Mystery writer Max Allan Collins is best known for comics and graphic novels, including the Road to Perdition series. He has also finished and published 15 of Mickey Spillane’s incomplete Mike Hammer novels. The latest, Baby, It’s Murder, is the last of the series.
‘The Maltese Falcon’ by Dashiell Hammett (1930)
In Hammett’s third novel, he assembles all the tropes of the private eye story, perfects them, and abandons them. He wrote only two more novels, The Glass Key and The Thin Man, neither traditional private eye novels. This one is a crackling read, with prose as spare and well-minted as anything Hemingway ever did. Buy it here.
‘Farewell, My Lovely’ by Raymond Chandler (1940)
Philip Marlowe and his creator each display an ease here that’s not readily apparent in the other handful of Marlowe novels. All of Chandler’s familiar, recurring character types are on display, from quack doctor and thugs to good girl and femme fatale. Much of what followed in the genre drew (and draws) upon this novel. Buy it here.
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‘One Lonely Night’ by Mickey Spillane (1951)
Spillane and his private eye Mike Hammer are at their most outrageous here, the noir poetry at its most musical, and Hammer’s psychotic violence at full throttle. Ostensibly littered with “Commie” bad guys (who are little more than Blue Meanies), the novel is chiefly Spillane answering his critics through a judge who reluctantly lets Hammer off for murder on a self-defense claim. Buy it here.
‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ by James M. Cain (1934)
In this and a few other works, notably Double Indemnity, Cain examines the lines between lust and love, and greed and murder, and does so while creating a lean prose style second to none. While his later novels are often lacking, Cain out of the gate wrote better dialogue scenes than anybody else. Buy it here.
‘Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye’ by Horace McCoy (1948)
McCoy created in “Ralph Cotter” (an alias used by the narrator) the template for Jim Thompson’s novels. The literate, even brilliant Cotter is a compelling stylist, which makes his amoral actions all the more terrifying. Buy it here.
‘The Golden Spiders’ by Rex Stout (1953)
Perhaps influenced by Mickey Spillane’s surprise success, Stout—the master of combining the traditional mystery and its hard-boiled rival—delivered his toughest novel here. It’s more noir than drawing-room mystery. Buy it here.
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