EXCLUSIVE: ‘ROAD TO PERDITION’ Author Max Allan Collins Speaks about Mike Hammer on Screen

Destroy the Brain is proud to have Max Allan Collins write up a guest post to explain the character of Mike Hammer and the screen adaptations of this character. We want to thank Tom Green from Titan Books for giving us this great opportunity.

The publication of Lady, Go Die! has elicited Hollywood inquiries as to the possibility of a new Mike Hammer movie.  Accompanying this interest comes the usual question, “Who do you think should play Mike Hammer?”  Since Mickey Spillane always said that Mike Hammer is a state of mind, my suggestions range from Josh Brolin to Denzel Washington, from Ben Affleck to Jason Statham.  I am always open to imaginative casting.  Tom Hanks made a great Michael Sullivan in Road to Perdition, after all.

Mickey always complained about the Hollywood movies from his Hammer novels, although he had complimentary things to say about the two TV Hammers, Darren McGavin and Stacy Keach.

McGavin brings an affability that did not compromise the character’s brutality.  The recent A & E video release of all 78 McGavin episodes reveals a really tough, violent series strewn with lovely B movie actresses from Yvette Vickers and Allison Hayes to Peggie Castle and Whitney Blake (both veterans of Spillane films).  The late ‘50s show has considerable Manhattan location shooting, really adding to the Spillane flavor.

Keach is for many the definitive Hammer, and I’ve been blessed to have him play Hammer in two full-cast, radio style productions of “novels for audio” of mine
(The New Adventures of Mike Hammer).  He’s a fine Hammer, and his feature-length TV movies, several of which are available on DVD, are solid examples of his charismatic take on the character.

The somewhat difficult to see original I, the Jury – released in 3-D in 1953 – cast an unknown as Hammer, Biff Elliott.  Elliott was a rough-and-tumble Hammer, a very accurate screen version in a much underrated film shot by noir master cinematographer, John Alton.  Spillane never described Hammer, so the “state of mind” was hard for the first screen Hammer to live up to.

Armand Assante in the 1981 remake is a rough-and-mumble Hammer, very much in a Brando vein, sexy and brooding and brutal as hell.  Spillane hated the film, finding it pornographic; but for the first time the sex and violence of the novels made it onto the screen.

In the ‘50s, the tough, sexy novels had a real time getting past the censors.  Robert Aldrich did the best job of it in Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and the smug, self-interested Mike Hammer of Ralph Meeker may be the best screen Hammer of all.  Even Mickey came to like Meeker’s portrayal, though it took him decades to come around.  Kiss Me Deadly is a noir masterpiece, even rating a recent Criterion edition, but the follow-up, My Gun Is Quick (1957, available on DVD) is a pretty shoddy affair.  Physically right for Hammer, TV actor Robert Bray shouted most of his lines.

The most accurate-to-the-novels Hammer, not surprisingly, is Mickey himself in The Girl Hunters (1963).  Who could have guessed this self-proclaimed “amateur” actor could hold the screen with such commanding confidence?  Many movie critics (including those of Time and Newsweek) called Mickey “great.”  The DVD is out of print, but TCM shows the film frequently.  It’s no “Kiss Me Deadly,” but it’s the real Mike Hammer, all right.

MIKE HAMMER: LADY, GO DIE! is Mickey Spillane’s lost second Mike Hammer novel – originally penned after I, The Jury and never before published!

Completed by his friend and literary executor Max Allan Collins, the master of crime fiction’s Lady, Go Die! is finally making it to print almost 70 years.

“Perhaps the most exciting discovery in Mickey’s papers,” explains Collins. “is the sizeable fragment of what was clearly the second Mike Hammer novel, Lady, Go Die!, written between I, the Jury and My Gun Is Quick (even predating the second-completed/published Hammer novel, The Twisted Thing, held back by Spillane till 1966).

“Mickey Spillane has been a huge part of my private and professional life since childhood.  He was the role model that led me into mystery,” says Collins.  “We became friends in the early 1980s…Over the years, Mickey entrusted me with numerous unpublished manuscripts, including two half-completed Mike Hammer novels. Shortly before his death, he said to his wife, Jane, ‘When I’m gone, it will be a treasure hunt around here. Call Max — he’ll know what to do with what you find.'”

When Hammer and Velda go on vacation to a Long Island beach town, Hammer becomes embroiled in the mystery of a missing well-known New York party girl who lives nearby. When the woman turns up naked – and dead – astride the statue of a horse in the town square, Hammer feels compelled to investigate.

[button color=”red” link=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0857684655/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=desthebra-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0857684655″]Buy ‘Lady, Go Die!’ on Amazon.com Now![/button]

Lady, Go Die! is available via Amazon in Hardcover or Kindle format.