BOOK REVIEW: "The Consummata" by Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins Revives

The Mick's Morgan The Raider...

...In A Hard Case Of Crime

Every Spillane Fan CONSUMMATA Have!

A Happy Birthday Mickey Spillane
Keeper in Krime

by Don K. Barbecue

Now that I've reviewed Quarry's Ex and found it one killer thriller, I'll give you a few minutes to run on down to the nearest bookstore for it. Either that or employ the usage of some on-line ordering service. Only don't tell Unk, who sez, whatever that means, that “After that 'Space Abhors A UniVACuum' Deal,' all I gotta do is stink abutt computers and IBM!”

Not to worry. Unk already provided me with his caption to The Consummata, which is Max Allan Collins' second Hard Case Crime in a row, as to grace the loverly McGinnis cover with a word balloon. According to Unk, for reasons you'll soon learn, it has to be said by an old partner in crime of the cover gal, some con, and it goes like this:

Con: “What's Summata you, lady, you keep playing with that gun down there, something's gonna GO OFF – and there'll be a whole Miss of blood Spillane around!”

In fact, Unk gave that line to me shortly after he saved my “sorry butt” from that little episode during the Temple of Schlock review for a new HCC in slay too long, Lawrence Block's Getting Off, wherein I was almost gotten off myself. Yeah, it really looked like the Charles Chips were down.

For those who missed it, come with me now to what was transpiring right at the end of that Getting Off review:

When, just as I was wrappping up, here comes this Charles Chips delivery truck from which people are firing guns at me. What thuh? Right in the middle of the street, from the surface of the street Unk's head pops up directly in the path of said vehicle, like 30 feet away from it. I don't believe it! And wuzzat on his friggin' head? Looks like a round piece of black cement grille or something, with a chinstrap! Not that I got much time to think about it, even as Unk let loose a few rounds of his own while shouting “Look out, kid, no matter whatcha think these guys ain't using Blanc's, the Mel. Get down already, I gotcha manhole covered!”

It doesn't last long. Truck car-roams to its side, and anyone scrambling out alive gets unalive fast and Fury-ous. I say that cuz, while Unk never said he worked for S.H.I.E.L.D., even to be comic, he still has one helluva A.I.M.

Truck's barely settled when Unk reachs up with his free hand and pushes a PIECES NOW! button on his helmet. Pavement around the truck disappears beneath it, taking dead assailants down with it, their guns still smoking.

Unk swivels, faces me square, shouts back to me “Hah, just cuz they use an old Charles Chip truck don't mean they're taking ME out with no snack attack!”

Last thing he hollers is something about “lost votes and rigged ballots down in Flori-DUH!,” and oh yeah, a cry of “You'll never successfully Bushwhack me and mine, suckers!”

I Coletown askt Unk onced about "Who WERE those guys, anyway?" and he just put his tattered old John D. Mac paperback down next to an old Lady from L.U.S.T. adventure that looked more like tittered.

Whereopon the man reached for that super-sub-atomic-whippy-poot-raygun thing he calls his "Walther PPKDick," got up with it like a shot and was outta the joint in no time.

Heedless to slay, Unk was gone so fast the place shook, and that John D. pback hit the floor so wide open flush it plumb broke and busted. Unk bitched about it later, but I told him that's what ya get when ya slam the big door ...

Yeah, suddenly I was the last one left.

Man, Unk had gone awful fast. But not fast enough that I didn't hear him off in the deepening distance, yelling something about how he was gonna "maul and MANGLE Chad," whoever that was, "down in" somewhere rhymes with "Gory Ma." Least that's what it sounded like to Miami.

Okay, reason I brought this up. The Temple's been swamped with people ... two of them, both old vamps of Unk's and Counting ... wanting to know what happened at the end of the Getting Off review, whether I GOT off'ed. Now they gnaw.

So, betcha that particular aside gotcha wondering about Unk's politics. Which brings us to Frank Morrison Spillane's politics via his own characters. Take Mike Hammer. In one of the later all-Spillane Hammer adventures, The Body Lovers, Hammer gets aslay with blowing up any number of movers and shakers and higher up schmucks. Leaves them all the politicold, cold ground.

Then there was Tiger Mann, Spillane's distaff answer to James Bond. And the answer was “What's the matter grue?”

Over the course of four 60's novels, bing bang boom!, Spillane Hammered out those Tiger tails at a superMannly pace. Mann was Mike Hammer with quasi-government sanction, and he liked his Cold War enemies a lot better dead than Red.

That said, those books are among Spillane's scary best. And whether, you decide, his enemies were actual Reds or not, when Mann took aim, like Unk, he never, ever Communist.

Of course, slay & hack when, we never doubted which were the good guys, and which the Cubad.

1967 ... about the time Unk sez I was “Ne-Hi to a pain in the gunbutt, so duh!” ... Spillane published The Delta Factor, the first and only adventure of Morgan The Raider. Morgan was a cross between, geez, who knows, some Tiger of a Mann and Hammer plus a new guy all his own manner of robbin' hood.

DELTA FACTOR's always been one of my favorite loose Spillanes. The oily 70's movie of same, not so much, even though I saw it once at the old, long-gone Mu-Way Drive-In in Pummeled Dwarf. At lust it starred Yvette Mimieux, who, even Unk admits, I was in Eloi-ve witch when I was a kid. Ah, to have a TIME MACHINE, all would be Wells ... he said all cagey and H. G.-ly.

Now I haven't time here to list all the Spillane Hammers or otherwise that involved a missing shipment of .... something! ... that everyone and his evil twin were hot to find, the truck. The Consummata lick thighs hinges upon one great big truckload of money that went .... somewhere ... at Delta's end. Book opens with Morgan outta stir, and everyone wants that missing forty mill, from our government to that of a certain island nation south of Unk's Flori-DUH. Don't wanna name names, but it's probably close enough ya could, all moist, take a small boat and Castro there.

So, Morgan wants his money, the Coms still hate they missed it, and our own government, yeah, U.S., is quite, regards our rebellious Raider, Fed up with him. Then there's the displaced islanders in the U.S., who could use that money to help their cause of winning back their homeland. Unless some Red bear has already liberate it.

What, ya think I'd forget to men shun Morgan's old lady friend, who gave him a heave-ho like nobody's fuzz nest? And could that home-grown in the U.S. revolutioness want Morgan for more than himself, or for freeing her still captive to non-capitalism country? Hah, like isle ever tell!

So what do these molls and this all have to do with something or someone involved called The Consummata? Churns out she's this legendary dominatrix ... he said, trying knot to give things all a'flay.

And who knows, unless Morgan hurries and loins who The Consummata is quickly, the author of the very next Hard Case Crime novel might ... HOLD on! CHOKE! get there Faust!

There ya have it, fear reader, the running with guns low down on Max Allan Collins latest. And when ya finish these, don't forget to check out his first three Hammer wrap ups, The Goliath Bone, The Big Bang and the incredible in a good slay Kiss Her Goodbye. Should prepare ya quite well for the 2012 release of number 4, Lady, Go Die! Be great if that book features another Robert McGinnis cover like this one does. Like Unk always sez, “Hell, kid, ALL books consummata have 'em.”

And ya know what, I don't think he's “kid”-ding me a femme fatall!

THE DELTA FACTOR (1970)

Reviewed by Tim Ferrante

The Delta Factor is a 1967 Mickey Spillane novel featuring the debut of Morgan the Raider, an escaped con and modern-day opportunist whose expert criminal background is put to use by the US government. Spillane originally intended Morgan as an ongoing character and crafted 108 pages of his next adventure, The Consummata. He never finished the manuscript, instead telling his wife that it be left to fellow scribe Max Allan Collins to do so upon Spillane’s death. The author died in 2006 and Collins fulfilled his wish five years later -- The Consummata was at last published (by Hard Case Crime) in 2011, some 44 years after Morgan’s introduction.

THE DELTA FACTOR movie (hereafter TDF) is nearly as heroic as Morgan’s bravado when facing the impossible. Its overuse of sub-plots and parenthetical characters are harmful and counterweight the likeable primary players and their purpose. There is a genuinely good movie lurking beneath it all, one that’s sorted out upon reflection. Less would have been more, but this is Spillane’s world where nothing is ever easy.

Christopher George (post-THE RAT PATROL and pre-THE IMMORTAL) is cast as Morgan who’s alternately smug, tough and vulnerable behind his ever-present smile and arresting charm. It was a shrewd casting move; George’s medium, yet toned physique and cutely-handsome looks are immediate winners. Regardless of his intentions with ladies or foes, you’re firmly on his side. Another casting plus is Yvette Mimieux who portrays Morgan’s Fed assigned partner (and temporary spouse), Kim Stacy. She is a beautiful actor who is expert at conveying hot and cold running passions through perilous encounters with antagonists and Morgan’s sly and overt advances.

The film’s opening car chase through rain-soaked streets utilizes a clever technique for the introduction and apprehension of the recently escaped Morgan who’d been wrongly convicted of a $40 million currency heist … a fraction of which has been recovered by the Feds. Agent Ames (Ted de Corsia), recounts to the apprehended Morgan how no one else could have pulled off such a robbery especially since Morgan associate, Sal Dekker (Joseph Sirola), was also involved. Surprisingly, the Feds couldn’t care less about the money. Instead, Ames proffers our escape artist antihero a truncated jail sentence in exchange for help in breaking out a political prisoner, Victor Sable, on the corrupt island of Nuevo Cadiz. It’s a convenient coincidence because Nuevo Cadiz is also the location where the Feds suspect the stolen money is hidden.

Morgan briefly gives his captors the slip and pays a visit to Valerie (Yvonne De Carlo) who runs a high end brothel. The minutes long sequence does little to advance the narrative as it serves as nothing more than providing a helpful contact name, Art Keefer (Ralph Taeger). It’s one of TDF’s needless tangents before Kim Stacy’s brazen apartment intrusion on a barely towel-clad Morgan. The pair embarks on their undercover assignment with new names, a quick wedding ceremony and covert arrival in Nuevo Cadiz.

Morgan’s luck at the hotel craps table is sidetracked by a distracting sub-plot of helping jetsetter Lisa Gordot (the supremely lovely Diane McBain) off of the island, she an unwillingly girlfriend to one of its several crooked lawmen. Complications ensue when Morgan and Kim endanger night club singer Rosa (Spillane’s real life wife, Sherri Spillane, in her feature debut) who also works as a portal for obtaining a radio transmitter and informant confidant. Betwixt attempts on their lives with booby trapped television sets, eavesdropping devices and outright gun battles, the duo manage to set up a plan to extract the imprisoned Sable.

The entire mid-section of TDF is rife with sometimes confusing motivations and implausible moments thanks to the aforementioned weighty screenplay. All the while Kim and Morgan grow closer and, for better or worse, know they’re facing overwhelming odds. Nevertheless, Morgan is driven by reconciling who really stole the $40 million and more so, perhaps, the challenge of rescuing Sable from the notoriously secure prison.

As a ruse, he convinces prison security he can deliver over a pound of heroin that will be administered to prisoners, rendering them into cooperative and dependant addicts. It’s a complicated compound, but Morgan manages to extract his target with the help of a turncoat guard. A plane with Kim waits, but not before an ensuing car chase and fire fight gets in their way. It’s not until the final moments when Morgan learns who masterminded the robbery (somewhat telegraphed early on). How, though, will he escape the clutches of the Feds once airborne? Oh, fret not dear friends. Morgan will find a way!

TDF was directed by Hollywood veteran Tay Garnett who also wrote the overloaded screenplay, a man whose career dates back to the silent era. Garnett spent the first half of his profession directing A-list talents such as Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, John Garfield (THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE) and dozens of other name above the title stars. In the mid-‘50s he switched almost entirely to directing television shows and amassed a huge resume in that medium. TDF was the aging auteur’s exclusive return to feature films. He’d direct two more low budget efforts, Pacific International’s CHALLENGE TO BE FREE and Howco’s TIMBER TRAMPS, before retiring. In TDF it’s plainly obvious he understood the visual necessities and coverage required, but one can’t help sensing he probably wished he was back on an MGM soundstage with Harlow, Gable and Wallace Beery filming CHINA SEAS. Credit is due for the final reel car chase that hints at the comedic. The relentlessly fast and silly pursuit in some ways gives us a glimpse at Garnett’s earliest movie days as a gag writer for Mack Sennett and Hal Roach.

TDF’s music score is shared by veteran Raoul Kraushaar and Howard Danziger. It’s mentioned here as this is Danziger’s sole film music work. While deciphering who wrote what would require extensive research, the resulting cues and pre-title theme are generally pluses throughout.

The completed TDF landed at Continental Distributing, the theatrical distribution arm of the Walter Reade Organization whose most notable release is NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Its domestic playdates were scattered and unnoticed and was eventually relegated to a Continental television syndication package carrying the company’s Medallion TV logo. Happily, it retains the WRO logo’s musical signature, an all-time fave of yours truly.

TDF struggles to keep as much of Spillane’s storytelling style intact. Alas, its pinched budget couldn’t possibly allow all of its intricacies to be adequately played out. Why an experienced writer and director like Garnett didn’t streamline the narrative is anyone’s guess. He had to have known there were too many spoons trying to stir in the same bowl. Along with Spillane, the Internet Movie Database lists the great Raoul Walsh(!) as an uncredited writer. If true, it’s a stunning revelation I chose to ignore.

Still, TDF moderately succeeds as an entertaining movie thanks to its non-stop spirit and thoroughly invested cast. Even with is overall rocky cadence and self-disruptive attempts for sinister intrigue, we can still cheer that Morgan the Raider is somewhere out there making other’s lives difficult…including his own.

Happy Birthday

Mickey Spillane!

Happy Birthday MICKEY SPILLANE

March 9th, 1918 - July 17th, 2006

'Femur Thighs Bonely' - OR - 'Mike Hammers Terrorists! Much Blood Spill Layin' Around!'

Femur Thighs Bonely

OR

Mike Hammers Terrorists! Much Blood Spill Layin’ Around!

THE GOLIATH BONE

by Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins

Regrued by The Keeper of the Pit

If it were 1951, Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, best selling private dick and man a gunbutt New York City, would be sitting minding his own business on a bar stool and some bed hot mama would walk over to him, her hips waving hello. And thigh naughty? By then he'd slam banged his unstoppable slay through four tough guy trendsetters, so he and the babes had been aROWLnd, and some of them had even survived to kiss and tell about it. And bedsides, Hammer never let the gals, hips waving any twitch lay, get him, um, behind in his work. Plus he wasn't the kinda guy ever hadda assk.

Butt no it's 2008, start of Goliath. Mike has a grandslambang 13 novels behind him now, his creator and enactor dead and gone to hard dick heaven, and he's sitting on yet another bar stool bemoaning the wicked weather without. For once it's snowing, although it does happen to Hammer in print or film time to time.. It ain't ev'ry day, say, that Stacey Keach gets to intone lines like "It was just another day in New York...cloudy with a chance of scattered hookers." Now maybe the line as I reekmember it ain't quite exact, but usually Mike's got a problem with rain like there's Noah tomorrow. And speaking of udder things double dehuge... in '51's The Big Kill Mike waves the gal off, watches a bundle-bearing guy walk in fright before his murder. Bundle turns out to be a baby of the burp and urp kind and so begins an adventure which brought new meaning to the term "babe and arms." Does too, I have it here on my crib shoot! Our times, there's no gal he gets to tell "Blow, sister," which modern readers might take for an oral exam. No, Hammer's not up for that, he leaves the joint for the street, double zeroes in on a guy acting suspicious in the back of a cab, a guy waiting for, looking for trouble. Odd, because, like Hammer sez, "Nothing was happening." Still, he's got a feeling something's gonna transpire soon, the feeling that readers know usually means scum one’s gonna expire soon. It's bonely, I SAID only page three, and Mike thinks his old cop buddy Pat Chambers would laugh, because "Guys like me weren't supposed to have those weird feelings, like having little people crawling up along your spine and making funny noises in your ears." Now, this little people thing could be why Hammer's still elf employed. But as anyone, such as myself who has read Spillane for like .45 years now, it could just mean streets mean Hammer ain't simply walking abutt with his gun half-cochlea'ed.

A young couple, college-aged, come out of a bar, the lad clutching a long package, maybe an instrument of some kind. He and his blond female companion scurry off toward the subway stairs, and the creep in the taxi gets out, takes after them. Hammer shadows the shifty sneak. By page 5 the kids have run back up to the street, their stalker behind them, armed and dangerous. Hammer aims for the bad guy's gunhand, nails it, and the guy takes a dive on the ice-beslimed subway steps. Sez Hammer, "His head smashed against the stairs," making "squishy sounds" on its way down, "the head pounding out drum notes until it split." After that, he's too far dead and gone for Hammer to "hear the blood dripping." Good thing Hammer always speaks hardboiled Egglish steada Latin, or here's the place where, subway train roaring by underneath him, Hammer coulda blown cold smoke from his piece maker and said "Slick transit gorier."

Ah, but maybe dead languages do in this Hammer have a scroll for him, sea? Turns out the young couple are the son and daughter of two university experts on matters as ancient as Hammer's own bones should be. As in, the son to the father is involved with his dad's second wife's daughter an old Biblical way naughty entirely brother and sisterly, all behind the parents' backs of course. Legal love matters notwithstanding, things soon get so Bibli-kill it isn't just Hammer doing a whole lotta beGATting.

The daughter's mother makes fur much torment of Hammer's old brain matter, as her lovely blonditude keeps shagging at his mam, I mean, memories. Who does this Charlene character remind him of? And true to Spillane form, why do such important to the puzzle thoughts always wind up, in true Hammer fashion, in italics? Old time readers, who no doubt read The Big Kill their first time and could see through the lil kid reaching for Hammer's rod, make that gun, all the time saw the big bang coming, should get quite a kick outta, how to say, Charlene’s denudement. Still, even wayback when Spillane was too much the master to leave plot holsters. And with her over shoulder boulders Charlene promises to be one big bad mama and a barrel of gun...

The on holy matter here? That instrument-sized package the kids unearthed Kongtained a reekscently discovered artifact, found in the very Valley of Elah. And I do mean Kongtained. Hammer herein makes various references to an old movie about a giant ape climbing the Empire State building, and it's not just Hammer having his Wray with words. There's this other piece of prime real estate in town that's no longer there, which was according to Spillane's collaborator, Max Allan Collins, what inspired the Mickster to put down one Hammer novel and start this one, around the day of infamous villainy called 9/11. And like Kong, who's a bigger New Yorker than Mike Hammer, another guy who'd rather the other fell low take the big fall? As for Kong, later on he gets his props, does his own bit fur the fall of the terrorist type of gorilla warfare.

And take the fall the fanatics do. Hard. As well they should, after 9/11 and their heinous act of plane murder. One takes the plunge from a roof rather than face Hammer, willingly plummets to his death unto a parked Thunderbird. Hammer looks down, his accomplice runs up, asks what happened. Hammer sez it's something terrible. Like what, the bud asks. Hammer sez, "Perfectly good ride got ruined." This despite the fact the feds and Chambers would rather have taken the perp down to their station for a good grille-ing. Sure Al Queda's put the hit on him, but when Hammer puts its agents down, it ain't like the next day will find that with guilt Hammer's been laden...

Hammer does make points on not being against ANY religion, just the fanatikillers who took out a good chunka the town he’s spent his professional life protecting. While warning scum one whom Hammer would prob'ly call an effendi offender, Mike threatens that when the terror thug's dead he'll hang a hunka meat around his neck so he doesn't get to heaven with all those virgins. Gee, and harem, I SAID here I thought Hammer was a WWII vet, not Korea. Doesn't matter, he sure knows how to deliver pure Porkchop Hell.

Collins, Spillane's biographer and friend, finisher of The Goliath Bone, pulls no pulsestopping punches here. Once Hammer, Chambers and the cops plus the feds defending our Homeland get in on it, there's no let up. Even if the danged high to the sky thigh didn't belong to the boy-to-be-King David knocked stone cold dead, what's to stop any side to warring factions in the Middle East wanting to either have it or destroy it, if not even start WW3 over it? When it comes to peoples who have been fighting since time immemorial, since before they invented friggin' rocks or maybe even human slinguage, does it even matter if the big bone in question is fake, or Israel? And trust Collins and Spillane to provide Hammer fisticuffly scrapes, not to mention all kindsa marrow.

Even though he’s the new man at the Hammer helm, it's not like Collins, movie maker, topnotch natterer of novelizations, creator of his own oldtime p.i. Nate Heller AND old-fashioned Quarry master, hasn't worked the Hammer beat before, as in his run with Spillane's comic book character, Mike Danger. Danger, in fact, being the original prototype for Hammer, even had his own succulent secretary in the far-flung future, a light on her features gal named Holly Graham. As to why she looked like Bettie Page, well, that's anudder Ms. Tree.

Which brings us to Velda, Hammer's, as Lenny Bruce would say, old lady butt firm secretary. Seems once again a Hammer book opens with Mike and his main triggerfinger squeezette are about to tie the knot, this time in three days in Vegas.By now, since say the end of The Snake in 1964, old Hammer fans can decide for themselves as to whether they wanna lay any beds. And how old ARE Hammer and Velda, any lay? At one point Hammer sez the young folks he rescued are about the age he and Velda first met. Yikes. Hammer, let's say, was in his gun oily '20's during WW2. Meaning Velda's about the same, quiver shake. Unless they were child sweethearts back in the old neighbor Me, Hood... Or maybe they diddle go to college together, and Mike joined up with Felta Velda Pi.

Like AARP-card carrying Hammer here, in incredible fine fighting and .45-firing form, Velda herself is lick thighs, I SAID likewise even more so. When young guys look at her and years of leers back Hammer woulda nailed 'em like a Commie rat to the floor, now he feels proud as, ahem, punch. And okay, so near the end she does manage to play damsel in distress, it's Velda who saves the day when Hammer is about done in by a character as tall and tough as the original Goliath AND toweringly deadly with killer giantics.

Bedsides, she still packs her .38. One can bonely letch, I SAID only guess if she's Keeps it in a P.I. vet place. I demean, ya gotta love her devotion to Mike, who has laid down his law at lust a few climbs, that’s just a few times with a willing wench tight before his supposed wedding. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter maybe he served in Korea, either, he's still Velda’s straight shootin' Seoul mate. Velda's proven time and again, ‘specially after Mike turns down Charlene and hasta drag away with a big bone of his own, it's WW2 privates she's fondle. And here's where I won't go off The Deep end, letch it up to you, leer reader, to loin for yerself if Mike and Velda make the big mattress moanies, or haveta make the date for anudder Erection Set.

The bonely, dang it, only things I haveta say in Kongclusion? One, this is the first book I’ve read and immediately rebeGAT since Paul Malmont’s The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, another book wherein as soon as I started it I felt like a young pulp! Two, same death-dealin' deal here. I put this Hammer down and simply picked him up again, ready for a second round of gun fun and gore. Now I want more, and I’ve started Kongsidering all those left behind Hammers Collins promises to come. Hmm. Way before the end of his life Spillane mentioned a book called The Organ Grinders, and I fur one would love if it survives in some form fur Mr. Collins to monkey with. Kongsarn it, just thinking about it makes me wonder if I could wait should it come out this very fall. (Heck, I’d even spring for it this Ape-thrill!)