The Shrinking Island – the YA novel by Mickey Spillane (collected with the preceding two novels in the Larry and Josh Trilogy) – is out now from Wolfpack/Rough Edges. It is unlikely (though not impossible) you’ll find it in a brick-and-mortar book store, so please seriously consider ordering it from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

This third Josh and Larry was announced in the mid-‘70s, so it has been (ahem) a long wait. Spillane fans should be used to that by now. Among the novels that were announced but did not come out during Mickey’s lifetime are The Consummata (the sequel to The Delta Factor), Complex 90, and King of the Weeds. I completed all of them from the unpublished, unfinished manuscripts. Novels whose stories he clearly referred to in interviews (though sans titles) include The Big Bang, Murder Never Knocks and the non-Hammer Dead Street. All of these I have completed, Mickey having requested I do so with his unfinished manuscripts.

Another announced (but never published) example is the Mike Hammer novel, Tonight I Die, which existed in Mickey’s files in three forms: radio, TV and movie scripts. One of these became a short story, “The Night I Died,” the radio play version of which I adapted during Mickey’s lifetime for the anthology The Private Eyes. I have done another pass on that and it will finally appear under the original title, “Tonight I Die,” in the forthcoming Wolfpack/Rough Edges collection, Stand Up and Die! Another version (the screenplay one) has become Kill Me If You Can, a Hammer novel that will be published in August.

Confused yet?

Allow your head to clear, then pre-order The Menace, which will come out later this month, again from Wolfpack/Rough Edges. The outstanding cover appears here for the first time. This is a novel I developed from a screenplay that appears to have been either a feature film or the pilot for an unrealized anthology series. Mickey had been toying with an Alfred Hitchcock Presents type of show for years, intending to host it himself. This script dates to the early ‘80s (possibly a bit earlier) and, while he always spoke to me of it as a movie project that he would produce and perhaps direct, the surviving version is rather short (under fifty pages).

That required fleshing it out some, and it became a full-length (but not lengthy) novel of 40,000 words. (We are including a short story and a non-fiction true crime piece by Mickey to round out the book somewhat.)

The Menace is unusual in that it’s a horror story, although it does have mystery elements (but then horror stories often do). Mickey conceived it as a sort of response to the overwhelming success of Stephen King in the literary marketplace. He disliked King’s use of the supernatural – he avoided that in his own writing – but considered King “a great writer.”

More on this later.

Those of you who have followed these updates over the years are well aware of my enthusiasm for Bobby Darin, the late great singer who gave us everything from “Splish Splash” and “Dream Lover” to “Mack the Knife” and “Beyond the Sea,” as well as “If I Were a Carpenter” and “Simple Song of Freedom” and memorable film appearances in Pressure Point and Hell is For Heroes.

I discovered Darin at age eleven when I saw him singing “Mack the Knife” on a Heart Fund special. I have never been the same since. The combination of a confident, sardonic singer, who moved with a dancer’s grace, and the dark story of a Jack the Ripper figure, widened my eyes in a way that hasn’t shut them yet.

I’d been aware of him, a little, because of “Splish Splash,” which at age ten I’d loved as a novelty record in the vein of “Purple People Eater” or “Witch Doctor.” “Mack” was something entirely different. I somehow scraped together enough to purchase his swinging standards album, “That’s All,” and received “This Is Darin” for my birthday, 1960. I collected everything I could get my hands on, searching record stores for his (even then) rare Decca releases going back to ‘56. A year or so later, I discovered Mickey Spillane, and my classmates at Grant Elementary (and later Central Junior High) were divided into two groups: those who knew me as the Bobby Darin guy, and those who knew me as the Mickey Spillane guy.

The bloody storytelling of “Mack the Knife” was the connective tissue. As I grew older – something Darin did, too, but not for long, dying at 37 in 1973 – I came to learn Darin had suffered a heart condition from childhood and had been told he wouldn’t live past thirty. And I now understand that “Mack the Knife” – and “Artificial Flowers” and such lesser known fare as “Gyp the Cat” and “Goodbye Charlie” – were the singer thumbing his nose at death. Even “Beyond the Sea” seems to have that resonance.

Darin has never gotten his due. I have long felt that if one singer/songwriter of the 20th Century was chosen to represent every facet of popular music, Darin was the obvious choice – not that he was the best in every category, but his curiosity as an artist, and his death-sentence desire to explore everything that interested him while he had time, makes him unique. His two major areas – rock ‘n’ roll and the Great American songbook – tend to get him dismissed in both genres. But try to imagine Frank Sinatra singing “Splish Splash” or Jerry Lee Lewis doing “Mack the Knife” and you’ll get the idea.

The other day I stumbled onto something that might be called an epiphany, if I could put it into words. Having turned 74, I feel more and more removed and detached from the younger world. For the first time, I can find nothing in popular music that I can relate to. Even movies interest me less, and pop music and mainstream movies have always been at the center of my adult (and childhood) life. It’s easy for people my age to feel the world moving away from them. Maybe it’s God’s way of making it easier to let go.

But then, quite by accident, I came upon something delightful. Something that made me smile and even laugh and feel a sense of common humanity with people decades younger than me. None of these people were old and white; most were Black and young. And I got such a kick out of sharing time with them on You Tube.

You may be hipper enough than me to already know about this, but a genre of You Tube posting has people younger than me (which is most people) reacting to music from earlier generations, hearing for the first time very famous songs from another era. Mostly this is ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s rock and pop music. Now, as someone who has difficulty – extreme difficulty – finding anything to admire about Rap and Hip Hop, with the notable exception being that those forms are at least not Country Western – I can’t properly express the life-affirming joy I felt seeing young people listening to Bobby Darin for the first time and being blown away.

There are at least a dozen of these out there, but I’m going to share a few of my favorites with you.

Here’s the Rob Squad, a cute, smart couple hearing “Mack the Knife” for the first time. Watch the young woman start picking up on the subject matter of the song, and then nudge guy – who’s been grooving along – to pay attention to the lyrics.

India Reacts has a very fun young woman picking up almost immediately on the murder spree and her reactions are wonderfully entertaining. She had earlier heard and loved “Dream Lover” and is not prepared for the dark alley Darin goes cheerfully down.

Another fun couple, Shawn and Mel, discover the magic of Darin doing “Beyond the Sea.” It should be noted this is Darin lip-syncing on a Dick Clark nighttime show (the standard practice) and he is probably all of 24 years old…but his smooth confidence and humor and ease is on full display. But the real point here is the infectious, positive energy of Shawn and Mel, and the power of Darin and good popular music spanning the decades like they’re nothing.

Dani’s “I’d Rather Be Listening” gives us a great live performance of “Mack the Knife,” and her reaction is smart and fun.

This older gent, Harry, reacts beautifully to “Beyond the Sea.” And then he looks Darin up and lets his audience know what a genius he’s stumbled upon. A great post. Thank you, brother!

I am so relieved to known that smart, cool people will be here after I’m gone.

M.A.C.

Tags: Mickey Spillane, Mike Hammer, The Shrinking Island