Baby, It’s Murder

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Shortly before his death in 2006, Mickey Spillane gave me an assignment — develop decades’ worth of various uncompleted manuscripts and synopses of his into completed form for publication.

Several reasons are behind the surprising number of manuscripts the bestselling mystery writer of his day left unfinished. One is his struggle with balancing his new-found (circa 1953) religious beliefs with the sex-and-violence reputation his fiction engendered. The major reason, perhaps — revealed in my biography Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction (co-written with James L. Traylor) — is Mickey’s contract with director/producer Victor Saville granting the filmmaker screen rights to any yet unwritten Hammer (and other) crime novels.

Mike Hammer’s creator disliked the Spillane-derived films Saville made, although Mickey came to appreciate the enduring importance of director Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), that fascinating film in which a critique of Mike Hammer somehow perfectly captures the feel of the initial six Hammer novels.

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