Noir fiction for the modern reader.

KISS HER GOODBYE by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins (2011)

Review by Mike Dennis

Mike Hammer is back.

It’s the 1970s. He’s a lot older now, a little mellower, and far more world-weary, as he makes his way through Kiss Her Goodbye, by Mickey Spillane in a 2011 posthumous collaboration with Max Allan Collins (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

After a near-fatal gunshot wound, Hammer has left New York and heads for the lower Florida Keys to recuperate and, for that matter, to retire. He’s had it with PI work, with New York and all its lowlifes, with having to deal with an ever-increasing number of critics and enemies, and with the loneliness that thirty hard years in the business has brought to him.

Not only that, Velda has gone. The love of his life, the one woman who understood who he was and why he did the things he did, has left, sent away by Hammer for her own protection.

Can he handle New York for one more go-around?

Turns out he’ll have to, as he returns for the funeral of Bill Doolan, his mentor, whose death was officially declared a suicide.

It all looks too perfect, too well-assembled. Doolan took a bullet in the heart, ballistics showed it came from his own gun, which lay at his side, and paraffin tests revealed that he had fired the shot. To top it off, he was found in his apartment with the door locked.

Open and shut, right?

Hammer smells a rat.

What follows is another classic Mike Hammer trek through Manhattan as he becomes ensnared in a search for Nazi jewels. Along the way, he encounters glad-handing politicians, a hardboiled female Assistant District Attorney, a Studio 54-type nightclub where cocaine flows like wine, and enough Mafia types to populate three more novels.

Hammer has a harder go of it this time around, though, because he’s a lot less agile. His pain meds have run out, but there’s still plenty of pain to go around, and a lesser man might not have made it through this maze of a plot.

There’s an underlying sense in this book that Hammer has, with the passage of the years, lost some of the anger that drove him through the earlier novels. He seethed his way through books like I, The Jury and One Lonely Night to the point where the reader hoped he wouldn’t blow an artery. His anger surfaces in spots throughout Kiss Her Goodbye, but overall, Hammer seems far more at peace with himself than he ever has, and frankly, it fits him well. It feels right, like a natural transition in his life. This might be attributed to Collins’ hand in the writing.

According to Collins’ introduction, the novel was assembled from an unfinished manuscript and various notes found in Spillane’s home following his death in 2006. Other than occasional nods to 1970s culture points, which probably came from Collins, the writing is seamless. It’s difficult to spot where Spillane left off and Collins begins. One key scene at a Mafia social club seems like vintage Spillane, but is it really? It could easily have been penned by Collins.

Either way, the Mick would’ve liked this one.

MY GUN IS QUICK by Mickey Spillane

Review by Mike Dennis

“You have to be quick. And able. Or you’ll be dead.”

That pretty much sums up Mike Hammer’s philosophy of life in New York City throughout all of his appearances in Mickey Spillane novels. But in My Gun Is Quick, Spillane’s searing 1950 tale of revenge, Hammer actually says this to the reader. He then sets out to prove it.

After making a post-midnight delivery to a client, he stops off at a slimy diner for a hot cup of java. There he encounters a gorgeous redhead down on her luck. He buys her a cup of coffee. They chat. A guy comes up to her, a guy with “a built-in sneer that passed for know-how”, and begins hassling her. Hammer pushes him around, gives the girl some money, and leaves.

Well, come to find out she’s a prostitute and she turns up dead the following morning. As in many other Hammer novels, he dedicates himself to finding her killer and dispensing his own brand of justice before the system can screw it up.

For the uninitiated, Mickey Spillane was considered beneath contempt by much of the literary world for virtually his entire career, which spanned sixty years. His hard-charging, gritty style turned off the literary elites, who also were not wild about his unabashed identification with the working class, which occasionally included prostitutes, gamblers, and street hustlers. Despite this institutional bias against him, Spillane sold over 130 million books during his life. They’re still selling.

All of the snide remarks and bad reviews couldn’t mask the passion that comes blasting through in Spillane’s prose. The dark streets and back alleys spring to life on the page, as Hammer slinks through them like a feral cat on the trail of his prey. The reader will feel Hammer’s hot desires as he strokes the naked skin of a beautiful woman. When he takes a wrong turn and is severely beaten by a few tough guys, the reader will feel the blows. This was pretty strong stuff in 1950, when readers of “mystery novels” were being spoon-fed Miss Marple.

My Gun Is Quick is currently available in a 3-book collection of Hammer novels, alongside I, The Jury and Vengeance Is Mine. The collection contains an outstanding introduction by Max Allan Collins, a longtime Spillane fan and collaborator. Highly personal and revealing, it sheds plenty of light on Spillane’s role in postwar America.

This book is the perfect entree for those who are unfamiliar with Spillane’s work. Get it. You won’t be sorry.

THE COLDEST MILE by Tom Piccirilli (2009)

Review by Mike Dennis, 2010

How would you like to take a job where your employer cuts your predecessor’s stomach open before your very eyes?  Well, that’s what’s offered to the central character in the opening of The Coldest Mile, a 2009 blow-‘em-out hardboiled tale by Tom Piccirilli.

He’s called Chase, and we learn that he was raised as a grifter by his grandfather, Jonah, who pulled him out of a foster home and straight into a life of crime.  Now, as a twentysomething adult, he’s on his own.  Jonah, now in his sixties, and who is one hardass dude, has plenty of blood on his hands.  But he’s still deep inside Chase’s head, for more reasons than one.

Immediately after Chase takes the job as chauffeur for a disintegrating New Jersey crime family, he runs into problems, all of his own making.  He’s not given to following orders too closely, he talks back, shows no respect, and pushes the family’s gunmen around.  The reader can’t help but think he’s going to get whacked any second.

Referring to a previous Piccirilli novel, The Cold Spot, a dense backstory is cleverly revealed in bits and pieces, letting the reader in on the complex relationship between Chase and Jonah.  In The Coldest Mile, Chase wants to find him again, but for very different reasons.

Piccirilli, an award-winning author of some twenty novels, knows how to write this stuff.  He keeps the reader’s eyes on the page with lots of stinging prose and tough dialogue.  He takes us with Chase to Florida, where the criminals are decidedly minor league, and gives us a finely-tuned feel of the messiness of their organizations.

He also draws a clear connection between Chase and Jonah.  It’s an ambivalent one, filled with both resentment and respect, but most of all, it is riveting, and forms the emotional core of the novel.

Through Chase’s memories, Jonah’s character is well-drawn before he ever actually walks onto the page.  When he finally does appear, he steals every scene he’s in, whether Piccirilli wants him to or not, and he very nearly steals the entire novel.  By then, however, the reader is totally ready for one of the most hardened, uncompromising characters he will ever encounter.

THE COLDEST MILE by Tom Piccirilli

Review Copyright 2009 by Mike Dennis

How would you like to take a job where your employer cuts your predecessor’s stomach open before your very eyes?  Well, that’s what’s offered to the central character in the opening of this blow-‘em-out hardboiled tale by Tom Piccirilli.

He’s called Chase, and we learn that he was raised as a grifter by his grandfather, Jonah, who pulled him out of a foster home and straight into a life of crime.  Now, as a twentysomething adult, he’s on his own.  Jonah, now in his sixties, and who is one hardass dude, has plenty of blood on his hands.  But he’s still deep inside Chase’s head, for more reasons than one.

Immediately after Chase takes the job as chauffeur for a disintegrating New Jersey crime family, he runs into problems, all of his own making.  He’s not given to following orders too closely, he talks back, shows no respect, and pushes the family’s gunmen around.  The reader can’t help but think he’s going to get whacked any second.

Referring to a previous Piccirilli novel, The Cold Spot, a dense backstory is cleverly revealed in bits and pieces, letting the reader in on the complex relationship between Chase and Jonah.  In The Coldest Mile, Chase wants to find him again, but for very different reasons.

Piccirilli, an award-winning author of some twenty novels, knows how to write this stuff.  He keeps the reader’s eyes on the page with lots of stinging prose and tough dialogue.  He takes us with Chase to Florida, where the criminals are decidedly minor league, and gives us a finely-tuned feel of the messiness of their organizations.

He also draws a clear connection between Chase and Jonah.  It’s an ambivalent one, filled with both resentment and respect, but most of all, it is riveting, and forms the emotional core of the novel.

Through Chase’s memories, Jonah’s character is well-drawn before he ever actually walks onto the page.  When he finally does appear, he steals every scene he’s in, whether Piccirilli wants him to or not, and he very nearly steals the entire novel.  By then, however, the reader is totally ready for one of the most hardened, uncompromising characters he will ever encounter.