Dead Street

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.

Finally, of course, I must thank Mickey for his friendship, his influence and his faith in me. And for ensuring that a certain part of me remains at all times Mickey Spillane’s biggest thirteen-year-old fan.

Max Allan Collins

October 2006

Muscatine, Iowa

About the Author

MICKEY SPILLANE, creator of private eye Mike Hammer, was the bestselling American mystery writer of the 20th century, and likely the most influential. He was also the most widely translated fiction author of the 20th century, although he insisted he was not an “author,” but a writer.