Word: hammerism
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...foreplay and deferring the climactic act. "'You're even better than I thought,' she said. 'You're a man with the instincts of some jungle animal. It has to be when you say so, doesn't it?' ... 'Not before,' I told her." The plot logic is twofold: that Hammer can't have sex with the woman he's going to kill on the last page, and that is trying to be faithful to his ever-lovin' Velda. But the way it plays is that Mike is less turned on by women who show they're turned on to him; maybe...
...violence are incestuously twinned in Hammer's mind. For him, every encounter is intimate. He gets in the faces both of his adversaries and of his for-the-moment girlfriends. Both forms of intervention involve a sock in the mouth, leading Mike to one of two responses: kiss or kill. And every smooch is a heavyweight event. ("I kissed her so hard I hurt my mouth this time.") Sex is violent, and violence sexy. They are the two things that give him a thrill. And once in a while he can combine the two. "I don't hit women...
...Hammer knows the code of brawling; he can instinctively anticipate a man's moves. He initiates contact with men. But women initiate it with him. (He's the female to their sexually avaricious male.) Being on the receiving end makes women a mystery to him. He can joke about it, saying, of lipstick, "I could never figure out why the stuff came off women so easy and off the men so hard." Other times he's just perplexed: "What is it that gives them that look as if they know the problem and the answer too, yet hold it back...
...Jury, Hammer takes Charlotte to the movies: "...we sat through two and a half hours of a fantastic murder mystery that had more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese and a Western that moved as slowly as the Long Island Railroad in a snowstorm. When we got out I thought I had blisters on my butt...
...Spillane didn't have much more luck with the films made from his novels than Hammer did that afternoon with Charlotte. He sold his movie rights to the English director-producer Victor Saville. "I always thought that Saville would have the sense to do what was right," Spillane told Collins. "He never did." The result was four '50s big-screen adaptations: three cheap little dogs (I, the Jury, The Long Night and My Gun Is Quick) and one large, strange, rabid animal (Kiss Me Deadly...