King of the Weeds by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

“You’re lucky you’re a Fed,” I said. “Putting a bullet in you isn’t worth the red tape… Let’s have those hands up.”

Mike Hammer, that ultra-tough, individualistic PI is back in another Mickey Spillane/Max Allan Collins collaboration, the unabashedly primal, King of the Weeds. This hard-nosed tale of long-delayed revenge is set against a challenge to both the capabilities of the aging Hammer and also to the career of Hammer’s long-time pal, Captain of Homicide, Pat Chambers.

Spillane intended King of the Weeds to be the final Hammer novel, and according to an intro by Max Allan Collins, it’s the sequel to the 1996 Black Alley, the last Hammer novel published by Spillane before he died. Max explains that Spillane set aside King of the Weeds in order to write The Goliath Bone. After Spillane’s death, his widow gave Max all of her husband’s unfinished manuscripts; this was Spillane’s wish, and now Max Allan Collins has finished six novels for grateful fans. There’s always buzz about whether or not unfinished novels should stay that way, but in this case, it’s a definite: hell, no!

King of the Weeds finds Hammer in his mid 60s, slower, older, and not fully recovered from bullet wounds taken the year before. He’s engaged to Velda, his savvy, sexy and tough secretary. Retirement is just around the corner, but before Hammer can file his PI license for the last time, the past comes back with a vengeance. It’s a near miss for Hammer when an assassin hunts him down early one morning:

When you suddenly realize you’re about to be killed, all your mind does is tell you that you were dumb. You had the experience, you had the physical abilities, you had the animal instincts.

But you were dumb,

Maybe you had played the game too long. Maybe that last round of injuries had left a deeper wound than you thought.

The little man in the tailored navy blue suit, a raincoat draped over his arm, was waiting on my floor when the elevator opened and I stepped out. He never raised his head to look at me, the brim of his pale blue hat even with my nose. He smelled faintly of too-strong aftershave. I thought nothing of it, but did wonder why that raincoat was dry on a rainy morning like this.

So I got off and began to walk away, knowing–just a stupid fraction of a second later than I should have–that he was a killer and I was the target, and I jerked my head around to see the face of the bastard who would take me down. He was just inside the elevator, his foot holding the door open while he aimed the silenced gun at me from six feet away, the weapon emerging for a good look at me from under that draped raincoat, and both of us knew there was no hope for me at all, because it was six-thirty in the morning and no one but me would be on the eighth floor this early.

This is the book’s opening paragraphs, and if you like the tone, the voice, and the pacing, then you’ll enjoy this rugged tale which pits an aging Mike Hammer against someone who wants him dead. During his checkered career, Hammer has made more than his share of enemies, and the list of those who would be happy to see him dead is so long, it’s not worth wasting the paper. Hammer suspects that the attempted hit may have something to do with 89 billion dollars of stashed mob money or then again perhaps the hit was placed by slimy Rudy Olaf, a man Hammer and his old pal, Pat Chambers put away in Sing-Sing forty years earlier for a string of robberies and brutal murders targeting gay men, known as the Bowery Bum slayings. Seems that a certain lowlife named Brogan, a “crony” of Olaf’s has decided to step up on his deathbed and confess to the crimes. Rudy Olaf is about to be released as a man who served a wrongful imprisonment, and he’s certain to harbor a grudge against Hammer and Chambers. But is the grudge big enough to propel a hit man Hammer’s way?

Hammer tries to discover who wants him dead while juggling the decades old Rudy Olaf case with the mystery deaths of New York cops who are dropping like flies in mysterious circumstances. Some of the deaths appear to be natural; other cops just seemed to be in the wrong place at the right time, but others are slaughtered in a “serial killing by coincidence” way.  According to Chambers, the chances of this number of cops dying in such a short period of time are “about ten times the likelihood of winning the Irish Sweepstakes.” With no clues why the ranks of the NYPD ranks are being decimated, Pat Chamber’s career on the line, and with both the mob and government after Hammer to spill the location of $89 billion in mob money, it’s up to Hammer to tie together all the connections between these problems.

This is a hard-hitting, fast-paced Hammer tale, and while Hammer may be in rocking chair territory, in this novel, Hammer’s aging actually works for him. With his low-rent office, he’s always been easy to underestimate, and that’s the mistake his enemies make repeatedly. He may be gray, he may be a little heavier and slower, but he’s still intelligent, aggressive, and with a savagery just beneath that laid-back façade–a PI whose sense of justice has no place within the confines of an institution.

Review copy