Word: gunning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mine!: "I loved to shoot killers. I couldn't think of anything I'd rather do than shoot a killer and watch his blood trace a slimy path across the floor." The fights he gets into are manuals for barroom brawlers. Here's a how-to from My Gun Is Quick: "I jammed four big, stiff fingers into his gut right above the navel and he snapped shut like a jackknife. I opened him up again with an openhanded slap that left a blush across his mouth that was going to stay for a while." Mike unholsters...
...thing that estranged Spillane from the literati was their disdain for the politics of his books. No question, he was right-wing. Each novel had a different conspiracy for Hammer to expose: drugs in I, the Jury, the call-girl racket in My Gun Is Quick, a blackmail ring in Vengeance Is Mine!, illegal gambling in The Big Kill, the Mafia in Kiss Me. Deadly. But it was the enemy in One Lonely Night - the U.S. Communist Party - and his gunning down of 100 of them, that soldered liberal horror of Spillane...
...first three Spillane titles, Hammer graduates from being the legal system (I the Jury) to the police force (My Gun Is Quick) to God Almighty (Vengeance Is Mine). But Mike doesn't think he's God. And the Devil he often wrestles with is himself. As the series of novels wore on, and Spillane perhaps winced at the criticism of them, Hammer occasionally goes into auto-critique mode. What has he become? What made him that...
...Mike says, wants only to "drag my soul out where everybody could see it and slap it with another coat of black paint." The judge blames Hammer's antisocial attitude on his military service: that, as Mike paraphrases, "it took a war to show me the power of the gun and the obscene pleasure that was brutality and force, the spicy sweetness of murder sanctified...
...those first years after the war, first base was as far as an American novelist could safely go. Spillane made the most of what little sexual license he had. Of a brief encounter with Lola in My Gun Is Quick Hammer rhapsodizes, "Her mouth was a soft bed of fire, her tongue a searching thing asking questions I had to answer greedily." In French kissing, as in all other aspects of a Hammer courtship, the woman is the aggressor. In the movies of I, the Jury and The Girl Hunters, the actor playing Hammer (Biff Elliot in the first, then...