Dead Street полностью

As a reasonably successful mystery writer identified with championing Spillane, I was asked in 1981 by the organizers of the mystery fan convention, Bouchercon, to serve as their liaison with Mickey, who was one of their honored guests. I was also asked to appear with Mickey on a two-man panel and do the first in-depth public interview of Spillane specifically for mystery fans. Mickey finally coming in close contact with appreciative genre buffs was gratifying to all concerned.

That was when our friendship began, and it lasted until his death in July 2006, and beyond. During those years we worked together on a number of projects, including our comic book series Mike Danger and a number of anthologies, some focusing on Mickey’s uncollected short fiction, others gathering stories by others in the noir tradition Mickey represented. And Mickey did me the favor of appearing as an actor in two of my independent feature films, Mommy and Mommy’s Day (these are also available on DVD).

Additionally, I was privileged to share numerous conversations with Mickey, both at his home in Murrell’s Inlet, South Carolina, and over the phone, about writing. With the exception of Dave Garrity and comic book crony Joe Gill, Mickey had few writer friends. His public persona of the blue-collar writer, self-deprecatingly comparing his work to chewing gum for the masses, meant Mickey allowed few other writers inside the world of craft and art where he spent so much of his life.

No one ever lived who loved storytelling more than Mickey Spillane; no one loved words and vivid turns of phrase more passionately.

Over the last ten or so years of his life, before cancer took him quickly (until his last two months, he was uncommonly healthy for a man in his late eighties), Mickey approached his work in a fashion quite apart from the process of his younger days.

The Spillane of Kiss Me, Deadly (1952) wrote quickly, in a fever heat. He claimed to have written some of his novels in intense, brutal sessions of as short a span as three days. I, the Jury (1947) may have been done in nine days (although sometimes Mickey admitted to nineteen). This was his habit throughout the ’50s and well into the 1970s. He typed with two fingers on cheap yellow paper, single-spaced to “make it look more like a book.”

Ideas flowed through Mickey’s mind in a manner consistent with his boundless energy, and — during the periods when he didn’t publish much (from 1952 to 1961, for example) — he would often noodle with first chapters and story ideas. Sometimes he would come back to these, other times not. In his last ten years, his habit was to work in three offices in his home (one was actually outside his house, a small shack on stilts). Often he would have a book going in each.

The last Spillane novel published during his lifetime, the adventure yarn Something’s Down There (2003), was one of these — he had begun it in the late seventies or early eighties, and didn’t finish it till a month or so before he submitted it. During his last five years he had four novels going — two Mike Hammers (The Goliath Bone and King of the Weeds), an adventure novel (The Last Stand) and a crime novel (Dead Street).

Mickey completed The Last Stand, and had done extensive work on the other three, moving back and forth between them as his muse dictated. A major frustration of his last two months was that he wanted to finish Goliath Bone in particular, as he had promised himself and fans “the last Mike Hammer” in which Hammer and his loyal secretary, Velda, would finally marry.

These last four novels show Mickey — who definitely had a sense of both his mortality as a man and his immortality as a writer — returning to the three genres he loved: private eye, adventure, and crime. For the latter, he in particular liked to write about tough cops, as witness The Deep (1961), Killer Mine (1968) and The Last Cop Out (1973).

Initially, Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai and I were going to publish The Last Stand first, as it was the final work Mickey completed. The book is a very entertaining rumination on friendship and is thematically about as typically Spillane as anything he ever wrote; but the adventure-tale nature of the story itself is more on a par with Something’s Down There than the mystery/crime novels with which Mickey was so strongly identified.