DIG TWO GRAVES

Mike Hammer goes west.

Celebrating both his secretary/partner/lover Velda Sterling’s return from a long absence in the early 1960s and his own comeback from a protracted period of drying out, Hammer is out Christmas shopping with Velda and her mother, Mildred Sterling, when Mildred is hit by a car and sent to the hospital. Unlike the driver who struck her, she’s not dead, and summoning the couple to the side of her hospital bed, she unreels a revised version of Velda’s origin story: Velda’s father wasn’t unassuming Roger Sterling but Rhinegold Massey, Mildred’s mobbed-up first husband. After evading a prison term for his part in an armored car robbery by turning on his co-conspirators and getting whisked off to Dreamland Park, an Arizona retirement community whose entire population is in the witness protection program, Rhino, now rechristened Rainer Miller, suffered a fatal heart attack after a mugging two months ago. Putting aside his initial assumption that he was the target of the driver who nearly killed Mildred, Hammer decides to head out to Dreamland Park to ask questions, and Velda decides, over his objections, to accompany him. Longtime fans of the franchise begun by Spillane and continued by Collins, working once more from his late friend’s drafts and notes, will anticipate that asking questions will be the least interesting thing Hammer and Velda do among the surprisingly spry and unsurprisingly felonious residents of Dreamland Park. The amusing conceit of a town for snitches allows full rein for Hammer’s signature blend of violence, chastely described lust, and revenge served cold, with several surprising twists thrown in as a bonus.

Like the denizens of its imagined retirement community, you just can’t keep this franchise down.