Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on May 25, 2011
Mickey Spillane was a master of the noir title: My Gun is Quick remains my favorite, but almost equally high on my list of stellar titles are I, the Jury; The Big Kill; and Kiss Me, Deadly. Kiss Her Goodbye just doesn’t have the same danger-laden pizzazz. Its subdued title notwithstanding, the novel feels very much like a Mike Hammer story: edgy, violent, fast-paced and action-filled.
Hammer was always a bit too self-righteous for my taste, too given to seeing himself as an avenging instrument of justice and too frequently indulging in rants against the many categories of people he believes the world would be better off without. Although it’s been years since I last read a Hammer novel, the latest installment depicts a somewhat more introspective Mike Hammer than the one I remember. I wouldn’t say he’s mellowed; he doesn’t kill anyone until about two-thirds of the way through the novel but the body count rises dramatically as the novel nears its end (particularly when Hammer tells us he “passed the grease gun across a sea of faces and turned them scarlet and screaming”). Still, Hammer engages in less moralizing as he did in some of the earlier novels and his misogynistic opinions are a bit more muted (both of those changes are improvements, in my view). Plots in a few Hammer novels seem like an excuse for Hammer to go on a rampage, dispensing street justice with his .44. Kiss Her Goodbye gives the reader a taste of the rampaging Hammer but also delivers a relatively nuanced plot that is both coherent and engaging.
After a year of retirement in Florida while recovering from a wound he received in a shootout with the Bonetti family, Hammer returns to New York to attend the funeral of his mentor, Bill Doolan. Hammer can’t believe Doolan would commit suicide, despite the terminal cancer that promised him only three more months of pain-filled life. After leaving the funeral, while riding with the captain of the homicide division, Hammer spots a murder victim, Virginia Mathes, lying dead on a city sidewalk. Hammer improbably intuits that Mathes was not killed in a random mugging and that her murder is somehow related to Doolan’s death. Adding to the mystery are a dead hooker, an uncut diamond that was smuggled out of Russia before the Second World War, a stunning Brazilian singer named Chrome, and Doolan’s unlikely membership in a trendy NYC disco called Club 52. It all adds up to an entertaining, plausibly-plotted story that leads to a satisfying (although not entirely surprising) resolution.
Despite being an enormously popular writer in his day, Spillane was never in the same league as the best writers of crime fiction who preceded him: Chandler, Cain, and Hammett. Compared to most other pulp fiction authors, however, Spillane stood out. Spillane nourished the reading public’s desire for sex and violence using a spare, undemanding prose style that was perfect for the gritty stories he wrote. We don’t know how much of the writing in Kiss Her Goodbye is Spillane’s and how much is Allan Collins’ -- the introduction tells us only that Collins was working from Spillane’s plot notes, character sketches, and a “false start” -- but it doesn’t really matter. Kiss Her Goodbye is unmistakably a Mike Hammer novel: a little trashy, sometimes childish, but always entertaining.
Although set in the 1970’s, the novel is written in the less-than-PC language of the 1950’s: women are either dolls or broads and nearly every description of a female includes a commentary on her breasts. Offensive though that might be, ‘twere it otherwise it wouldn’t be a Mike Hammer novel. It is what it is. Kiss Her Goodbye is the kind of throwback novel that most fans of old-school, hard-boiled detective fiction should enjoy. I thought it was well done.
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