Don't Look Behind You (25 page)

“You lose, Hammer. You l-lose.”

I backed away, holstered the .45, and lighted up a cigarette. Then I reached for the letter from Dr. Beech. “Here’s something interesting I got in the mail today.”

I took out and unfolded the sheet and held it before the eyes of a man whose grotesque expression of a pain both physical and emotional was so exquisite, no words could do it justice. The veins of his neck bulged out in pale blue relief and the crazy wrenching that was tearing at his torn guts was eating at his mind, too, making his eyes bug out as if they might burst like balloons.

I said, “Maybe you can’t see so well right now, so I’ll summarize. You know, Dr. Beech has been on the verge of a breakthrough in Phasger’s Syndrome for some time. Thanks largely to generous donors like yourself.
And now there’s a cure.
And you lived to see it! Think of that.”

He lay there with his hands bloody as he gripped his punctured belly and he tried to scream, but it hurt too much.

I leaned back against the desk and had two smokes while I watched him sob, whimper, and finally die.

But just before his lights went out, I bid him goodbye, my way.

“No, sucker,” I said, “I win.”

Because my approach to completing Mickey Spillane’s unfinished novels is to set them in the period during which he began them, I find myself working from materials that were contemporary to my famous co-author but which require me to forge a novel that is a period piece bordering on an historical novel.

In that spirit, I wish to acknowledge
Peppermint Twist
(2012) by John Johnson, Jr. and Joel Selvin with Dick Cami, for information about the legendary Peppermint Lounge. Although the Genovese crime family’s involvement in the club is well-known, the treatment of the mob’s role here is fictional.

I also wish to thank and acknowledge my wife Barb Collins, with whom I write a very un-Spillane-like mystery series about antiquing, who gave me two extremely important suggestions that improved this book a great deal. Thanks also to my partner Jane Spillane, Titan editor Miranda Jewess, my lost brother Nick Landau, and my friend and agent, Dominick Abel.

MICKEY SPILLANE
and
MAX ALLAN COLLINS
collaborated on numerous projects, including twelve anthologies, three films, and the
Mike Danger
comic book series.

SPILLANE
was the bestselling American mystery writer of the twentieth century. He introduced Mike Hammer in
I, the Jury
(1947), which sold in the millions, as did the six tough mysteries that soon followed. The controversial P.I. has been the subject of a radio show, comic strip, and several television series, starring Darren McGavin in the 1950s and Stacy Keach in the ’80s and ’90s. Numerous gritty movies have been made from Spillane novels, notably director Robert Aldrich’s seminal film
noir, Kiss Me Deadly
(1955), and
The Girl Hunters
(1963), in which the writer played his own famous hero.

COLLINS
has earned an unprecedented twenty-two Private Eye Writers of America “Shamus” nominations, winning for the novels
True Detective
(1983) and
Stolen Away
(1993) in his Nathan Heller series, and for “So Long, Chief,” a Mike Hammer short story begun by Spillane and completed by Collins. His graphic novel
Road to Perdition
is the basis of the Academy Award-winning Tom Hanks/Sam Mendes film. A filmmaker in the Midwest, he has had half a dozen feature screenplays produced, including
The Last Lullaby
(2008), based on his innovative Quarry novels, also the basis of
Quarry
, a current Cinemax TV series. As “Barbara Allan,” he and his wife Barbara write the “Trash ’n’ Treasures” mystery series (recently
Antiques Swap
).

Both Spillane (who died in 2006) and Collins received the Private Eye Writers life achievement award, the Eye.

In response to reader request, I have assembled this chronology to indicate where the Hammer novels I’ve completed from Mickey Spillane’s unfinished manuscripts fit into the canon. An asterisk indicates the collaborative works (thus far).

M.A.C.

I, the Jury

Lady, Go Die!*

The Twisted Thing
(published 1966, written 1949)

My Gun Is Quick

Vengeance Is Mine!

One Lonely Night

The Big Kill

Kiss Me, Deadly

Kill Me, Darling*

The Girl Hunters

The Snake

Complex 90*

Murder Never Knocks*

The Big Bang*

The Body Lovers

Survival… Zero!

Kiss Her Goodbye*

The Killing Man

Black Alley

King of the Weeds*

The Goliath Bone*

Hammer and Velda go on vacation to a small beach town on Long Island after wrapping up the Williams case (
I, the Jury
). Walking romantically along the boardwalk, they witness a brutal beating at the hands of some vicious local cops—Hammer wades in to defend the victim.

When a woman turns up naked—and dead—astride the statue of a horse in the small-town city park, how she wound up this unlikely Lady Godiva is just one of the mysteries Hammer feels compelled to solve…

“Collins knows the pistol-packing PI inside and out, and Hammer’s vigilante rage (and gruff way with the ladies) reads authentically.”
Booklist

“A fun read that rings true to the way the character was originally written by Spillane.”
Crimespree Magazine

TITAN
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