A Return ... to Dead Street

By Joe Hilliard

What's this? A new column? Has it really been more than a year since the last one? It has indeed. As it is wont to do, real life took a hold the past year and I haven't had the time to devote to the column as much as I had hoped. But, a very persistent writer has been after me lately to review his book, I have some notes on other columns, so here we are, dusting off the old tip-tap-typing to give you a new review.

Dead Street is the latest, but not last, book from the pen of the late Mickey Spillane. Publisher Hard Case Crime still has a few more on tap to follow this one. Unfinished when Spillane died, this was completed by author Max Allan Collins, another Hard Case Crime regular. More than any new book lately, this was one I was really looking forward to, and really wanted to like it. However, Collins newer works, like The Last Quarry, haven't grabbed me like his earlier novels. More troubling was the thought of a posthumous collaboration. Generally, these leave me cold. I'm thinking of the Raymond Chandler/Robert B. Parker Philip Marlowe novel Poodle Springs and Into the Night, the Cornell Woolrich/Lawrence Block thriller, both published in the late-80s. I remember being in high school and picking these up new off the shelves. And being really disappointed. I had high hopes, but low expectations.

The book follows retired NYPD Officer Jack Stang as he investigates the sudden reappearance of a long lost, long thought dead, love suffering from amnesia, and what her supposed death and reappearance mean. It follows the thread of many of the later Mike Hammer novels, and especially the Tiger Mann books, with its Cold War underpinnings, only somewhat updated to the post-9-11 New York milieu. I have to admit, the first salvo does not impress. The first chapter manages to veer from borderline parody to some taut, tense descriptions and then to the merely pedestrian in its few pages. It's like the shock of the character's experiences overwhelm our first person narrator, and Spillane lets that overwhelm the book as well. Fortunately, Spillane settles down into a compelling, interesting voice thereafter. He still straddles parody of his older work, but he succeeds in staying on the right side of the ledger as the mystery unfolds.

It's not as visceral as Spillane's early work. The only "on screen" violence comes in the final few chapters, those written by Collins. Spillane was no longer writing hot-blooded; he maintained a much more leisurely pace with this book. Collins addresses this in his afterward. The insight into Spillane's later career is fascinating enough to warrant seeking out the book if you are interested in the hardboiled genre at all. The changes in his writing style show. Dead Street is not white hot. If you go in expecting exactly the same Spillane of I, the Jury you will be disappointed. The same could be said of The Killing Man when it appeared on shelves in the late-80s. Different sensibilities. And now, fifty plus years down from that first novel, an even different sensibility.

There is a real palpable sense of loss that permeates the book. Spillane meditates repeatedly on his concept of the dead street, a way of life, a state of mind, that has passed on. Stang gives voice to this. The police. The girl. The gangster. The old woman in the neighborhood. All of them are defined by what was, not what is. It is an intensely melancholy book for much of its length. Unfortunately, this atmosphere is lost in the Collins chapters. The Collins chapters mine those tropes associated with Spillane. Gun fire. Sudden brutal death. One last betrayal. On their own, not bad, but as a denouement to what comes before, not as successful. Spillane had largely dropped the straightforward action set pieces in Dead Street to present instead a picture once removed, one of stories within stories. Stang finds clues, hears stories, three times removed from their original source. On one level, it's if Tony Hillerman had abandoned the Southwest for New York, where we find things out obliquely. Sideways. And we don't know it all. Collins drops this oblique vision to present concrete black and white answers to what ails Stang. I can't argue they make sense as a Spillane book, but I can argue they don't make the best sense for this Spillane book.

That being said, on the whole, I liked Dead Street. Even a little Spillane is welcome in this day and age. He still is a breath of fresh air on the stale market. The recent releases from Hard Case Crime have been very strong. Check out friend of the column Christa Faust's Money Shot for a good modern day hardboiled novel that manages to be of our age and still completely hardboiled. Check out their website at http://hardcasecrime.com/.

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