Word: hammer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Anything short of execution is excusable. "I didn't kill him," he says after one encounter. "All I did was shoot him in the leg a little bit." (In Hammer's world, that's a towel slap.) Sometimes he imagines the awful-delicious retribution. "If anything happened to Velda I'd tear the guts out of some son-of-a-bitch!" he muses in One Lonely Night. "I'd nail him to a wall and take his skin off him in inch-wide strips!" Other times, he keeps the violence strictly verbal, on the level of threat...
...Collins doc, Spillane defends the pugnacity of his alter ego (alter libido, more likely). "If anybody kicks my cat," he explains, "I'm gonna whack him on the ear, see? It's somewhat like kickin' his [Hammer's]cat, so to speak." Actually, it's more like someone's saying, "That's not much of a cat you got," and Mike pulls the guy's guts through his nose. In Spillane, nearly every charged conversation between males escalates pronto into a fight. Hammer hits first. And, as J. Kenneth Van Dover notes in his astute, fairly critical Murder...
...tough guy before whom all other tough guys go soft, Hammer is also an adolescent boy's dream of the total he-man package. He's also a magnet for all comers. Gangsters and glamorous women fall at Mike's feet, from the impact of his blows or the surly machismo of his swagger. Of course there's a darker view of this unchecked brutality, this out-lawman with a feudal ethical code. That's that Hammer is a bully with a grudge - a one-man fascist state, and I don't mean Italy...
...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...
...Truth is, Hammer never pretends to be a political sophisticate. "I haven't voted since they dissolved the Whig Party," he says in One Lonely Night. And his agenda is at least as much anarchist as it is fascist. He's against all the big people who prey on the little people, and has elected himself to wipe out the scourge. His tone is not so much political as Biblical - Old Testament. He's the cleansing plague...