Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer is back in town after a twelve-year hiatus and caught up in his biggest – and most dangerous – case ever.
The Goliath Bone pits Hammer against Al-Qaeda, Homeland Security, the FBI, Mossad, an Israeli vigilante group and a megalomaniac theatrical impresario, who are all scrabbling for a priceless artifact – a thigh bone whose owner stood over ten feet tall, recently unearthed in the Valley of Elah.
There is a great tribute to Spillane – dubbed “a master in compelling you to always turn to the next page” by the New York Times – on the Thrilling Detective website which includes not only biographical information, but a complete bibliography and filmography of his works as well.
He passed away July 17, 2006 at his home in South Carolina, “leaving behind a wife, a couple of ex-wives, four children, possibly as many as 200 million copies of his books in print and plenty of satisfied customers.”
Road to Perdition author Max Allan Collins was entrusted with a nearly finished manuscript by Spillane a week before the author’s death.
And Sam Spade – “the blonde Satan” – will return in February, 2009, in Joe Gores’s Spade and Archer, the authorized prequel to Dashiell Hammett’s classic, The Maltese Falcon.
In 1921, Spade sets up his own agency in San Francisco and takes on a partner, one Miles Archer. According to the publisher’s website, “The next seven years see him dealing with booze runners, banking swindlers, gold smugglers, bumbling cops, and the illegitimate daughter of Sun Yat-sen …”
You can find a list of Spade’s many celluloid incarnations on the Thrilling Detective site.
Check the Classic Film Pages website for some interesting background on the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon.
Surprisingly, Bogart was not the first choice to play the legendary Sam Spade. The role was initially offered to George Raft, who turned it down because he didn’t want to work with an inexperienced director – John Huston.
