Kiss Her Goodbye by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Mike Hammer has retired to Florida after winning a deadly shootout with a young mobster in New York. Retirement doesn't last for long when Mike gets called back up to New York to attend the funeral of his friend and mentor, who died of an apparent suicide. Mike doesn't buy the suicide story and begins looking for a murder.

Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer made his debut in the late 1940s and that's where the private eye with a grudge bigger than his .45 likes to keep his memories. But New York has changed a lot in the late-1970s and Hammer takes in the changes with a cynical sneer. That's because despite all the superficial changes, people can still be dirty, no-good crooks and killers.

Kiss Her Goodbye was one of several unfinished novels left by Spillane when he died. It was only natural for his longtime friend and fellow crime writing master Max Allan Collins (The Road To Redemption) to pick up where Spillane left off.

Collins knew Spillane probably better than any other writer. While there will always be a million and one hacks trying to emulate the voice of hardboiled fiction's most popular PI, Collins is able to shoot straight and capture almost all of Hammer's idiosyncracies.

Spillane and Collins do a remarkable job in painting a colorful picture of New York in the golden age of disco. The characters are complex though the story line contains elements that are a must in a Mike Hammer novel: illicit drug trade, prostitute friends that always end up dead, and a depiction of violence that is unmatched in many books. In fact, Kiss Her Goodbye contains some gems that are reminiscient of I, The Jury to make the reader cringe. One section stood out for me:

Fast as it had been, he'd had time to be surprised, and now stared in shock at the ceiling as blood and brains spilled from his shattered skull like awful jelly onto his otherwise spotless kitchen floor.

Collins studied hard before picking up his keyboard for this one; he studied almost too hard. The ending rode dangerously close to the shocking twister of Vengeance Is Mine! but maybe the whole "Juno was a man!" bit was too much for Collins and he pulled at it enough to make it his own.

The first three Hammer novels (I, the Jury, My Gun Is Quick, and Vengeance In Mine!) will always be my personal favorites but Kiss Her Goodbye has earned its place on my bookshelf.