Word: slappings
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...back to him." The moll is Clara (Jane Randolph), one of those diamond-hard dames who, in the noir universe, are there to dish out abuse verbally and take it physically. Toward the end, when Clara gets drunk, Ireland takes her bottle away and gives her a severe slap: "Just when you oughta keep your head, you start picklin...
...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 his .45 and "just for effect I stuck it up against his forehead and thumbed back the hammer. It made a sharp click in the silence...
...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...
...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...
...giving their joint press conference," said a Russian diplomat, "all their show of camaraderie notwithstanding." The diplomat cited the WTO talks with the U.S. that had fallen flat the very same morning as the primary source of this sudden tension. "Instead of a long-promised reward, Putin got a slap," he said...