A computer-implemented method and article of manufacture is disclosed for enabling computer programs utilizing hardware transactional memory to safely interact with code utilizing traditional locks. A thread executing on a processor of a plurality of processors in a shared-memory system may initiate transactional execution of a section of code, which includes a plurality of access operations to the shared-memory, including one or more to locations protected by a lock. Before executing any operations accessing the location associated with the lock, the thread reads the value of the lock as part of the transaction, and only proceeds if the lock is not held. If the lock is acquired by another thread during transactional execution, the processor detects this acquisition, aborts the transaction, and attempts to re-execute it.