Mickey Spillane - Dead Street

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.

So while The Last Stand will no doubt see print before long, Charles and I — with Jane Spillane’s blessing — decided to start here, with Mickey’s final cop/crime novel. As this novel is a rare look at the later years of a traditional hardboiled anti-hero, and opens with (and periodically returns to) poetic musings on life, death and re-birth in and out of the big city, Dead Street seems the perfect novel to remind readers why Mickey Spillane was the 20th century’s bestselling, most famous writer of “tough guy” fiction.

Mickey and I spoke many times about Dead Street . On several of my visits to his home over the last ten years, this was the book he was working on. It began as a much different animal, although with common elements — originally, he intended to write about four ex-cops and their wives in a Florida retirement community oriented to police and firemen (based on a real such village), and crimes they solved in the area. As Dead Street evolved into his more typical loner cop story, Mickey often said he thought it would make a good movie for older actors, and hoped Charles Bronson might play the lead and that Lee Meredith, Mickey’s co-star in the incredibly long-running Miller Lite commericials, might play the blind girl, Bettie.

Friendship was key in Mickey’s work and, of course, his life. Jack Stang, the hero of this novel, takes the name of the real-life upstate New York cop who was one of Mickey’s best friends, and who Mickey had hoped would one day play Mike Hammer in the movies. Mickey even shot a short try-out film for Stang as Hammer in the ’50s, and Stang appears with Mickey in the John Wayne produced film, Ring of Fear (1954), available on DVD. The irony is that Mickey blew Stang off the screen in that film, and set the stage for playing Hammer himself in The Girl Hunters (1963).

Toward the end of his life, Mickey realized he would not be able to finish these last few novels, and he indicated to me that after he was gone, these and other unfinished projects would be turned over for me to complete. I later learned that he’d said to his wife Jane, “Give all this stuff to Max — he will know what to do with it.”

No greater honor could have been paid to me by my friend, with the possible exception of the day he consented to be my son Nathan’s godfather.

Most of Dead Street is Mickey’s — eight of eleven chapters are his work, with minor additions and continuity corrections by me based upon his notes. Mickey famously said he didn’t rewrite, but this was not entirely accurate: he did modest line edits and rather major inserts, adding material where later plot developments required earlier clarification.

Often Mickey wrote the ending first, or at least a rough version of it; but that was not the case with Dead Street . He did, however, leave extensive notes ranging from plot concerns to characterization, and I was able to figure out where he was heading and what he was intending. The last few chapters I fashioned from those notes, and from conversations about Dead Street that Mickey and I had over the last several years.

I wish to thank Mickey’s wife Jane for her support and confidence, and for her willingness to dig and search for every scrap of Dead Street notes available (and these were extensive). I’d also like to thank my producing partner, Ken Levin; Mickey’s typist, Vickie Fredericks; Jane’s attorney David Gundling; and agent Dominick Abel. And, of course, thank you to Barbara Collins, my wife and frequent collaborator, who helped Jane and me conduct the “treasure hunt” among Mickey’s papers.

Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime had been in touch with Mickey during the last year or so of the writer’s life, and Mickey was greatly impressed with what the Hard Case line was accomplishing. I know he would be pleased to have Dead Street published here in the company of such writers he admired as Ed McBain, Lawrence Block and Donald E. Westlake.