Kill Me if you Can was just published in 2022. Yet it fills in a gap in the Mike Hammer chronology between Kiss Me Deadly (1952) and The Girl Hunters (1962), starting with Velda’s disappearance and Mike’s seven year bender when he nearly drinks himself to death with guilt.
Culled from Spillane’s unfinished drafts and outlines, the story has Mike out of his mind trying to figure out how highly trained Velda disappeared from a gala event where she was playing bodyguard. Mike is going through every bar in Manhattan trying to draw out information on who is running the high-stakes jewelry robbery crew that hit Velda. But all it’s gotten him is drunk and sick.
When Mike died take on a security job in a hunch, he ends up turning it into a vicious bloody mess as well.
Much of the story has Mike in a romance with a torch singer who is a stand-in for Velda, but getting no closer to a solution.
This 26th Mike Hammer novel (although perhaps seventh chronologically) is filled with Spillane’s patented brand of comic book violence, Hammer’s bravado, and a searing sense of right and wrong. There are no fuzzy lines in Mike Hammer’s world and very little mercy fir the bad guys either.
Pulp, Crime, & Mystery Books 