Where does Spillane stop and Collins start?: A job for the style detective and some questions for readers

I've read a few crime fiction collaborations by authors who have also established literary identities on their own, and I sometimes play the idle game of trying to guess which partner in responsible for a given narrative passage or line of dialogue.

The Consummata is not a typical collaboration. Mickey Spillane began the book as a sequel to a novel of his that had appeared in 1967, and he gave the unfinished manuscript to Max Allan Collins years later. Collins then completed the novel, which finally appeared under the Hard Case Crime imprint in 2011.

I don't know how complete the book was when Spillane handed it over, and I don't know what changes Collins made over the many years it was in his custody. But I detected a few small stylistic changes in the novel's climactic section that could suggest a different hand at work, or perhaps the same hand many years later.  This was mostly a matter of repetition of words, one in particular, and a mildly political jab I fancy likelier to have come from the liberal Collins than the right-wing Spillane. Some of the wit in the section is also slyer than what I associate with Spillane, more a wink than a hearty clap between shoulder blades.

(My favorite sentence in the novel, however, does not figure in this discussion: "He conked his head on the porcelain edge of the crapper.")

Have you ever read a collaboration between two authors?  Have you ever tried to guess which author wrote what? What is likely to make you attribute a given passage to one rather than the other? Tone? Prose style? Something else?

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(When you're done, read an interview from the Rap Sheet in which Max Allan Collins talks about Spillane, his own work, and a lot more. And read Collins on anything and everything at maxallancollins.com. Collins was on a panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach. The man would be worth listening to on the subject of crime fiction and its history even if he hadn't written any of the stuff himself. Collins was my intro to Roy Huggins and Ennis Willie, for example.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

My Bouchecon panels: "The third time he pulled the trigger she disappeared"

This post's title is the end of Ennis Willie's story "Con's Wife." The story's first line is "He had three eyes."  For all the talk about Willie's tough-guy persona and his raw, first-draft prose style, and his roots in sleaze magazines and paperbacks of the 1960s, the man could write.

He's Richard S. Prather without the jokes, Mickey Spillane without the political frothing to which Spillane could descend at his worst.  His protagonist, Sand, is what Carroll John Daly's Race Williams would have been if Daly had been a better writer.

Willie is also a bit of a mystery man, at various times thought to be a) African American, b) Mickey Spillane, or c) dead, though the truth turns out to be simpler and, hence, more mysterious than the speculation.  You can read him in two collections available from Ramble House: Sand's Game and Sand's War, which include novels, stories, and appreciations from leading hard-boiled writers and commentators, including Bill Crider, Max Allan Collins, and Bill Pronzini.

So get your Willie. He's tough, fast, satisfying and, thanks to Ramble House, cheap. (Read the first chapter of Death in a Dead Place, included in Sand's Game, on the Ramble House Web site.)

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Max Allan Collins will offer some comments on Ennis Willie as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014. The panel is called Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras, and it happens at 3 p.m, Friday, Nov. 14.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014