[Mike Hammer 14] - The Goliath Bone
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The .22 he dropped, though, went spinning on the cold hard floor and Charlene deftly knelt and plucked it up and, as I was turning back toward her, she slammed the barrel of the target pistol into my right wrist and my fingers popped open involuntarily and the .45 fell, and the second of blinding pain gave her just the time she needed to snatch up the .45 as well. She swapped guns with herself so that my .45 was in her right hand and the .22 she dropped in her lab coat pocket. She was smiling now, an almost-demonic smile.
"I know who you remind me of," I said.
That amused her. "Really? Who?"
"Another woman of science. Another manipulative bitch. I should have remembered—same damn perfume ... I didn't even know they still made My Sin."
"Oh yes. It was George's favorite."
Even their names were alike—Charlene, Charlotte, and the two women's faces blurred, the whiteness of the hair and the eyes that could taste you with a glance, the mouth that could devour you, the body that was fire and velvet.
I nodded toward the sprawl of blue smock with his head in pooling red behind me. "That's your lab assistant—Bryan, right? He was with you in Israel. He's a former student, loyal as a pup to you. You were screwing him, too, right?"
She frowned with her forehead but her mouth was smiling, and her face had finally lost its beauty. "Did you really expect to walk in here and just kill me, you pitiful shambling dinosaur? How did you expect to get away with it?"
I edged toward her. "You'll be just another al-Qaeda victim, baby. I'll kill your evil ass, then duck back out, and show up at the appointed time to find the tragic aftermath. And now Bryan's part of it, too."
Her eyes glittered. "Oh, you think you're still in this game?"
I was almost on top of her when the gun swung up and she thumbed back the hammer, the weapon trained on my heart. "Good-bye and good riddance, Hammer."
Call it God, call it Allah, call it kismet, what happened next was a literal thousand-to-one shot when she squeezed the trigger and a random unstable vintage .45 cartridge exploded and the gun that I'd used for so many years so many times to wipe away evil exploded in her hand, a modest explosion as explosions went, no shrapnel flying,
just a blossom of orange and yellow and red leaving a flower of twisted metal that fell from a hand that was mostly gone, glistening blood and shreds of charred flesh clinging to the white skeletal hand that stayed behind to leave death's own knobby finger pointing at me.
Her scream was shrill and banshee-like, its own dead language, ringing off all that stainless steel, but her wild cry of pain ended when I snatched up the mangled abstraction that had once been a gun and hammered the jagged blossom of steel into her throat, turning scream into gurgle and life into death.
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A Tip of the Porkpie Hat
Mickey Spillane often mentioned having written the first Mike Hammer novel, I, the Jury (1947), in just nine days. His record for a novel, he said, was three days.
As a young man, Mickey displayed a frenzied, intense creativity that resulted in seven novels in five years that became the top bestsellers of the mid-twentieth century. In his last two decades, Mickey drifted into a more leisurely if no less ambitious approach. He maintained three offices at his home in Murrell's Inlet, South Carolina, often having one novel or more going in each. At the time of his passing in July 2006, he had four books under way.
Around 1999 Mickey told me that his Hammer novel-in-progress, King of the Weeds, would be the final in the series. He had a substantial number of pages written when September 11, 2001, sent him and his tough detective in a new direction. The idea of Mike Hammer in a New York threatened by terrorists invigorated Mickey, and he turned with great enthusiasm to The Goliath Bone, designed to be the final Hammer novel, chronologically. (He also intended to complete King of the Weeds, and had entrusted several other set-aside Hammer manuscripts to me when I visited him in 1989—Mickey said, "Maybe you can do something with these someday." Two weeks later, Hurricane Hugo hit South Carolina, destroying Mickey's home.)
A few days before his passing, Mickey—who during his illness remained cheerful, tough, and hopeful—expressed one regret to me: "I may not get The Goliath Bone finished." I told him not to worry; if need be, I'd do whatever was necessary to complete it (which I have done, utilizing his rough draft material and extensive notes). His reply was characteristic: "Thanks, buddy."
More thanks are due: to Otto Penzler, who shares my love and respect for Mickey Spillane; Mickey's wife, Jane Spillane, who followed her husband's advice and entrusted me with this mission; Barbara Collins, my wife, who joined Jane and me on the "treasure hunt" Mickey knowingly sent us on through his offices, files and papers; Mickey's longtime typist, Vickie Fredericks; the real Paul Vernon, who provided boating info; editors David Hough and Andrea Schulz, who were both helpful and patient; Dominick Abel, my agent and friend, who made this possible...
...and, of course, Mickey Spillane himself.
Thanks, buddy.
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About the Authors
Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins collaborated on numerous projects. They co-edited four anthologies presenting new and/or classic stories by a variety of American crime writers, and their co-creation, the science-fiction incarnation of Mike Danger, was a popular comic-book series in the 1990s.
With Spillane's cooperation and help, Collins edited (or co-edited) six volumes collecting previously uncollected Spillane short stories and comics work. Occasional actor Spillane also appeared in Collins's two Mommy films as a criminal lawyer and was the subject of an award-winning Collins documentary.
Mickey Spillane was the bestselling American mystery writer of the twentieth century. He was also the most widely translated fiction author of the twentieth century, although he insisted he was not an "author," but a writer.
A bartender's son, Mickey Spillane was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 9, 1918. An only child who swam and played football as a youth, Spillane got a taste for storytelling by scaring other kids around the campfire. After a truncated college career, Spillane—already selling stories to pulps and slicks under pseudonyms—became a writer in the burgeoning comic-book field (Captain America, Submariner), a career cut short by World War II. Spillane—who had learned to fly at airstrips as a boy—became an instructor of fighter pilots.
After the war, Spillane converted an unsold comic-book project—Mike Danger, Private Eye—into the hard-hitting, sexy novel, I, the Jury (1947). The $1,000 advance was just what the writer needed to buy materials for a house he wanted to build for himself and his young wife on a patch of land in Newburgh, New York. The 1948 Signet reprint of the 1947 E. P. Dutton hardcover edition of I, the Jury sold in the millions, as did the six tough mysteries that soon followed; all but one featured hard-as-nails PI Mike Hammer. The Hammer thriller Kiss Me, Deadly (1952) was the first private-eye novel to make the New York Times bestseller list.
Much of Mike Hammer's readership consisted of Spillane's fellow World War II veterans, and the writer—in a vivid, even surrealistic first-person style—escalated the sex and violence already intrinsic to the genre in an effort to give his battle-scarred audience hard-hitting, no-nonsense entertainment. For this blue-collar approach, Spillane was attacked by critics and adored by readers. His influence on the mass-market paperback was immediate and long lasting, his success imitated by countless authors and publishers. Gold Medal Books, pioneering publisher of paperback originals, was specifically designed to tap into the Spillane market.
Spillane's career was sporadic; his conversion in 1952 to the Jehovah's Witnesses, the conservative religious sect, is often cited as the reason he backed away for a time from writing the violent, sexy Hammer novels. Another factor may be the enormous criticism heaped upon Hammer and his creator. Spillane claimed to write only when he needed the money, and in periods of little or no publishing, Spillane occupied himself with other pursuits: flying, traveling with the circus, appearing in motion pictures, and f
or nearly twenty years spoofing himself and Hammer in a lucrative series of Miller Lite beer commercials.
The controversial Hammer has been the subject of a radio show, a comic strip, and two television series, starring Darren McGavin (in the late '50s) and Stacy Keach (in the mid-'80s with a 1997 revival, both produced by Spillane's friend and partner, Jay Bernstein). Numerous gritty movies have been made from Spillane novels, notably director Robert Aldrich's seminal film noir, Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and The Girl Hunters (1963), starring Spillane himself as his famous hero.
Mickey Spillane died in August 2006, joining the ranks of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Agatha Christie, arguably the only other mystery writers of the twentieth century with comparable name recognition.
Max Allan Collins was hailed in 2004 by Publishers Weekly as "a new breed of writer." A frequent Mystery Writers of America Edgar nominee, he has earned an unprecedented fourteen Private Eye Writers of America Shamus nominations for his historical thrillers, winning for his Nathan Heller novels, True Detective (1983) and Stolen Away (1991). In 2006 he received the Eye, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the PWA, joining a small, distinguished list of recipients that includes Ross MacDonald, Robert B. Parker, and Mickey Spillane.
His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award—winning film starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman and directed by Sam Mendes. His many comics credits include the syndicated strip Dick Tracy; his own Ms. Tree; Batman; and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, based on the hit TV series for which he has also written video games, jigsaw puzzles, and a USA Today-bestselling-series of novels.
An independent filmmaker in the Midwest, he wrote and directed the Lifetime movie Mommy (1996) and a 1997 sequel, Mommy's Day. He wrote The Expert, a 1995 HBO world premiere, and wrote and directed the innovative made-for-DVD feature, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market (2000). Shades of Noir (2004), an anthology of his short films, including his award-winning documentary, Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane (1999), can be found in a DVD collection of Collins's indie films, The Black Box. His most recent feature is Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life (2006), based on his Edgar-nominated play (also available on DVD); and he wrote the screenplay for The Last Lullaby (2008), based on his own acclaimed 2007 novel, The Last Quarry.
His other credits include film criticism, short fiction, songwriting, trading-card sets, and movie/TV tie-in novels, including the New York Times bestsellers, Saving Private Ryan and American Gangster. He lives in Muscatine, Iowa, with his wife, writer Barbara Collins. Their son Nathan (Mickey Spillane's godson) works in the video-game industry as a translator of Japanese into English.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Front
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
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