The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 3 Page 2

  But Spillane has a great time exploring his hero’s new frailties. This Hammer is weak and uncertain after having been out of the game for a long time, and must now coast on his old reputation—and Spillane seems almost puckishly aware of the parallel between himself and Hammer. Whether his religious conversion or the sex-and-sadism critical blasts were factors, it’s hard to say, but Spillane’s technique has changed—he is more sparing with the sex and violence, although both are present, used, as the writer liked to say, “as exclamation points.” The Girl Hunters signals a Hammer less likely to fire away with his .45 at the drop of a fedora, and shows a move to surprise endings that will often have Hammer tricking the bad guys into killing themselves so he doesn’t have to bear the direct guilt.

  The body count is high, but Hammer himself isn’t responsible, although the vicious climatic fight with the Russian agent called The Dragon concludes with one of the most casually brutal acts Hammer ever perpetrated. With surprising ease, Spillane moves his fifties detective into the sixties, espionage substituting for the Mob and other more conventional villains. Hammer had fought “Commies” before (in One Lonely Night), but here he’s entered the world of his British offspring, James Bond. There’s a showbiz element connected to Spillane’s own celebrity, including the use of real-life columnist Hy Gardner, a rival and contemporary of Walter Winchell and Earl Wilson.

  Spillane is at his best in The Girl Hunters, his storytelling fast-moving, consistently entertaining, and with crisp, tough dialogue and action that shocks when it comes, plus mood-setting descriptions that show off his gift for noir poetry. Spillane employs a surprising narrative technique, the absence of Velda from the story—she is the girl being hunted, but she does not appear.

  Spillane saves her reappearance for The Snake, the eighth Mike Hammer and a direct sequel to The Girl Hunters. Readers should understand, however, that The Girl Hunters and The Snake were never intended to be one book, one continuous story, and are advised to keep in mind that three years separated the publication of the two. Those fresh from spending time with a drunk Mike Hammer who was struggling to get back to his old self will need a grain of salt, at least, to accept Hammer in The Snake—which begins perhaps an hour after The Girl Hunters ends. Improbably, Hammer is not only his old self again, but is accepted around Manhattan by his cronies as if he’d been away for seven weeks, not seven years.

  Still, The Snake is a first-rate tough mystery, with Spillane abandoning espionage for more traditional Mob concerns. Hammer and Velda are instantly the team of old as they help a damsel in distress and wade into the murky waters of big-time politics. In some respects, this is as close to a “standard” Mike Hammer mystery as you’re likely to find. Had Spillane—like Stout, Christie, Gardner, and so many others—chosen to write dozens of Hammer novels rather than just a dozen (well, a baker’s dozen), The Snake might have been the template. Moving around Manhattan with ease, Hammer works his contacts among journalists and reestablishes a working relationship, if not quite his friendship, with Pat Chambers. Even Spillane’s old enemy Anthony Boucher praised the novel’s craft, calling it “certainly Mike Hammer’s best case.”

  The ending is (as they used to say) a corker, although the ambiguous nature of what happens next—i.e., do Velda and Mike consummate their love?—remains unresolved, at least as far as Spillane was concerned. This piece of continuity bedeviled Spillane, who, post-Snake, went back and forth on whether Hammer and Velda were intimate.

  Clearly Spillane intended to write another batch of books about Mike Hammer, but several things interfered. He was sidetracked for a while working as screenwriter and star of the British-American production The Girl Hunters (1963). Last-minute funding problems caused the film to be shot in black-and-white, making it look shabby next to the early Bond films with which it was in direct competition (sharing Bond girl Shirley Eaton, who costarred in The Girl Hunters and had the small but memorable golden-girl role in Goldfinger).

  Spillane received raves for his portrayal of his hero, a remarkable accomplishment—after all, it’s not as though Edgar Rice Burroughs could have pulled off Tarzan onscreen, although Agatha Christie would have made a pretty fair Marple. The high concept of mystery writer playing his own detective attracted lots of media, in particular a witty Esquire magazine piece by Terry Southern. But Bond’s emergence, and frankly dominance, screwed things up for Spillane—Ian Fleming, the Brit used by Signet to fill in for Spillane during “the long wait,” was now on top of publishing and movies.

  The Snake had been intended to be the basis for the second Spillane-as-Hammer film, and the Lolita-ish Sue was written as a role for his then wife, Broadway starlet Sherri Malinou. But The Girl Hunters didn’t do well enough to justify a second film, and discouraged Spillane from focusing on his most famous character. Instead, he developed the Hammer clone Tiger Mann, a hard-boiled secret agent whose four adventures sold in the millions but did not generate TV shows or films despite the surrounding spy craze.

  A brief aside—The Girl Hunters title was derived from the “Girl Hunt” ballet in the classic 1953 Fred Astaire film The Band Wagon, which overtly and beautifully spoofed Spillane and Mike Hammer. This gave the mystery writer great satisfaction, because Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies were Mickey Spillane’s cinema of choice.

  Spillane wound up publishing only four Hammer novels in the sixties, although he began a number that were set aside for various reasons; over the remainder of his career, he began and set aside even more Hammer novels that he never published. After The Snake, Spillane developed a Hammer story that pitted his hero against the drug racket in a context of the swinging sixties. But he found himself up against a deadline to Dutton and Signet for a new Hammer novel, and rather than finish what would eventually become The Big Bang (published in 2010 as “the lost Mike Hammer sixties novel”), he pulled down a certain old, unpublished manuscript from his shelf—For Whom the Gods Would Destroy—and sent that instead, under the title The Twisted Thing.

  This was, of course, the rejected novel he’d written right after selling I, the Jury (1947) to E. P. Dutton, making it chronologically the second Mike Hammer mystery. When Signet had a huge success with the paperback reprint of I, the Jury, however, the editor at Dutton came back to Spillane requesting For Whom the Gods Would Destroy, but (as indicated earlier) Spillane said no.

  He chose to write My Gun Is Quick (1950) instead. The response from readers to the sex and violence of I, the Jury dictated a different Mike Hammer novel to follow the first. For Whom the Gods Would Destroy went onto a shelf in the writer’s upstate New York home, where the sole manuscript was nearly lost in a fire. The retrieved pages lacked only the final one, which had been burned black; Spillane wrote a replacement last page for it in 1966, though a restoration of the charred page revealed he had remembered the original ending almost word for word.

  Spillane’s noir universe was so timeless that very little revision was required for publication in 1966 of a novel written in 1948. A small passage with Hammer’s cop friend, Pat Chambers, makes reference to the events of The Girl Hunters and The Snake, and The Twisted Thing fits in well with the 1960s Hammer novels, which were tough and sexy but eased up on the emotional fire and extremes of violence and passion that had made I, the Jury (and the five Hammer novels that quickly followed it) such icons of controversy in the early 1950s.

  Ironically, critics—again including New York Times stalwart Anthony Boucher—greeted this “new” Hammer mystery with accolades. “I suggest,” said Boucher, “that [Mike Hammer’s] creator is one of the last of the great storytellers in the pulp tradition, as he amply demonstrates in The Twisted Thing.”

  Boucher, in terming the novel “vintage” Spillane, didn’t know how right he was—or that he was responding enthusiastically to a novel written in the very period during which the critic had been (in his words) “one of the leaders in the attacks on Spillane.”

  Looking at The Twisted Thing in that context, Spillane’s shelvin
g it and substituting My Gun Is Quick is easy to understand: the latter novel plays off the violence and vengeance of I, the Jury with sexual passages that were frank for the day, and exhibits a generally seamy, sordid feel, beginning with Hammer’s encountering a friendly hooker in a diner.

  The Twisted Thing, however, implies the vengeful Hammer of the first novel was not envisioned by the writer as the Hammer of all the novels—rather, I, the Jury appears intended to tell just that one tale of murdered-friend retribution. In The Twisted Thing there is casual sex and vintage Spillane rough stuff, but the dominant theme is a father-son relationship between Mike Hammer and fourteen-year-old child genius Ruston York.

  The Twisted Thing takes place in a small town where Hammer is initially involved with rescuing young Ruston from kidnappers—both Velda and Manhattan are largely absent from the novel. A tough, corrupt local cop—the evocatively named Dilwick—provides the initial conflict, but the young genius’s wealthy father is soon murdered, and away Hammer goes. Hoods and a casino right out of The Big Sleep provide the toughest of tough dicks with further fun and games, but his detective work is right out of Christie, a search for missing documents more typical of Hercule Poirot than Mike Hammer.

  The Girl Hunters is likely the best of the sixties Hammers, but The Twisted Thing isn’t a sixties Hammer at all, but rather a late forties one. The ending, revealing the identity of the murderer, comes in typical abrupt, shocking Spillane style, and makes a lot of sense as the second such ending Spillane wrote, a huge surprise in 1966 that still has power today. The small-town setting, the classic pulp cast—troubled millionaire, willing wench, crooked cops, casino thugs—represent classic pulp at its liveliest. But the father-son relationship at the novel’s core makes The Twisted Thing unique among Hammer novels.

  Mike Hammer has come to be synonymous with tough private eyes, as has Mickey Spillane with hard-boiled mystery fiction. We may not know for a certainty why Spillane withdrew Mike Hammer, temporarily, from the public stage; but reading these, you’ll say it’s easy to understand why that public welcomed back both Spillane and Hammer so enthusiastically.

  —Max Allan Collins

  Summer 2010

  Max Allan Collins has earned an unprecedented fifteen Private Eye Writers of America Shamus nominations, winning twice for novels in his historical Nathan Heller series. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award-winning Tom Hanks film. Shortly before Mickey Spillane’s passing, the writer asked Collins to complete various unfinished works, including the Mike Hammer novel The Big Bang (begun 1964, published 2010). Both Spillane and Collins are recipients of the Eye, the Private Eye Writers life achievement award.

  THE GIRL HUNTERS

  This one is for Elliott Graham

  who sweated more waiting for Mike than he did as a dog face

  waiting for us brown-shoes fly-boys to give him aerial cover.

  So here we go again, E.G., with more to come.

  But this one is for you.

  CHAPTER 1

  They found me in the gutter. The night was the only thing I had left and not much of it at that. I heard the car stop, the doors open and shut and the two voices talking. A pair of arms jerked me to my feet and held me there.

  “Drunk,” the cop said.

  The other one turned me around into the light. “He don’t smell bad. That cut on his head didn’t come from a fall either.”

  “Mugged?”

  “Maybe.”

  I didn’t give a damn which way they called it. They were both wrong anyhow. Two hours ago I was drunk. Not now. Two hours ago I was a roaring lion. Then the bottle sailed across the room. No lion left now.

  Now was a time when I wasn’t anything. Nothing was left inside except the feeling a ship must have when it’s torpedoed, sinks and hits bottom.

  A hand twisted into my chin and lifted my face up. “Ah, the guy’s a bum. Somebody messed him up a little bit.”

  “You’ll never make sergeant, son. That’s a hundred-buck suit and it fits too good to be anything but his own. The dirt is fresh, not worn on.”

  “Okay, Daddy, let’s check his wallet, see who he is and run him in.”

  The cop with the deep voice chuckled, patted me down and came up with my wallet. “Empty,” he said.

  Hell, there had been two bills in it when I started out. It must have been a pretty good night. Two hundred bucks’ worth of night.

  I heard the cop whistle between his teeth. “We got ourselves a real fish.”

  “Society boy? He don’t look so good for a society boy. Not with his face. He’s been splashed.”

  “Uh-uh. Michael Hammer, it says here on the card. He’s a private jingle who gets around.”

  “So he gets tossed in the can and he won’t get around so much.”

  The arm under mine hoisted me a little straighter and steered me toward the car. My feet moved; lumps on the end of a string that swung like pendulums.

  “You’re only joking,” the cop said. “There are certain people who wouldn’t like you to make such noises with your mouth.”

  “Like who?”

  “Captain Chambers.”

  It was the other cop’s turn to whistle.

  “I told you this jingle was a fish,” my pal said. “Go buzz the station. Ask what we should do with him. And use a phone—we don’t want this on the air.”

  The cop grunted something and left. I felt hands easing me into the squad car, then shoving me upright against the seat. The hands went down and dragged my feet in, propping them against the floorboard. The door shut and the one on the other side opened. A heavy body climbed in under the wheel and a tendril of smoke drifted across my face. It made me feel a little sick.

  The other cop came back and got in beside me. “The captain wants us to take him up to his house,” he said. “He told me thanks.”

  “Good enough. A favor to a captain is like money in the bank, I always say.”

  “Then how come you ain’t wearing plainclothes then?”

  “Maybe I’m not the type, son. I’ll leave it to you young guys.”

  The car started up. I tried to open my eyes but it took too much effort and I let them stay closed.

  You can stay dead only so long. Where first there was nothing, the pieces all come drifting back together like a movie of an exploding shell run in reverse. The fragments come back slowly, grating together as they seek a matching part and painfully jar into place. You’re whole again, finally, but the scars and the worn places are all there to remind you that once you were dead. There’s life once more and, with it, a dull pain that pulsates at regular intervals, a light that’s too bright to look into and sound that’s more than you can stand. The flesh is weak and crawly, slack from the disuse that is the death, sensitive with the agonizing fire that is life. There’s memory that makes you want to crawl back into the void but the life is too vital to let you go.

  The terrible shattered feeling was inside me, the pieces having a hard time trying to come together. My throat was still raw and cottony; constricted, somehow, from the tensed-up muscles at the back of my neck.

  When I looked up Pat was holding out his cigarettes to me. “Smoke?”

  I shook my head.

  His voice had a callous edge to it when he said, “You quit?”

  “Yeah.”

  I felt his shrug. “When?”

  “When I ran out of loot. Now knock it off.”

  “You had loot enough to drink with.” His voice had a real dirty tone now.

  There are times when you can’t take anything at all, no jokes, no rubs—nothing. Like the man said, you want nothing from nobody never. I propped my hands on the arms of the chair and pushed myself to my feet. The inside of my thighs quivered with the effort.

  “Pat—I don’t know what the hell you’re pulling. I don’t give a damn either. Whatever it is, I don’t appreciate it. Just keep off my back, old buddy.”

  A flat expression drifted across his face before
the hardness came back. “We stopped being buddies a long time ago, Mike.”

  “Good. Let’s keep it like that. Now where the hell’s my clothes?”

  He spit a stream of smoke at my face and if I didn’t have to hold the back of the chair to stand up I would have belted him one. “In the garbage,” he said. “It’s where you belong too but this time you’re lucky.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  I got another faceful of smoke and choked on it.

  “You used to look a lot bigger to me, Mike. Once I couldn’t have taken you. But now you call me things like that and I’ll belt you silly.”

  “You son of a bitch,” I said.

  I saw it coming but couldn’t move, a blurred white open-handed smash that took me right off my feet into the chair that turned over and left me in a sprawled lump against the wall. There was no pain to it, just a taut sickness in the belly that turned into a wrenching dry heave that tasted of blood from the cut inside my mouth. I could feel myself twitching spasmodically with every contraction of my stomach and when it was over I lay there with relief so great I thought I was dead.

  He let me get up by myself and half fall into the chair. When I could focus again, I said, “Thanks, buddy. I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Pat shrugged noncommittally and held out a glass. “Water. It’ll settle your stomach.”

  “Drop dead.”

  He put the glass down on an end table as the bell rang. When he came back he threw a box down on the sofa and pointed to it. “New clothes. Get dressed.”