The vehicles had just rolled away when she woke up, snuggled against me even closer, and asked, “Jack — is that the sun coming up?”
“Yes. You want me to describe it?”
“No. I can see it. Not well, but I can see it — colors, shapes. I’m alive, Jack. I’m coming alive.”
Soon, so was the street, a boy on a bike hitting porches with papers, retirees in robes collecting them, lights coming on in houses, the sound of radio and TV and even the laughter of children, or anyway grandchildren.
The Street back in the big city might be dead, but this one wasn’t. All those years without Bettie, I’d been as dead as that ancient patch of pavement. They say retirees go to Florida to die.
But I felt like I was finally starting to live.
Following Mickey Spillane Down DEAD STREET
Preparing this novel for publication was a bittersweet task, a thrill, an honor, an obligation, a privilege. My only regret is that the task needing doing.
Back around 1961, I was a thirteen-year-old in Iowa who fell in love with Mickey Spillane’s fiction, and was inspired by his work (and that of such peers of his as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain) to pursue crime and mystery writing.
As a teenager, I was surprised to learn that the writer I admired so much had been controversial, that in fact he’d been vilified and attacked. When I read about Hammett, Chandler and Cain, I encountered glowing praise for the most part; when I read about Spillane, I heard ridiculous nonsense about pornographic sado-masochism, fascist tendencies and the fostering of juvenile delinquency.
Over the years I became a champion of Mickey’s, and I remain so. During the ’50s, ’60s and into the mid-’70s, Spillane was the world’s bestselling author (not mystery writer — author, a term he disliked, incidentally) and having to defend a writer so popular seemed absurd to me then, and still does now. Part of my pro-Spillane effort included writing (with James L. Traylor) the first critical study of Spillane’s work, One Lonely Knight: Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1984), an Edgar Award nominee, and later making a documentary, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane (1999), available on DVD in the anthology of my short films, Shades of Noir (part of the boxed set, Black Box).
As a reasonably successful mystery writer identified with championing Spillane, I was asked in 1981 by the organizers of the mystery fan convention, Bouchercon, to serve as their liaison with Mickey, who was one of their honored guests. I was also asked to appear with Mickey on a two-man panel and do the first in-depth public interview of Spillane specifically for mystery fans. Mickey finally coming in close contact with appreciative genre buffs was gratifying to all concerned.
That was when our friendship began, and it lasted until his death in July 2006, and beyond. During those years we worked together on a number of projects, including our comic book series Mike Danger and a number of anthologies, some focusing on Mickey’s uncollected short fiction, others gathering stories by others in the noir tradition Mickey represented. And Mickey did me the favor of appearing as an actor in two of my independent feature films, Mommy and Mommy’s Day (these are also available on DVD).
Additionally, I was privileged to share numerous conversations with Mickey, both at his home in Murrell’s Inlet, South Carolina, and over the phone, about writing. With the exception of Dave Garrity and comic book crony Joe Gill, Mickey had few writer friends. His public persona of the blue-collar writer, self-deprecatingly comparing his work to chewing gum for the masses, meant Mickey allowed few other writers inside the world of craft and art where he spent so much of his life.
No one ever lived who loved storytelling more than Mickey Spillane; no one loved words and vivid turns of phrase more passionately.
Over the last ten or so years of his life, before cancer took him quickly (until his last two months, he was uncommonly healthy for a man in his late eighties), Mickey approached his work in a fashion quite apart from the process of his younger days.
The Spillane of Kiss Me, Deadly (1952) wrote quickly, in a fever heat. He claimed to have written some of his novels in intense, brutal sessions of as short a span as three days. I, the Jury (1947) may have been done in nine days (although sometimes Mickey admitted to nineteen). This was his habit throughout the ’50s and well into the 1970s. He typed with two fingers on cheap yellow paper, single-spaced to “make it look more like a book.”
Ideas flowed through Mickey’s mind in a manner consistent with his boundless energy, and — during the periods when he didn’t publish much (from 1952 to 1961, for example) — he would often noodle with first chapters and story ideas. Sometimes he would come back to these, other times not. In his last ten years, his habit was to work in three offices in his home (one was actually outside his house, a small shack on stilts). Often he would have a book going in each.
The last Spillane novel published during his lifetime, the adventure yarn Something’s Down There (2003), was one of these — he had begun it in the late seventies or early eighties, and didn’t finish it till a month or so before he submitted it. During his last five years he had four novels going — two Mike Hammers (The Goliath Bone and King of the Weeds), an adventure novel (The Last Stand) and a crime novel (Dead Street).
Mickey completed The Last Stand, and had done extensive work on the other three, moving back and forth between them as his muse dictated. A major frustration of his last two months was that he wanted to finish Goliath Bone in particular, as he had promised himself and fans “the last Mike Hammer” in which Hammer and his loyal secretary, Velda, would finally marry.
These last four novels show Mickey — who definitely had a sense of both his mortality as a man and his immortality as a writer — returning to the three genres he loved: private eye, adventure, and crime. For the latter, he in particular liked to write about tough cops, as witness The Deep (1961), Killer Mine (1968) and The Last Cop Out (1973).
Initially, Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai and I were going to publish The Last Stand first, as it was the final work Mickey completed. The book is a very entertaining rumination on friendship and is thematically about as typically Spillane as anything he ever wrote; but the adventure-tale nature of the story itself is more on a par with Something’s Down There than the mystery/crime novels with which Mickey was so strongly identified.
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.