I’m pretty sure that the first time I read Vengeance is Mine! I knew there was a twist coming in advance. Mickey Spillane had wanted to write a book where the big reveal at the end was withheld until the very last word. So knowing that going in I had things figured out pretty early. There aren’t that many very last words that are going to do the trick. “When you’re writing a story, think of it like a joke,” is a bit of advice Spillane had for writers. “What’s a great punchline? Get the great ending and then write up to it.” And that’s exactly how Vengeance is Mine! plays. It’s quite brutal, in ways that were already by this, the third Mike Hammer novel, starting to wear, but it also has a bit of tongue in its cheek. I don’t think Spillane took himself that seriously.

But if Vengeance is Mine! ends with a bang it also kicks off with quite a needle-drop. (Another bit of Spillane wisdom for writers: “The first chapter sells the book and then the last chapter sells the next book.”) Here’s how we begin:

The guy was dead as hell. He lay on the floor in his pajamas with his brains scattered all over the rug and my gun was in his hand.

Damn. Whether you’re into pulp or not, that’s a heck of a way to hook a reader.

The backstory is that Hammer met up with an old war buddy visiting the Big Apple and they’d gone out to party,  leaving Mike “Whisky-drunk and out like a light with no memory of what happened.” Except he’s in a hotel room with a dead body. Sort of like Jane Fonda in the movie The Morning After.

It’s a great way to get things started, but it’s also a bit of a stretch and seemed to me to be both awkward and unnecessary as a plot device. In any event, not much is made of the situation beyond Hammer temporarily getting his gun permit pulled so that he has to get Velda to nominally take over the investigation, a job she turns out to be more than capable at. The other thing the set-up introduces is a conflict between Hammer and a District Attorney. Hammer can’t stand the guy and, being Hammer, isn’t afraid to tell him exactly what he thinks of him when he shows up at Mike’s apartment and tries to give him the third degree:

“Show me your warrant to come in my house and do that, then I’ll talk, you yellow-bellied little bastard. I’m going to meet you in the street not long from now and carve that sissified pasty face of yours into ribbons. Get out of here and kiss yourself some fat behinds like you’re used to doing. I’ll be all right in a few minutes and you better be gone by then and your stooges with you. They’re not cops. They’re like you . . . political behind-kissers with the guts of a bug and that’s not a lot of guts. Go on, get out, you crummy turd.”

There’s no subtlety in Mike Hammer! Maybe that’s how he got his name.

I mentioned earlier how I don’t think Spillane took himself all that seriously. I think that’s especially the case here, as he seems to have been having some fun with setting up his “punchline” of an ending. Even though Juno is a goddess (or, more pointedly, “a queen and she didn’t want to be. She wanted to be a woman”) there’s just something not right about her, just one thing that he can’t put his finger on. Maybe it’s her clothes that “covered everything up and let your imagination fill in the blanks.” Perhaps it’s her man hands. Hmm. It’s all kind of funny (both ha-ha and weird) that Mike Hammer could be so easily fooled. “Me, a guy what likes women, a guy who knows every one of their stunts . . . and I fall for this.”

And then there are all the pokes and double entendres. He comes on to Velda but says he’s “afraid of that rod you use for ballast in your handbag.” Yes, Velda does have a gun in her handbag, but is there a nod here to another woman in the book who is packing? Then when Hammer is looking at the bullet holes in the hotel room and realizes he almost got shot in the balls when he was passed out drunk he says “another inch higher and I would have been singing tenor and forgetting about shaving.” This is a book that has more than it’s share of dick references. When the D.A. stands over Hammer “so I could admire his physique, I guess” while berating him, our hero can only groggily remark to himself that “The D.A. was getting a big whang out of this.” What exactly is Hammer noticing and remarking on here? You be the judge.

The actual story I didn’t find very interesting. What makes it worth a read is the further insight we get into Hammer’s psyche, which isn’t very deep but is plenty dark enough. There’s a lot more on the mutual attraction (if that’s not too tame a word) between him and Velda. And if you want to know why they don’t just go all the way it’s because he’s haunted by the ghosts of all the women he’s gotten involved with who have met violent ends. Including the ones he killed himself, like in I, the Jury. And it’s a record he keeps up here as his girl-of-the-week Connie ends up another victim. So he’s protecting Velda by keeping her at a (relative) distance.

Then there’s Hammer’s personal brand of violent psychopathy. Here are his thoughts as he prepares for the final showdown and thinks about how the killer must be terrified knowing the force of vengeance that is now pursuing him:

He’d check old papers and court records and ask questions, then he’d know what I was like. He’d know that I didn’t give a damn for a human life any more than he did. I was just a bit different. I didn’t shoot anything but killers. 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. It was fun to kill those bastards who tried to get away with murder and did sometimes.

I started to laugh and I couldn’t stop. I pulled the Luger out and checked it again when it didn’t need it. This time I pulled the trigger off half cock and let it sit all the way back ready to nudge a copper-covered slug out of the barrel and into a killer’s face.

How are we to read this? As over-the-top comic-book glorification of violence? As parody? Taken seriously, it’s quite unpleasant. But I don’t know how seriously to take it. I’ll leave things by saying that Spillane is a writer I can only manage in small doses, not just because he’s quite repetitive but because the effect can be numbing.

Hammer index

It’s easy to compare Dorothy L. Sayers with her creation Lord Peter Wimsey. Easy, and fair. Just as Lord Peter is a cultured, brainy type slumming it as an amateur detective (a “noble sleuth” looking for “something new in thrills”), Sayers was doing the same as a mystery writer. Which doesn’t mean she enjoyed it less, or found it any less worthy an occupation, than Lord P enjoys his work. What it means is they both entered into it in the spirit of a game. In Unnatural Death Lord Peter even makes a wager with his Scotland Yard buddy (and brother-in-law) Parker about whether he’ll be able to bring Miss Whittaker to justice. And this before anyone knows if a crime has been committed.

So this is another mystery that pitches us a curve ball. In Whose Body? the curve was the discovery of a body that nobody could identify in a bathtub. In Clouds of Witness the curve was a murder investigation without a murder. In Unnatural Death it’s made clear who the guilty party is, or who at least Lord Peter thinks the guilty party is, right from the start and the only question is how he’s going to prove it. This is what I meant by the way Sayers, like Wimsey, approaches these things in the spirit of a game.

Already by the 1920s the mystery had taken a form that readers felt comfortable (or cozy) with. The locked room. The body in the library. The line-up of the usual suspects. The genealogical tables and maps showing the layouts of rooms. So the challenge for a mystery (and it’s really the same for any genre) writer became how to give readers what they expect (and want), but at the same time give it enough of a twist to make it fresh. I think Sayers did a great job with that.

I think Sayers and Wimsey also shared a similar cultural headspace. Well-read, well-educated (they came to nearly the same thing a hundred years ago), and fascinated by crime and other tabloid events. This results in Lord Peter’s inner and outer monologues where it’s like he’s tossing a salad that’s full of bits of poetry, current affairs, famous criminal cases, and other trivia. I mentioned in my notes on Whose Body? how it could have really used endnotes explaining names and quotations (often slightly mangled, unconsciously or on purpose, “Did somebody write that, or did I invent it? It sounds reminiscent, somehow”). The same goes for Unnatural Death. Once Lord Peter starts humming along it’s hard to keep up. I’m sure a lot of what he throws out would have been picked up on by readers at the time, but today I don’t think there are many people who know Hillaire Belloc’s poem “The Python,” or that Elinor Glyn coined the phrase “It girl.” And these are just a couple of examples that I think at least some people might still get. They’re the easy ones. Now when Lord P says “Criminals always tend to repeat their effects. Look at George Joseph Smith and his brides. Look at Neill Cream. Look at Armstrong and his tea-parties,” I got two out of three of these, but had forgotten the Armstrong case (if you want to look it up: Herbert Rowse Armstrong, executed in 1922 for poisoning his wife, which was just five years before this book came out). But you’d need nearly a page of notes to sort out the following list of headlines:

Chamberlin and Levine flew the Atlantic, and Segrave bade farewell to Brooklands. The Daily Yell wrote anti-Red leaders and discovered a plot, somebody laid claim to a marquisate, and a Czecho-Slovakian pretended to swim the Channel. Hammond out-graced Grace, there was an outburst of murder at Moscow, Foxlaw won the Gold Cup and the earth opened at Oxhey and swallowed up somebody’s front garden. Oxford decided that women were dangerous, and the electric hare consented to run at the White City. England’s supremacy was challenged at Wimbledon, and the House of Lords made the gesture of stooping to conquer.

I managed to check out a number of these, while others remained riddles (who laid claim to a marquisate?). But I don’t think they were riddles in 1927. They were the stories most people, or at least most people who read books, would have been up on.

Leaving this part of the texture of the novel aside and turning to our cast, I was pleasantly surprised by Unnatural Death. Alongside Lord Peter and Parker there are two dominant female figures literally fighting it out. The bad ‘un is Miss Whittaker, Lord P’s worth adversary. She’s a killer in the great golden age tradition, meaning a nurse with a knowledge of drugs and poisons who also has a flare for the dramatic. She’s also a barely concealed lesbian, and the scene where she drugs Lord P, who resists by accident while he’s barking up the wrong tree, plays like Wodehouse comedy, and very effective Wodehouse comedy at that. It’s one of the truly great scenes in the mystery fiction of the period.

Fighting alongside Lord Peter is Miss Alexandra Katherine Climpson, “a spinster made and not born – a perfectly womanly woman.” She’s also an amateur detective with a penchant for writing breathless letters to her boss about what she’s found out. These read almost like social media posts, with their underlinings and exclamations and all caps. She’s a lot of fun, and equal to Lord Peter both in her detection skills and her inability to see the obvious. I say that because one of the reasons I enjoyed this novel so much is that I had it basically all figured out about halfway through. Which actually helps tighten the suspense at the end as Lord P and Miss Climpson keep failing to make contact, leaving them working towards the truth in a stumbling way that puts them both at risk.

Sticking with the cast, we have Lord Peter himself and Parker. As for Parker, I’m unsure of what actual work he does for Scotland Yard as he mainly seems to just toodle around with Lord Peter. But this was before the day of police procedurals and professionalism. Lord Peter, meanwhile, is an unashamed amateur:

I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness, don’t you see, which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an’ suicide. Very natural, healthy pursuit – not too strenuous, not too sedentary; trains and invigorates the mind.

And yet . . . in a biographical note prepared by his uncle this dilettante is also said to be imbued with the “underlying sense of social responsibility which prevents the English landed gentry from being a total loss, spiritually speaking.” Ah, noblesse oblige. Whatever happened to it? It was good for the soul. As it is, Peter is certainly a toff, perhaps a little callous about the little people (Sayers upbraids him at one point for having “the cheerful brutality of the man who has never in his life been short of money”), but he is still one of the good guys and I found myself warming to him for the first time here.

As a student of crime, Lord Peter also has some theories of his own to put forward. The most interesting of these comes by way of a long disquisition he directs at Parker on the subject of “abnormal crimes,” by which he means crimes that have failed because they have been discovered and the perpetrators caught. “But how about the crimes which are never even suspected?” People are only caught if

“they were fools. If you murder someone in a brutal, messy way, or poison someone who has previously enjoyed rollicking health, or choose the very day after a will’s been made in your favour to extinguish the testator, or go on killing everyone you meet till people begin to think you’re the first cousin to a upas tree, naturally you’re found out in the end. But choose somebody old and ill, in circumstances where the benefit to yourself isn’t too apparent, and use a sensible method that looks like natural death or accident, and don’t repeat your effects too often, and you’re safe. I swear all the heart-diseases and gastric enteritis and influenzas that get certified are not nature’s unaided work. Murder’s so easy, Charles, so damned easy – even without special training.”

Is reported murder only the tip of an iceberg? Are the people who get caught only fools, and the annals of true crime filled with exceptions to a more general slaughter being carried out every day unsuspected? Or is Lord Peter just being superior? This puts me in mind of Eliot Spitzer talking about how stupid most criminals were just before his own downfall. But I’d have to give an endnote now to explain who Spitzer was . . .

I really enjoyed Unnatural Death. Critics were quick to jump on the unrealistic way Miss Whittaker did away with her victims, but I can’t say I cared much about that. I was too busy having fun. As I think Sayers was. And Lord Peter too. How can you not smile at a chapter beginning like this? Here’s a man who enjoys life:

The rainy night was followed by a sun-streaked morning. Lord Peter, having wrapped himself affectionately round an abnormal quantity of bacon and eggs, strolled out to bask at the door of the “Fox-and-Hounds.” He filled a pipe slowly and meditated. Within, a cheerful bustle in the bar announced the near arrival of opening time. Eight ducks crossed the road in Indian file. A cat sprang up upon the bench, stretched herself, tucked her hind legs under her and coiled her tail tightly around them as though to prevent them from accidentally working loose. A groom passed, riding a tall bay horse and leading a chestnut with a hogged mane; a spaniel followed them, running ridiculously, with one ear flopped inside-out over his foolish head.

Lord Peter said, “Hah!”

Ha-hah!

Wimsey index

Uncle Meleager’s will is a “fascinating problem” because he sets it up as a treasure hunt for his champagne-socialist niece Hannah to figure out. If she doesn’t, all his money will be left to some Tory charity. Luckily for Hannah, the one clue that he leaves her is that she needs to be frivolous, and if anyone knows about being frivolous it’s Lord Peter Wimsey, who is soon on the case.

Things kick off with Bunter drawing Lord P’s bath and making his breakfast, one of those scenes that make you shake your head at how the upper class lived just a hundred years ago. Then Peter’s sister Mary shows up and puts him on the case of the will. What follows feels like a riff on “The Musgrave Ritual,” with the ritual taking the form here of a crossword puzzle. This puzzle is, in turn, what I think Sayers was really interested in. It’s probably something she always wanted to do. I didn’t play along though, as I can’t stand crossword puzzles. I don’t know why. The riddling clues just strike me as annoying.

If you like those sorts of games, and everyone in the story apparently does as even the resistant Hannah and the reserved Bunter get into the spirit of things, then you’ll probably enjoy this. It’s more fun than I was expecting, which was something more along the lines of the dry discussion of estate law in Unnatural Death (original U.S. title The Dawson Pedigree). You may also expand your vocabulary. I had to look up “ambsace” (the lowest throw of dice, or anything worthless or unlucky), “inspissated” (thickened or congealed), and “viridarium” (an arboretum or ornamental garden). I’ll note in passing that my Word program doesn’t recognize any of these as being proper words. I also didn’t recognize “shingling” or “shingled” as a hairstyle. Apparently this was a short cut or bob cut that was very popular in the 1920s and ‘30s. Shingling was (I believe) a reference to the way the hair looked on the nape of the neck. Anyway, there must have been a lot of it going on, as Sayers refers to it a number of times.

Wimsey index