Complex 90 is not your typical Mike Hammer story. Yes, there is grotesque violence. Yes, there are steamy sex scenes. And Mike Hammer is still a hard-talking, hard-hitting private detective. But instead of taking out lowlife thugs and serial killers, he's taking on the KGB. You remember the KGB: the Soviet spy apparatus that made a great villain for spy novels throughout the Cold War.
Mike Hammer is drafted into bodyguard service for a U.S. Senator on a goodwill mission to the Soviet Union. Why Mike when the Senator can have his pick of Secret Service agents for protection? Mike interrupted an armed robbery at the Senator's going away party that resulted - in predictable Hammer fashion - with the culprit's violent demise and the death of the senator's regular bodyguard (and Mike's friend).
While in the USSR, Mike is arrested on trumped up charges of collaborating with a dissident and, during the interrogation, his connection to the shooting and arrest of two Soviet assassins is brought up. Mike realizes the Soviets brought him in for revenge and to make a spectacle of his arrest for propoganda purposes. Before they can, he breaks out of prison and cuts a trail of death across the Eastern Bloc as he escapes to an American base in Turkey.
Back in the USA, Mike expects the hero treatment. Instead, he's whisked away underneath the Pentagon and accused of creating an international incident. The Soviets are clamoring for his return to the USSR and some politicians are actually considering it. With fast talking and help from a deep cover friend in a high place, Mike is released and goes back to New York. The Soviets are hunting him, the U.S. government is tailing him, and Mike is in a race to find out if and why he wants to stay alive.
What separates Complex 90 from the typical Mike Hammer books - and by typical I refer to the first six Mike Hammer novels that sparked a revolution in paperback publishing - is it's so over the top. Mike was always a bad ass but he pulls off Rambo-esque feats by single-handedly killing 45 Soviet agents while he escapes a Moscow prison. Considering that Complex 90 got shelved in the 1960s, Spillane beat out David Morrell in the one-man army genre by at least 20 years. As outlandish as it is, the story shoots by as though fired from one of Mike's .45 caliber pistols. There's hardly ever any time to catch your breath before someone ends up eating a bullet, and even Mike doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about the case as he did in previous novels. He doesn't really need to once he realizes he's got the answer with him the entire time.
This newest Mike Hammer adventure is a joint effort by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins. Spillane may have died in 2006 but he left a whole library of unfinished works to Collins. As with the other Spillane-Collins collaborations (Mike Hammer's The Big Bang, The Consummata starring Morgan the Raider, etc.), the fusion of the two writers is seamless. Either Spillane left his manuscripts ready for print and they just needed cleaning up, or Collins has truly inherited Spillane's style and rhythm. Whatever the case, Complex 90 is a fast-paced Cold War thriller that is a real treat.
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