KILLING TOWN by Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins

Killing Town is the tenth Mike Hammer novel started by Mickey Spillane and completed by Max Allan Collins. In Collins’ Introduction, “Meet Mike Hammer”, Killing Town’s genesis is explained. It’s an early, perhaps the earliest, Mike Hammer story Spillane started—the incomplete manuscript clocked in at 30 typed and single-spaced pages. The story takes place before I, The Jury, making it the first Mike Hammer novel, and a few elements we take for granted when reading a Hammer story are missing. Velda is nowhere in the tale, Manhattan is in Hammer’s rearview mirror, and Pat Chambers is nothing more than a voice on the telephone.

When Hammer arrives in Killington, Rhode Island, undercover and riding the rails as a hobo, he’s greeted with a strip tease and a murder rap. The frame is for the rape and murder of a young woman. The local constabulary, as foul smelling as the city’s fish cannery, is pushing Hammer to the electric chair before he’s even seen a judge. But when an alluring blonde, and the daughter of the fish cannery king, springs him with a false alibi and a marriage proposal he’s left wondering what happened and why.

Killing Town opens, in solid Spillane style, with a flash and a bang and barely wavers from beginning to end. Its trajectory fast and straight as a bullet, rifling Hammer from jailbird and murderer to knight-errant, friend and protector. The mystery is nicely controlled and the reader is as confused about what’s happening, and more importantly why it’s happening, as Hammer. The foul and corrupt setting is as beautifully hardboiled as the prose is stark and lively. An excellent addition to the Hammer canon, and my favorite, of those I’ve read, completed posthumously by Max Allan Collins.

Thrift Shop Book Covers: "Twister"

Twister, by David Hagberg, was published as a paperback original by Dell in 1975, which is the very edition that caught my eye. The cover is everything I want a cover to be; a burning station wagon—an old-school Ford?—frenzied movement as a tornado curves on to Main Street, and an oddly still man, debating whether he should pick up a shiny new quarter, holding a woman in an orange dress and high heels. The artist: Unknown (to me at least)

The first sentence:

Peter Geiger was fifty-three years old and every bone in his body told him something was drastically wrong.

THE PEACEMAKER by Andrew McBride

The Peacemaker is a wonderfully written, entertaining, and thought-provoking novel. Calvin Taylor, also known by his unwanted nickname Choctaw, is a teenager--six weeks past his eighteenth birthday--with experience, if not wisdom, far past his years. While moving eastward across the Arizona Territory towards Texas, Taylor is ambushed by a small group of Apache Indians. 

Choctaw escapes with his life when he happens across a small U. S. Army troop escorting a white man, Brennan, and his adopted Apache daughter, Nahlin, on a peace mission from the American President, U. S. Grant, to the great Apache chief, Cochise. Against Taylor's better judgment, sweetened with the prospect of a $300 fee, he agrees to accompany Brennan and Nahlin to the Apache stronghold where Brennan will present Cochise with the peace offering.

The Peacemaker has the feel and pacing, and wonderfully so, of a classic Western film. The story, as the author explains in his Author's Note, is inspired by a 1968 screenplay written by John Starr Niendorff for the television series "High Chaparral". The desert setting has a technicolor vibrancy that captures the landscape's desolation and beauty, heat and dust. The characters, including the Apaches, are believable with recognizable strengths and flaws. Chactow is, at times less than likable, but always understandable. Beautifully written and vivid, The Peacemaker, is a big novel with big ideas that should please both traditional Western and historical readers alike.

I interviewed Andrew a few months ago, and if you’re interested you can read the interview here.

Blissful Silence

I’m in an busy period right now, outrageously so, and as a result the blog has suffered over the past couple weeks. This suffering, in the form of blissful silence, is going continue for another week or so, but once everything has settled down everything will be back to business as normal.

Until then, take it easy and keep reading.

— Ben Boulden