Word: mikes
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...fact, Mike loves to hate, to beat, to kill. From Mi>Vengeance Is 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...
...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 in the Millions (about Gardner, Hammett and Fleming), Hammer's pugilistic repertoire relies...
...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...
...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...
...Lonely Night, Hammer is brought into court before a judge, who, 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...