Mickey Spillane has been dead for more than two years, but he has a new Mike Hammer thriller out.  Area writer Max Allan Collins, who lives across the river in Muscatine, Iowa, helped make this possible.
 

Spillane was at one time America's best-selling author, with a series of six action-packed stories that emerged from his typewriter with the same ferocity that bullets were fired from private eye Mike Hammer's gun.   Collins couldn't get enough of these types of hard-boiled detective stories as he was growing up in the 1950s.

As Spillane would need the money, another seven Hammer novels were cranked out in a 20-year period from 1963 to 1983.  Collins began writing crime novels in the '80s, and his "Road to Perdition" became an Academy Award winning film starring Paul Newman and Tom Hanks. 

Spillane went on to parody his tough guy image in a memorable series of Bud Lite commercials with the likes of Bob Eucker and Dick Butkus.  Collins asked him to be co-editor and help select the stories for four crime story analogies, and also tagged him as an actor in two films he was making.

By 2006, Spillane had four books in progress with two of them featuring Mike Hammer.  There was only supposed to be one more but Spillane, as a native New Yorker, became obsessed with the idea of underground terrorists continuing to threaten the city in the wake of 9/11.  He wanted an aging Mike Hammer to take them on.

That book was called "The Goliath Bone."  On his deathbed, Spillane told his buddy that one of his only regrets was that he might not finish it.  Collins said he'd take care of it for him.

Jane Spillane, Mickey's widow, helped Collins find all the story notes and first-draft pages.  Otto Penzler, a longtime mystery anthologist who heads his own imprint section for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, said he wanted to publish it.

The book is out now, as fast and furious a compelling page-turner as Spillane ever turned out in his heyday.  Max Allan Collins once stated that he tended to write period pieces because he didn't see the private eye as that believable a hero in modern times. But, using Mickey Spillane's rough draft, he has done a superior job in realistically portraying a Mike Hammer for the 21st century in a story ripped from the headlines.