For Mike Hammer fans, every new story is worth the wait. Kiss Her Goodbye finds Hammer pal Captain Pat Chambers calling the old gumshoe out of his retirement in Florida to investigate whether a common friend really committed suicide. We meet Old Man Mike Hammer, not fully recovered from getting caught in the crossfire in his last big show. He’s ragged around the edges, but refuses to let a shelf full of pills and his loss of girth prevent him from pushing anyone out of his way. No matter how many guns they have drawn.
Max Allan Collins is back, taking notes left by Mickey Spillane and drawing them together into one of the most fun, and most down-to-earth, adventures of Hammer in New York City. This time he’s left to work his way through a Studio 54-inspired club, as he trips over dead bodies to learn the truth. But can Hammer really be Hammer without the lovable Velda? Originally published in 2011 in hardcover, Kiss Her Goodbyeis now out in paperback, and with an all-new ending.
It’s difficult to imagine even Superman could leap over the tall buildings that have pierced the skyline in recent years. The current tallest building is a staggering 2,717 feet (828 m) tall, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. If its 57 elevators and 124-floor elevator aren’t high enough for you, just wait for the next skyscraper to eclipse it in 2021, the 3,281-foot high Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, which when finished will in part mimic the look of the fictional Stark Tower/Avengers building in the New York City of the Marvel movies. From the 2,800 hundred-year-old Great Pyramids of Egypt to today’s contest to be Manhattan’s tallest structure, Edward Denison and Nick Beech′s How to Read Skyscrapers is a handy pocket-sized field guide to accompany you on your travels or serve as a reference to understand the history of humanity’s desire to build ever taller structures.
Not only does How to Read Skyscrapers provide a chronological overview of the construction processes and features behind the history of tall building design, it is a quick course in the progress of architectural science and technology. Along the way readers will encounter flying buttresses and domes, arches, facades, and columns, lobbies and pedestals, iron framing, prefabricated modular design, elevators, sprinkler systems, boiler and ventilation systems, electricity, zoning barriers, decorative features, building material improvements, innovative lighting, air travel docking systems, marketing and competitive (ego) building and symbolism, all toward the concept of creating the building as city unto itself–and the innovation annotations are all tied to the buildings these new features were first introduced.
For much of the book two cities championed dramatic heights, first Chicago followed later by New York City, making this guide a useful tool for sight-seeing in these cities. One section highlights American growth and early building history, another section details the global proliferation of tall buildings, followed by a survey of the tallest U.S. buildings, and a tour of the most striking, strangely designed giant structures around the world.
Fans of any character or universe love their fandom and often can’t get enough of it. It’s why writers keep writing new versions of Frankenstein 201 years later and new stories featuring James Bond 66 years later and Sherlock Holmes 132 years later. Fans of writer Mickey Spillane′s Mike Hammer novels (or the Darren McGavin or Stacy Keach television series) have not just the 13 novels Spillane wrote beginning 72 years ago, but now a full two dozen thanks to Spillane’s co-conspirator of hard-boiled crime and his successor, Max Allan Collins. In last year’s centenary of Spillane’s birth, that meant the release of the unpublished first Mike Hammer novel Killing Town (reviewed here at borg). Using the combined talents of Spillane and Collins, it’s a crime story as good as they get. With the latest team-up of Spillane and Collins,Murder, My Love, Collins proves he has mastered the voice of the famous cop-turned-private eye. This book is 100% end-to-end Collins, as the writer says he worked from Spillane’s notes but all of the prose is new material. And that’s fabulous, because this book is all Mike Hammer at his best.
As with Killing Town, Collins’ Murder, My Love is a shorter Hammer novel and a quick read. Personally at 200 pages I find it the ideal length–all pulp novels, classic paperback mysteries, true crime novels, etc. should be able to be gobbled up in a single trip (like on a Greyhound bus from Detroit to Cincinnati or a train from Omaha to Denver). I soaked up Murder, My Love in two sittings, and it was an entirely satisfying read, complete with Hammer and his assistant/also cop-turned P.I., Velda, who Collins writes cleverly here first person in a few pages of “off-camera” playback that is some of the best material in the book.
Max Allan Collins signing at San Diego Comic-Con in 2018.
It’s a story set later in Hammer’s career, with Collins establishing a perfect picture of New York City from a few decades ago as he takes a U.S. senator on as a client, a senator with White House ambitions. Unfortunately he and his wife have a history of extramarital affairs and now someone else knows, resulting in blackmail. Hammer and Velda embark on the detective work, interviewing the subjects of the senator’s liaisons. Once they find the schemer behind the blackmail, that’s when the body count begins. One-by-one the possible suspects end up dead, and Hammer isn’t exempt from getting in the line of fire.
Our look at the works of master crime writer Donald E. Westlake continues with his 22nd novel published under his own name and 75th (give or take) novel in all,Brothers Keepers, reprinted this month by Hard Case Crime for the first time in 30 years. It’s a deeply human, thoughtful, descriptive, and humor-filled look at a monk named Brother Benedict living in a 200-year-old monastery in Manhattan in the mid-1970s. When a 99-year lease on the land on which his monastery was built expires, and no one can find the original lease contract, the monks’ lives are upended. The problem is the land has become too valuable for the underlying owners–successors to the landowners that granted the lease during the American Revolution–not to cash out. The crime is real: Someone has stolen the lease from the monks, and worse for the Brotherhood, they believe one of the monks conspired with the landowners to hide knowledge of their rights until newly issued options to buy the land vest–meaning any rights the monks may have cease–on New Year’s Day, only a few weeks away.
You’ll hear the Jack Ryan line in The Hunt for Red October, “next time, Jack, write a memo,” as Brother Benedict becomes the monks’ bearer of bad news, only learning of the lease situation by reading the newspaper and seeing it mentioned as part of a story on the skyscraper set to replace the current buildings on the block. Soon he is the designated instrument of solving the problem, requiring him to travel, a concept that is anathema to the Brotherhood: travel is to be avoided at all cost. When he accompanies a more authoritative monk to confront one of the owners on his posh estate, a chance encounter with the owner’s attractive daughter prompts Brother Benedict to question his vows. When another encounter finds the monk and the woman target of a mugging, Brother Benedict has no choice but to confront his curiosity and fears, taking on more and more of the burden to find the original lease, rumored to have an automatic renewal clause that grants his Brotherhood–The Crispinite Order of the Novum Mundum–the right to renew the lease for another 99 years in the Brotherhood’s sole discretion.
First edition of Westlake’s Brothers Keepers.
For those familiar with property law, there’s a nearly unimpeachable attention to the law of leases that becomes the through line of the story. The rights of landowners, the public interest of preserving historical structures, right vs. wrong, good vs. bad, all intertwine with an order of monks who simply want to live their repeated, weekly routine without interfering with–or being bothered by–the outside world. The result is Brothers Keepers, a one-sitting read, a 300-page, laugh-out-loud (at least one laugh every other page) page turner that makes for the perfect follow-up to Hard Case Crime’s most recent Westlake reprint, Help I Am Being Held Prisoner, another highly recommended retro-read reviewed here at borg last year.
