One of the first releases from the newly revived Hard Case Crime series was The Consummata, a novel first started by hard boiled originator Mickey Spillane in the Sixties and finished in the twenty-first century by fellow noir scribe and close friend Max Allan Collins.
Spillane was the legendary author of numerous best selling hard boiled detective and action novels from the 1940s through to the 1970s. His most infamous creation was the tough talking, pistol packing and pugilistic private eye, Mike Hammer, immortalized in the classic 1947 novel, I, The Jury, memorable for its brilliant finale with its unforgettable blending of Eros and Thanatos:
Her thumbs hooked the fragile silk of the panties and pulled them down. She stepped out of them as delicately as one coming from a bathtub. She was completely naked now. A suntanned goddess giving herself to her lover. With arms outstretched, she walked toward me...She leaned forward to kiss me, her arms going out to encircle my neck...
The roar of the .45 shook the room. Charlotte staggered back a step...
"How c-could you?" she gasped.
I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
"It was easy," I said.
Spillane was both admired and reviled for his tough, unflinching prose, his tight plotting and the graphic sex and violence of his novels. Film director Stanley Kubrick, whose movie classic The Killing, adapted from the novel Clean Break by noted hardboiled scribe Lionel White and co-scripted by Kubrick and Jim Thompson of The Killer Inside Me infamy, is a masterpiece of noir in itself, once said, "Spillane knows all there is to know about reaching audiences."
There is no doubt that vintage Spillane novels, whatever their faults, are classic page turners that grip your attention.
The Comsummata, however, is an awkward final contribution to the Spillane canon. It is the unfinished and thus previously unpublished sequel to the 1967 Spillane offering, The Delta Factor, which was to kick off a series featuring a new Spillane hero, Morgan the Raider. The series fizzled out, however, after a botched attempt to turn The Delta Factor into a movie embittered Spillane. In frustration, he gave the unfinished novel to Collins, telling him that some day they would finish it. Collins eventually finished the novel and the end result is in stores now.
Ostensibly, the novel is set in 1967 Miami, where Morgan is being pursued by the Feds. He is the lead suspect in a $40 million armored car heist and very much a wanted man. He is given refuge by a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles and they offer him the job of finding seventy-five thousand dollars that has been stolen from their war chest. Grateful to his hosts and moved by their sincerity and sympathetic to their cause, Morgan takes the job.
He soon learns the man most likely responsible for the theft is Halaquez, a member of the group since exposed as a double dealer who collaborated with Castro. He was a regular customer at the Mandor Club, an extremely secret brothel for politicians, businessmen and other notable VIPs - a regular, but extremely unwelcome customer, due to his rarefied tastes in sadomasochism. Morgan is granted entree to the club and meets Gaita, a courtesan of the establishment who gives him some leads on Halaquez.
Morgan learns that Halaquez stole the seventy-five thousand to fund a crackpot scheme by a fellow Mandor Club customer, an inventor developing a device for detecting atomic weaponry. The dots soon connect and an elaborate tower of cards collapses all around Morgan, leaving behind a tattered network of duplicity implicating just about all of the novel's characters, a pile of corpses worthy of an Elizabethan revenge tragedy, and the surprise - or maybe not so surprising for more astute readers - identity of The Consummata, a half legendary dominatrix whose mysterious presence hangs tantalizingly over the novel and lends the story its name.
I said earlier that the novel was ostensibly set in 1967 Miami. What I mean is that the novel never really feels like anything from the 1960s. "Chippy" a long and deservedly lost slang word for prostitute is uttered by the characters at one point and just a few paragraphs later, those same characters use the present-day euphemism, "sex worker." Early in the novel, Morgan describes the armored car heist he was involved in as a "template" for such robberies - a term that would never have been used in the 1960s. Yet, at around the same point, Morgan talks about "the threads" worn by the federal agents pursuing him, very much a specimen of 1960s slang. Yet there are no references to movies or music from the time, nothing that really places the story in 1967. Even with its creaky Cold War-era nuclear conspiracy plot, the novel seems to exist in its own time continuum, in its own space of meta-narrative.
This seems to be a strange quirk of Collins, whose The First Quarry, a novel featuring the first adventure of the contract killer Quarry - Collins's version of Morgan the Raider - was supposedly set in 1970, yet featured such bizarre anachronisms as karaoke bars. The untimely intrusions into an otherwise naturalistic story are never explained and in the end, they bothered me and turned me off the novel. This is definitely a distracting aesthetic conceit that he should have left out of Spillane's The Comsummata. Collins did a much better job with Dead Street, the final Mickey Spillane novel published by Hard Case Crime in 2008, for which he wrote the concluding chapters. Collins' contributions fit seamlessly into the novel, his vocabulary and style totally blended with Spillane's and resulted in a very strong and entertaining book.
Now, I'm not saying The Consummata is a total write off, pardon the pun. There are some skillfully described action sequences and some beautiful erotic writing involving Gaita that are highly entertaining. If you are a fan of either Spillane or Collins, the book is a must-read.
It's just too bad that the book leaves you with a strong feeling of reverse deja vu, a feeling of loss at what might have been made at one time out of a brilliant idea for a great story.
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