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...august hard covers. He also slipped a Mickey to the image of the serious fiction writer, showing a brisk contempt for the elevated anguish of creating literature. In just five years, between 1947 and 1952, he served up seven novels: I, the Jury; My Gun Is Quick; Vengeance Is Mine!; One Lonely Night; The Big Kill; Kiss Me, Deadly; and the non-Hammer story The Long Wait. (The six Hammers are collected in two volumes of The Mike Hammer Collection.) By the mid-50s, those seven titles were among the ten all-time best-sellers. When his critics deplored this...
...with Stang in the role, but it didn't take.) He also gave Hammer a contact in the police force, Captain Pat Chambers, to serve as go-between, confidant and stooge; and a girl-Friday, the voluptuous, resourceful, loyal Velda - based, Spillane says, on Wilma, "an old girlfriend of mine, a long time ago, before...
...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...
...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...