Mickey Spillane and
Masquerade for Murder
FOR GARY SANDY—
who brought Mike alive on stage
Co-author’s Note
Shortly before his death in 2006, Mickey Spillane told his wife Jane, “When I’m gone, there’s going to be a treasure hunt around here. Take everything you find and give it to Max — he’ll know what to do.”
Working under the death sentence of pancreatic cancer, Mickey had already called me to ask if I would complete his final Mike Hammer novel for him, if that became necessary, which it did — the greatest, if most bittersweet, honor of my career.
Half a dozen substantial Hammer manuscripts of 100 pages or more were found in the “treasure hunt,” conducted by Jane, my wife Barb and me. These five lost Hammer novels spanned Mickey’s career, from the late ’40s through the mid-’60s and on up to (and including) The Goliath Bone, which he was working on at the time of his passing.
The six substantial manuscripts — often with notes, sometimes with roughed-out endings — were the first order of business; these have all been completed. A number of shorter but significant Hammer manuscripts — again, sometimes with notes and rough endings — were also worthy of completion, including the writer’s first attempt at a Hammer yarn (Killing Town, 2018). Some less substantial fragments became short stories, eight of which have been collected in A Long Time Dead, published by Mysterious Press.
This time — as was the case with the previous Hammer novel, Murder, My Love (2019) — I am working chiefly from a synopsis, with only a few tasty morsels of Spillane prose to interweave. As usual, I have done my best to determine when Mickey wrote the material, so that I might set the novel in continuity, to give the book its rightful place in the canon.
The nature of the plot synopsis suggests Masquerade for Murder may have been designed for one of actor Stacy Keach’s Mike Hammer telefilms or episodes of the TV series that ended in 1989 (revived in 1997). I know that Mickey developed several ideas for TV producer Jay Bernstein, and in fact his novel The Killing Man (1989) began that way, until Mickey decided to go the prose route (“It was too good to waste on television,” he told me). Mickey also devised the ending of the otherwise abysmal Bernstein-produced, non-Keach Hammer telefilm, Come Die with Me (1994), a production Spillane disavowed.
This synopsis would appear to have been developed either before or after The Killing Man, putting its action in the late ’80s. I am placing it in the continuity right after that 1989 novel (the text of which places the action in 1988). This presents a Mike Hammer in his late fifties, somewhat younger than the calendar would have him, a mathematical improbability that did not bother Mickey Spillane one bit.
You shouldn’t let it bother you, either.
Max Allan Collins
September 2019
Chapter One
It wasn’t New York any more, not the old New York. Over on the Main Stem, the lights still blazed as bright as ever and the people were just as many, but that was Tourist Town. Action Street. The Big Beanery.
And when you stood on the corner of Second and 44th, on a chill November night promising winter, and watched five lanes of taxis cruise by heading south in time with the signals, you knew you had kissed off the old New York a long time ago. The Els were down, the cobwebs gone, and even the slop chutes had their faces lifted. The Blue Ribbon restaurant was a memory, fading into history with Broadway pen pushers like Walter Winchell, Earl Wilson and Hy Gardner, whose newspapers were as dead as they were. The hole-in-the-wall joints were done-over and intimate now, the prices high and the lighting low, where the rich married slobs could slip off with some poor sexy broad without causing too much of a stir. Even the junk shops catered to class. Now they had hand-carved ANTIQUES signs over the doors, and brand-new price tags on the same old worthless rummage.
Across the street from where the hackie dropped me, one place was still open and unchanged — PETE’S CHOPHOUSE, said the neon lettering above dark-tinted windows that glowed with electric beer signs like fireflies in the night. I was meeting Captain Pat Chambers of Homicide, my oldest friend in the world, going back all the way to the army and the kind of war nobody protested. One of his best officers, Lt. Casey Shannon — “the Wall Street Cop,” the News called him — was retiring soon, and this was his send-off.
Diminutive Pete himself met me just inside — he was his own maitre d’, a small jet-black-haired man in his sixties (only his hairdresser knew for sure) wearing a shiny tuxedo and a thick mustache and a puffy face that bore a smile like a duty, but one he didn’t mind. The place was smoky and dark, mirrored walls working to make the joint bigger — one of those male bastions where women were welcome, as long as they came accompanied. Like me, Pete’s was a relic — a supper club clinging desperately to the past.
“Mike!” Pete said, the smile turning real. “Or is it Mr. Hammer now that you’re respectable?”
I grinned at him. “I just killed somebody important for a change.”
I took off my porkpie fedora and Pete helped me out of the trenchcoat and took the hat and handed the works over to the blonde at her window; she was maybe twenty-five but in that low-cut sparkly thing, she looked like fifty-five — 1955, that is, and that was fine by me.
“One of these serial killers you read about, huh?” Pete burbled. “Hidin’ in plain sight, in a government job yet! And you flush him out. You got a lotta play in the papers, Mr. Hammer, Mike — like the old days! Your girl Velda, she’s okay? Bastard put her in the hospital, they say.”
“She’s great. That was months ago, Pete. Old news.”
I patted his shoulder and slipped away — I wasn’t here to talk to an aging restauranteur about my latest fifteen minutes of infamy.
The hostess, a stunning redhead in a green evening dress with matching emerald eyes, intercepted me. Though I hadn’t been to Pete’s for a while, I was enough of a regular to know that her first name was Sheila, though by now we were too well-acquainted for me to ask what her last name was.
She was ten curvy pounds the right side of plump and had cherry-red lipsticked lips with a bruised Bardot look that made her smile seem knowing and sly without even trying. Her arm slipped into the crook of mine as she slow-walked me, winding around tables, pausing for bus boys and wait staff.
“Alone tonight, Mike?” She was flirty in that way that you knew would never amount to anything.
“Velda doesn’t like this place.”
Lovely raven-haired Velda was officially my secretary but unofficially my partner in a bunch of ways, with her own P.I. license and a .32 automatic in her purse and my heart tucked under her arm.
The Bardot lips twitched with amusement. “Food not to Velda’s taste?”
“Food very much to her taste. That’s why she doesn’t like it.”
Sheila gave me a kiss of a smile. “Watching her figure?”
“Her and me and every other right-minded man in town. Are you okay, kid?”
“Super. Why?”
“I got X-ray vision. Me and Clark Kent. I can see right through that make-up.”
Her left eye was a little swollen and expertly dabbed with flesh-colored cosmetic.
She frowned just a tad. “Is it that obvious, Mike?”
“Could be I’m a detective. What’s his name? I might have something for him.”
She brought us to a stop and her smile turned into a tragic thing that wouldn’t fool anybody. “No, Mike. Please don’t. Please stay out of it. I’m breaking it off. I promise. I swear.”