Kiss Her Goodbye: An Otto Penzler Book [Hardcover]

It's probably hard for anyone born after, let's arbitrarily say, the Viet Nam era, to believe, but Mickey Spillane was once considered the most violent writer in America. Moreover, his books were considered borderline pornography for his "graphic" sex scenes. Do I need to add that, for a time in the mid 60s, or thereabouts, his books outsold all other titles in the world, except for the Bible!
What no one (at least of the literati) EVER said about him, in life, or after his passing, was that he was a good writer. Well, maybe he wasn't. But he was certainly one of the most influential writers of his generation.
All due credit to the influences of Hammett and Chandler, but, for every "hard-boiled" writer in their tradition, there are 5 in the Spillane tradition. Moreover, while Hammett was a frail consumptive reliving his past, and Chandler was an Anglophile snob, Spillane LIVED his Mike Hammer persona pretty much until his death in 2006 at age 88.
And, he had a hard core of believers who treasured his writing even when the mass market had, mostly, turned to other, more "modern" writers.
One of those was/is Max Allan Collins, no slouch himself in the writing department. Collins' passionate championing of Spillane was more than just lip service and so, when Spillane knew his time was almost up, he asked that Collins take on some of his unfinished works and continue the tradition.
"Kiss Her Goodbye" is the third work that Collins has taken on, after "The Goliath Bone" and "The Big Bang", and like its predecessors, this latest, which, for those who need to know the plot... never Spillane's strongest point... concerns Mike Hammer coming back to New York (after the events of "...Bang") and getting involved in the "suicide" of an old friend that, "just doesn't feel right". All the standard Spillania is here, from Mike's ongoing and eternal angst, to a finale that makes Hammett's "Red Harvest" look like "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm" (O.K. maybe that's a BIT much!) But, basically, I have to feel this is REALLY a nostalgia trip for people (not unlike myself) who are long-time fans.
I have two paraphrased quotes that summ up my feelings. In regards Spillane's popularity: "For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not, no explanation is possible". And, regarding how well Collins carries on the Spillane mantle, I paraphrase John O'Hara on George Gershwin: "Mickey Spillane died in 2006. But I don't have to believe it if I don't want to."

Hey, I remember when I,THE JURY first appeared, and I was one of those thoroughly captivated by the Mike Hammer character. In fact, I satirizewd the Spillane style in a piece I wrote for San Jose State College's LYKE literary magazine, naming my character "Sludge Hammer". This was around 1953.

So it's great to see Mike still around even after his creator's death. But alas, we can't really call this good writing. That's not to say that one won't enjoy it though. Don't look for credibility and you won't be disappointed. And don't try to keep count of the dead bodies in this.

I will say that this is inspiring me to look up the old Mike Hammers and re-read them.

Mickey Spillane was a master of the noir title: My Gun Is Quick remains my favorite, but almost equally high on my list of stellar titles are I, the Jury; The Big Kill; and Kiss Me, Deadly. Kiss Her Goodbye just doesn't have the same danger-laden pizzazz. Its subdued title notwithstanding, the novel feels very much like a Mike Hammer story: edgy, violent, fast-paced and action-filled.

Hammer was always a bit too self-righteous for my taste, too given to seeing himself as an avenging instrument of justice and too frequently indulging in rants against the many categories of people he believes the world would be better off without. Although it's been years since I last read a Hammer novel, the latest installment depicts a somewhat more introspective Mike Hammer than the one I remember. I wouldn't say he's mellowed; he doesn't kill anyone until about two-thirds of the way through the novel but the body count rises dramatically as the novel nears its end (particularly when Hammer tells us he "passed the grease gun across a sea of faces and turned them scarlet and screaming"). Still, Hammer engages in less moralizing as he did in some of the earlier novels and his misogynistic opinions are a bit more muted (both of those changes are improvements, in my view). Plots in a few Hammer novels seem like an excuse for Hammer to go on a rampage, dispensing street justice with his .44. Kiss Her Goodbye gives the reader a taste of the rampaging Hammer but also delivers a relatively nuanced plot that is both coherent and engaging.

After a year of retirement in Florida while recovering from a wound he received in a shootout with the Bonetti family, Hammer returns to New York to attend the funeral of his mentor, Bill Doolan. Hammer can't believe Doolan would commit suicide, despite the terminal cancer that promised him only three more months of pain-filled life. After leaving the funeral, while riding with the captain of the homicide division, Hammer spots a murder victim, Virginia Mathes, lying dead on a city sidewalk. Hammer improbably intuits that Mathes was not killed in a random mugging and that her murder is somehow related to Doolan's death. Adding to the mystery are a dead hooker, an uncut diamond that was smuggled out of Russia before the Second World War, a stunning Brazilian singer named Chrome, and Doolan's unlikely membership in a trendy NYC disco called Club 52. It all adds up to an entertaining, plausibly-plotted story that leads to a satisfying (although not entirely surprising) resolution.

Despite being an enormously popular writer in his day, Spillane was never in the same league as the best writers of crime fiction who preceded him: Chandler, Cain, and Hammett. Compared to most other pulp fiction authors, however, Spillane stood out. Spillane nourished the reading public's desire for sex and violence using a spare, undemanding prose style that was perfect for the gritty stories he wrote. We don't know how much of the writing in Kiss Her Goodbye is Spillane's and how much is Allan Collins' -- the introduction tells us only that Collins was working from Spillane's plot notes, character sketches, and a "false start" -- but it doesn't really matter. Kiss Her Goodbye is unmistakably a Mike Hammer novel: a little trashy, sometimes childish, but always entertaining.

Although set in the 1970's, the novel is written in the less-than-PC language of the 1950's: women are either dolls or broads and nearly every description of a female includes a commentary on her breasts. Offensive though that might be, `twere it otherwise it wouldn't be a Mike Hammer novel. It is what it is. Kiss Her Goodbye is the kind of throwback novel that most fans of old-school, hard-boiled detective fiction should enjoy. I thought it was well done.

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