Mike Hammer – Murder, My Love

Mike Hammer is back, entering the realm of politics in Murder My Love that celebrates the Mickey Spillane Centennial. Edgar award winner Max Allan Collins has finished this book in time for those who have been thinking about the upcoming election season. Spillane was a Jehovah’s Witness who did’t believe in voting, and one hears Hammer’s cynicism and distrust. He takes the assignment to help a politician root out and stop someone who is blackmailing him.

This one happens somewhere around the 1980s. The subject matter is adult with an interest in open relationships, something Hammer understands from his work and pleasure relationship with his assistant Velma, also a PI. When the blackmailers who have a tape of the political contender start being killed, the story turns away from commentary to investigation. There is serious action in this one, which is R rated, with some of the laws of love, and would not be considered Noir Lite. Spillane and Collins take us to New York sites with puns and emotional writing.

Action ensues like in the others, with this being one of a number of books that have been finished by Collins, a friend and colleague of the late Spillane, the best selling mystery writer of the 20th Century. They can be guttural, like in this one where you also know from your gut that something sinister, mysterious, and wrong, is to be expected, and not revealed until the very end.