, the Jury itself was the second Mike Hammer story.

  Killing Town (as I have called it—Mickey’s pages bore no title) indeed appeared to be the first Mike Hammer novel.

  To me, it seemed exceptionally strong, but the absence of Manhattan, Velda and Pat Chambers made it somewhat atypical, and Hammer himself was not as vengeance-driven as in the later novels, though he was as hardboiled as ever. What to do with this special tough-guy pulp jewel?

  As it happened, Mickey’s last completed novel, The Last Stand, was also not a typical work—for one thing, it was a modern-day western that didn’t feature Hammer at all. I found it quite wonderful. But in 2006, preparing a program of Spillane novels developed from his files required (it seemed to me) starting with full-blown Mike Hammer stories. And he had left something like a dozen of those, six substantial, six more, shorter but significant, not to mention even shorter fragments that became the short stories collected in A Long Time Dead.

  What to do with these two very special works?

  That’s when it occurred to me that saving both of them for the centenary of Mickey’s 1918 birth would be perfect timing. Fortunately, Titan Books agreed with me. They, and their associate publisher, Hard Case Crime, were keen to celebrate Mickey’s day (a day of the guns, as it were) with the publication of the last solo Spillane novel, and the very first Mike Hammer story.

  Which you hold in your hands.

  For purposes of continuity, we will assume this tale takes place in 1946 or ’47, around a year before the events of I, the Jury. This is a Mike Hammer younger than we’ve seen, a recent veteran of combat in the Pacific, a raw, aggressive roughneck, minus the somewhat civilizing influence of his secretary/partner Velda, the strong female equal he has not yet met. You are cautioned to keep in mind that this is a story begun and conceived over seventy years ago by a writer who was about to rock the conventions of popular culture with a new level of violence and sexual content. You are advised to drop all notions of political correctness in the basket at the door before entering the Mickey Spillane Theater.

  And don’t worry. There will be at least two more Mike Hammer mysteries… but they will have to wait for the next hundred years.

  Max Allan Collins

  September 9, 2017

  CHAPTER ONE

  The blonde dame in the sleeper car window was damn near naked in front of the mirror on the back of her closed door, and ready to finish the job. She hadn’t bothered to pull down the shade, maybe because her train was in the yards backed up on a curve of track against a stalled freight.

  And she didn’t know she had company, by way of somebody stealing a ride under that freight.

  I didn’t catch what she was changing out of—she was stark naked soon enough, and not a natural blonde but nobody’s perfect. Right now she was climbing into some black lacy stuff, several pieces of it, including the sheer black nylons she was hooking to the garter belt, shapely right leg lifted with the toes stretching out. Then this very grown woman with baby-doll features stood there pirouetting around while she brushed out her hair, making love to her reflection but good.

  For once I wasn’t in the mood to enjoy a candid strip act, and anyway I was no peeping Tom—just a tag-along passenger working the cricks out of a back stiff from accommodations under the box car, aching all over from where sharp-edged pebbles had bounced off. A hunk of baling wire between the tracks had ripped a furrow down my pant leg, and the cloth flapped around the gash until I got in my battered overnight case and got a safety pin to clip the tears together. At least the gash wasn’t in me.

  And maybe, doing that, I caught a few more glimpses of the babe in the window. Just maybe.

  There was dirt caked in the stubble of my beard and ground into my scalp. My hands and face must have been as black as the night itself, its sultry heat sending down rivulets of sweat that turned it into pure muck. Travel under a train does not come with shower facilities. My preening beauty wouldn’t have found much to look at where I was concerned.

  Somebody else would find me worth looking at, though. Down the line I could hear the yard cops flushing out the bums, ni
ghtsticks making dull, soggy noises where they landed. Sometimes sharper, cracking sounds were followed by hoarse screams and a torrent of curses, mixed in with the rumbles and bangs and whines of trains moving and braking and bumping.

  Then they were closing in from both ends and I was ready to kick the first guy in the chops who stuck his face in between the cars where I was standing. For a minute there was a lull, and I was just about to make a break for it when the beam of a flash split the night in half and light bounced off from somewhere, catching brass buttons not twenty feet away.

  The big tough bull in blue looked like he was frozen there, staring straight at me.

  I pressed back into the shadows trying to hug the rear of the car. I was jammed up against the steel ladder that ran to the top, wishing I dared move and get the overnight case in my hand turned around so it wouldn’t make such a conspicuous bulge. Same went for the packet tucked in the front of my shirt under my old field jacket.

  Damn it to hell— he was waiting for me to come out so he could get a clear swing at me! It hadn’t taken me long to regret leaving my .45 behind.

  Behind me I could half-sense the dame snugging into her undies, but I would have liked it better if she had switched out the light. It was turning me into a silhouette that couldn’t be missed unless that guy had left some thick glasses at home.

  I was all set to pitch out that bag in the railroad cop’s kisser, to take some teeth and make a break for it, when I realized the copper wasn’t in the same mood as me—not by a long shot. More lights came by, hitting his face, and this time I saw his eyes. No, they weren’t looking at me at all. They went right by me to the dame in the sleeper-car window, and I could have lit a butt without him seeing the match. Could have started in blowing smoke rings, too.

  What the hell? The curve of track gave me a vantage point, so I took one last look at her myself.

  She was working on the other nylon now, toes stretched out ballet-style, and then her feet found the floor and she had a look at herself too, probably thinking Gypsy Rose Lee had nothing on her. Her red-nailed hands cupped this and that and her chin lifted, her mouth all white teeth and crimson lipstick and pure confidence. She was having a hell of a good time in front of that mirror. Hell of a good time.