The six substantial manuscripts—often with notes, sometimes with roughed-out endings—were the first order of business; these have all been completed. A number of shorter but significant Hammer manuscripts—again, sometimes with notes and rough endings—were also worthy of completion, including the writer’s first attempt at a Hammer yarn (Killing Town, 2018). Some less substantial fragments became short stories, eight of which have been collected in A Long Time Dead, published by Mysterious Press.

This time—as was the case with the previous Hammer novel, Murder, My Love (2019)—I am working chiefly from a synopsis, with only a few tasty morsels of Spillane prose to interweave. As usual, I have done my best to determine when Mickey wrote the material, so that I might set the novel in continuity, to give the book its rightful place in the canon.

The nature of the plot synopsis suggests Masquerade for Murder may have been designed for one of actor Stacy Keach’s Mike Hammer telefilms or episodes of the TV series that ended in 1989 (revived in 1997). I know that Mickey developed several ideas for TV producer Jay Bernstein, and in fact his novel The Killing Man (1989) began that way, until Mickey decided to go the prose route (“It was too good to waste on television,” he told me). Mickey also devised the ending of the otherwise abysmal Bernstein-produced, non-Keach Hammer telefilm, Come Die with Me (1994), a production Spillane disavowed.

This synopsis would appear to have been developed either before or after The Killing Man, putting its action in the late ’80s. I am placing it in the continuity right after that 1989 novel (the text of which places the action in 1988). This presents a Mike Hammer in his late fifties, somewhat younger than the calendar would have him, a mathematical improbability that did not bother Mickey Spillane one bit.

You shouldn’t let it bother you, either.

Max Allan Collins

September 2019

CHAPTER ONE

It wasn’t New York any more, not the old New York. Over on the Main Stem, the lights still blazed as bright as ever and the people were just as many, but that was Tourist Town. Action Street. The Big Beanery.

And when you stood on the corner of Second and 44th, on a chill November night promising winter, and watched five lanes of taxis cruise by heading south in time with the signals, you knew you had kissed off the old New York a long time ago. The Els were down, the cobwebs gone, and even the slop chutes had their faces lifted. The Blue Ribbon restaurant was a memory, fading into history with Broadway pen pushers like Walter Winchell, Earl Wilson and Hy Gardner, whose newspapers were as dead as they were. The hole-in-the-wall joints were done-over and intimate now, the prices high and the lighting low, where the rich married slobs could slip off with some poor sexy broad without causing too much of a stir. Even the junk shops catered to class. Now they had hand-carved ANTIQUES signs over the doors, and brand-new price tags on the same old worthless rummage.