I'm always a little surprised when Mickey's prose is termed competent or workman-like or whatever, because what attracted me to him in the first place was the unique fever-dream pulp poetry that is so wholly his — the openings of ONE LONELY NIGHT and KISS ME, DEADLY, for example, and his descriptions of Manhattan in…

Just for some clarification on my Spillane titles, DEAD STREET was a book that was 80% finished that I completed from Mickey's notes.  So it has Mickey's byline alone.  GOLIATH BONE existed in a nearly complete rough draft that ran rather short because, frankly, Mickey was dying and was racing the clock.  I completed…

Nate Heller in the first novel (TRUE DETECTIVE) was in his mid-20s, a tactic I took with an eye on taking him up through history.  That makes him in his mid-to-late fifties in the new book (BYE BYE, BABY).

Am I a shitty writer?  Well, is somebody who determines the quality of my work by the title of a work-for-hire novelization I did a shitty reader?  Let's leave that to others to decide.

THE CONSUMMATA is not a Mike Hammer story.  It's the sequel to a novel called THE DELTA FACTOR from the mid-'60s and was begun by Spillane around '67.