Dead Street

To be frank, I wouldn’t have even writen a review of Mickey Spillane’s Dead Street if I hadn’t liked the book. I have no desire to spit on the fairly recent grave of one of the most popular and influential mystery writers of all time.

Truth be told, I’d never read any Spillane before Dead Street. I know, sacrilege. I guess all the talk of his classic Mike Hammer character being some sort of right wing reactionary, commie-bashing homophobe got to me. However, according to Max Allan Collins’ afterword to Dead Street, a lot of the criticisms lobbed at Spillane were bullshit anyway. After reading his final crime novel, it seems that my best bet will be to pick up one of these and decide for myself.

Dead Street, which Max Allan Collins had to finish after Spillane’s death, is a very good read, but not incredible. One can, however, quite easily see how good its writer must have been in his prime.

This final novel concerns one Jack Stang, a cop who’s acquired the nickname “Shooter,” (guess why!) and starts the book by finding out that his lost love who supposedly died twenty years ago is still alive–Stang subsequently retires. From there, the story builds much slower than expected, as our anti-hero tries to settle into a retirement community and solve a mystery at the same time. By the end we’ve had double-crosses, exploded heads, interrogations, and terrorists… but, surprisingly enough, I’d say that the romantic side of the story gets the most coverage.

All in all, things move along well, and even when nothing’s happening the tension stays up. The switch from Spillane to Collins is just about seamless, and the only real problems with it are some strange grammatical choices earlier on in the Spillane section: I assume these were due to a hesitation to greatly change Spillane’s work. Understandable enough. The only overall problem I had with the novel itself was one segment that seemed to operate under the assertion that Saudis = terrorists, but that ends quickly can be explained away without too great a leap of logic.

On the plus side, though, Dead Street is greatly distinguished from other books of its genre by Spillane’s utilization of, well, grumpy old man attitudes. Jack Stang is a retiree, and he has issues with the ways in which the world has changed around him. This, along with a touching love story, serve to add a very human side to what I expected to be a more fast-paced and violent story. Our protagonist is a classic hardboiled anti-hero… aged a few decades: it’s fascinating, and, I expect, partly a window into Spillane’s own later years. Even the novel’s at times overly black and white morality can be explained by the first-person narrator’s world view, if we like. Although, critics generally cite that as typical of Spillane’s work, so what do I know.

Point is, Spillane managed to put together a very poignant farewell to his genre of choice… and unlike many, he did it without writing a main character who is himself a writer, or some such. Jack Stang is not Spillane, but we feel Spillane throughout the novel, for better and for worse… even when Collins is writing.