Together We Kill

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Mickey Spillane — the best-selling noir novelist of the Twentieth Century, the author of such seminal hard-boiled novels as I, the Jury (1948) and Kiss Me, Deadly (1952) — may well be a short story writer at heart. He cut his eyeteeth on the hard-boiled short fiction of Carroll John Daly and Fredric Brown, and honed his own craft in the pre-WWII comic book industry, writing short fiction “fillers” designed to satisfy certain postal regulations requiring text pieces. And though Spillane’s famous detective Mike Hammer has appeared rarely in short stories, the Mick has frequently shown his affection for — and dexterity at — the short-fiction form, through periodic publication of such pieces as appear in this book.

Spillane in particular wrote short stories (and articles) for macho men’s “mags” in the 1953–1960 period that his fans think of as the “drought” between novels (Kiss Me, Deadly in ’52 and The Deep in ’60). A number of these (often novellas) were collected in ’60s paperbacks published by Corgi in Great Britain and Signet in the United States — Mickey needed quick money to fund his ’62 film version of The Girl Hunters, in which he starred as Hammer — and most of the other stories were gathered in my 1984 Mysterious Press collection, Tomorrow I Die.

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