By Hook Or By Crook
Tyrus Books

I’m pleased to announce that the Mike Hammer short story, “A Long Time Dead,” which appeared last year in the Strand magazine, has been selected for the 15th edition of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s The Best American Mystery Stories 2011.

Otto Penzler selects the fifty stories that he regards as the outstanding mystery/crime stories of the year and submits them to a guest editor – this year it’s Harlan Coben – who whittles the list down to twenty.

And “A Long Time Dead” made the cut. This is the first time one of my stories has been chosen for the BAMS honor (or, for that matter, one of Mickey’s).

The story was developed from one of eight or so shorter Mike Hammer fragments in Mickey’s files. The unpublished Hammer material falls into three categories: a., substantial novel fragments of approximately 100 pages or more, sometimes including plot and character notes; b., shorter novel fragments of a chapter or two, sometimes including plot and character notes; and c., single chapters or less, (again) sometimes including plot and character notes. A previous Hammer story developed from such a fragment appeared in 2010 in the Strand (“The Big Switch,” was chosen for Ed Gorman’s rival “best stories of the year” collection, By Hook or By Crook).

It’s gratifying that these Hammer short stories are being so well-received. I hope to develop the rest of the shorter fragments into short stories in the coming years, with an eye on an eventual collection. With some odd exceptions, Mickey himself never really published a Hammer short story. The exceptions are “The Night I Died,” which I short-story-ized from a radio script of Mickey’s (the only ghosting of sorts that I did for him during his lifetime) for the Spillane/Collins-edited anthology The Private Eyes, and “The Duke Alexander,” an offbeat humorous Damon Runyon kind of thing, starring Hammer but not at all typical, which appeared in Byline: Mickey Spillane (edited by Lynn Meyers and me). I believe “The Duke Alexander” was intended primarily as a screen treatment.

Other exceptions are short story-length condensations of Mickey’s Mike Hammer novels,The Killing Man and Black Alley, both of which appeared in Playboy. I don’t know who created those condensations, but I doubt it was Mickey (it wasn’t me).

So “The Big Switch” and “A Long Time Dead” – both chosen for “best of the year” collections now – are the first actual Mike Hammer short stories in the conventional sense. And there will be more….

Tags: A Long Time Dead, Mike Hammer, Short Stories, Spillane