Murder Never Knocks

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Shortly before his death, Mike Hammer’s creator Mickey Spillane paid me an incredible honor. He asked me to complete the Hammer novel that he currently had in progress — The Goliath Bone — and then told his wife Jane to gather all of the other unfinished, unpublished material and give it to me: “Max will know what to do.”

These manuscripts, surprising in number, spanned Mickey’s entire career from the late ’40s until his passing in 2006. Six manuscripts were substantial, usually 100 pages or more, with plot and character notes and sometimes roughed-out final chapters. Most of the books had been announced by Mickey’s publisher at various times from the 1950s through the ’90s. As a Spillane/Hammer fan since my early teens, I am delighted to finally see these long-promised books lined up on a shelf next to the thirteen Hammer novels published by Mickey in his lifetime.

In addition to the substantial novel manuscripts mentioned above, a number of shorter Mike Hammer manuscripts were uncovered in the treasure hunt conducted by Jane Spillane, my wife Barb and me, ranging over three offices in Mickey’s South Carolina home. Some of these were fragments of a few pages, primarily the openings of never-written novels or stories; these I have been gradually turning into short stories with an eventual collection in mind. Others were more substantial if less so than the six novel manuscripts, and — although they vary in particulars — these shorter manuscripts represent significant unfinished entries in the most popular American mystery series of the twentieth century.

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