While the acclaim for hardboiled fiction goes largely to Messrs Daly, Hammett and Chandler, it was Mickey Spillane who got the spoils. The late Spillane sold 225m copies of his books, and by 1980, seven of the top fifteen all-time bestselling fiction titles in the US were works by Spillane. His formula was uncomplicated, offering up an abundance of sex and violence to a hungry audience. For this, and his unabashedly simple style, Spillane was profoundly unpopular with literary critics and often broader society. Chandler railed against the quality of his writing, while clergymen and politicians denounced his subject matter. Critics bemoaned Spillane’s popularity, believing it a sad indictment of the intellect of the American public. Mickey himself was characteristically terse in his famous response -

“Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar… If the public likes you, you’re good.”

Before he passed away in 2006, Spillane is said to have asked his wife to present his unfinished manuscripts to his friend, Max Allan Collins. Spillane’s faith was well-placed. Collins is one of the most prolific and decorated PI authors working today, churning out a vast number of works across a broad spectrum. These efforts, particularly his acclaimed Nathan Heller series, have earned him numerous Shamus and Edgar award nominations.
The novel begins with the enduring hero of Spillane’s work, private detective Mike Hammer, returning from his self-imposed exile in Florida to attend the funeral of his old mentor, Bill Doolan. Manhattan has changed in the year since Hammer left, but not to so much that he doesn’t find himself almost immediately embroiled in a murder investigation. Such is the swiftness with which the plot kicks into action. What follows is a tearing romp featuring Nazi diamonds, the sordid side of the ’70s disco-scene and the same doses of violence and sex that so endeared Hammer to the American public.

In some ways, Hammer himself has changed over the years. While still set long before glasnost, perestroika and 1989, the end of the Cold War seems to have assuaged Spillane’s own rabid anti-Communism and thus expunged the Red-bashing of previous outings. In addition, the racial insensitivity of which Spillane was so unfortunately capable in earlier years has disappeared. For that, this reviewer is truly thankful. It’s fair to say that these changes make the novel more refined than many of its predecessors.

In all other respects, Hammer remains the same he ever was – an utterly uncompromising, battle-scarred Guadalcanal veteran, who dispenses justice on his own terms; usually from the barrel of his trusty .45. His ability to function as a one-man army is undimmed, as is his almost exclusively sexual interest in women.

It is perhaps surprising then, that as first person narrator, Hammer has an understated ability as an urban poet. He speaks of New York with an affectionate hatred, and while the prose is never at risk of becoming florid, there are brief passages which evoke that steel and concrete Babylon as beautifully as anything else in fiction.

New York’s constantly evolving zeitgeist is the perfect backdrop for an ageing Hammer, and in many ways echoes Spillane’s own position within the genre. The new disco scene has brought with it a level of sexual liberation which has left Hammer looking almost prudish. At one point he flatly refuses favours from a beautiful Latino singer on the grounds he is unwilling to indulge in public. Much as the sexual revolution seems to have left Hammer behind, so the bar of shock value has been raised far above Spillane’s head since his first novel, 1947’s I, The Jury. This also gives rise to one of the best lines of the book. –

“Hey, man, aren’t you into androgyny?”
“I don’t dig science fiction.”

This will give rise to just one instance of the dichotomy of responses to Spillane’s work. There are those who will view Hammer as an anachronism; others will see him as classic. Many will see Hammer as a chauvinistic vigilante; many others see him as a man’s man with a keener sense of justice than the corrupt institutions of the law.

This reviewer is firmly in the ‘classic’ camp. Kiss Her Goodbye is not without its faults – Spillane’s oeuvre never was – but it compensates for these with a sense of adventure and old-fashioned escapism. A childhood fan of Spillane, in the masterful way he has finished off this manuscript, Collins has more than done justice to his idol.

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