A Long Time Dead

September 1, 2016
After Mickey Spillane's death, his frequent collaborator, Collins, found a trove of unpublished material: short stories about Spillane's most famous creation, PI Mike Hammer, along with beginnings of novels and various rough drafts of longer works. Collins worked the material into several short pieces, which were published in various places and are collected here for the first time. And they are, each of them, gems. A man scheduled to be executed in prison claims he's been framed, and Mike serves up some rough justice to the guilty party; Mike has to solve a murder in order to find out who's trying to kill him; Mike is convinced he's just seen, hailing a cab, a man who died at the hands of a prisoner executioner several years ago; and more. Collins has published several Hammer novels, completions of Spillane's original unfinished manuscripts, and, as with those novels, the writing here is so fluid, so very much in Spillane's voice, that it's impossible to tell where the original writer's words end and the coauthor's begin. A must for anyone interested in the history of hard-boiled mysteries.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

July 11, 2016
Collins (Murder Never Knocks) brings his considerable experience with iconic PI Mike Hammer to these eight formulaic stories adapted from manuscripts that Spillane left incomplete at his death, though the collection is definitely a mixed bag. At his best, Collins captures the feel of a New York City fraught with danger at every turn; at his worst, the prose is purple (an electrocuted man’s eyes are described as “sightless black sockets crying scarlet tears as he cooked in the gravy of his own gore”). The plots are also uneven, including one that enters schlock horror terrain. But others are more down-to-earth and encapsulate Hammer’s somehow-charismatic callousness, such as “A Dangerous Cat,” which has a delightfully wicked ending. Spillane fans will enjoy Collins’s faithful re-creations of Hammer and the violence-prone gumshoe’s supporting cast, including his knockout partner and love interest, Velda, and his one friend on the NYPD, honest cop Pat Chambers.