Lady, Go Die!

March 26, 2012
A clever, fast-moving plot drives Collins’s gritty fifth posthumous collaboration with MWA Grand Master Spillane (after 2011’s The Consummata), which picks up about a year after the events of the debut Hammer novel, I, the Jury (1947). Late one night while on a weekend getaway in the Long Island town of Sidon, the cop-turned-PI and his bombshell secretary, Velda, spot three goons “kicking the hell out of little guy” in an alley. Hammer recognizes one of the three as Dekkert, a crooked cop he once knew. Now with the Sidon police, Dekkert claims, right before Hammer decks him, that he’s pursuing leads to a missing woman, Sharron Wesley, who’s done time for the manslaughter of her husband. When Wesley’s nude corpse turns up shortly afterward, posed on a horse statue, Hammer investigates. Once again, Collins displays his mastery of Spillane’s distinctive two-fisted prose. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary Agency.

May 1, 2012
Before he died, in 2006, we're told, Spillane bequeathed his papers to Collins, saying, He'll know what to do. Collins (Bye Bye, Baby, 2011) has been industriously finishing unpublished Spillane books ever since. One of these, The Goliath Bone (2008), was purportedly intended as the final entry in the Mike Hammer saga. Lady, Go Die! is set much earlier than that post-9/11 sagait's a sequel to I, the Jury (1947), Hammer's debut. Hammer and faithful secretary, Velda, head to Long Island for some R & R only to find a small town just as rotten as the Big Apple. Collins knows the pistol-packing PI inside and out, and Hammer's vigilante rage (and gruff way with the ladies) reads authentically. Considered as a sequel, however, there are marked tonal shifts: the language is ballsier than 1940s pulps, the violence more graphic, and a serial-killer angle feels transported by time machine. We don't know how much Collins had to work with, of course, but consider this more a collaboration than a continuation. Expect to see Hammer yet again.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)