We’ve all heard of Harry Callahan, a cop in the San Francisco Police Department who despised legal niceties. And you may remember the backlash against him and his unorthodox methods from well-meaning liberal film critics. Wasn’t Harry really just a fascist with a badge?

The controversy over Dirty Harry had been prefigured a quarter-century earlier by the reaction of critics and book reviewers to Mike Hammer (“a dangerous paranoid, sadist, and masochist” per Malcolm Cowley). No surprise, as Hammer, in this his first book, sounds a lot like Harry. He’d have been a cop himself “if there weren’t so damn many rules and regulations to tie a guy down.” You see, “cops can’t break a guy’s arm to make him talk, and they can’t shove his teeth in with the muzzle of a .45 to remind him that you aren’t fooling.”

I, the Jury is the first of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels and he claimed to have written it in nine days. That sounds right. When Mike’s buddy Jack is killed in a sadistic manner he swears vengeance, declaring that he’s “not letting the killer go through the tedious process of the law” just so some fast-talking attorney can get him off scot-free. Specifically, he promises to take the killer out the same way Jack died, “with a .45 slug in the gut, just a little below the belly button.”

A jury is cold and impartial like they’re supposed to be, while some snotty lawyer makes them pour tears as he tells them how his client was insane at the moment or had to shoot in self-defense. Swell. The law is fine. But this time I’m the law and I’m not going to be cold and impartial.

It’s Hammer time!

Spillane is writing tough-guy, American-style detective fiction, albeit with a bit more brutality than the likes of Chandler or Macdonald. For one thing, unlike Marlowe or Archer Hammer is a tank who never gets sapped (at least in this book). Sure, sometimes the bad guys get the drop on him, but it doesn’t take long for him to turn the tables. He’s a comic-book character, and in fact that’s where he started out (under the name “Mike Lancer”) when Spillane was writing comics. Hammer’s such a force of nature that I have to admit to doing a double-take when he reveals that he only weighs 190 pounds. And that’s meant to impress us. There’s been some inflation in action heroes since then. I think today we’d expect any tough guy to be coming in at around 220 pounds of lean muscle today. But then Spillane wanted readers to be able to relate to Mike Hammer, which is one reason he never described him in any detail.

Mike is a man’s man. Which doesn’t mean he’s a “fruit,” like the odd couple in this novel. No, he has an eye for the ladies, and they look right back at him. Even the ones who aren’t nymphomaniacs (and they’re here too). What kind of woman (or “wench”) does he go for? He’s not into girls who are “tall and on the thin side”: “Me, I like ‘em husky.” Husky and busty. Or maybe they come to the same thing. Private dicks at the time, and Archer is an equal offender in this regard, had a thing for ogling a woman’s frontage.

The female psychiatrist Charlotte Manning is a lady right up his alley. He first sees a picture of her in a bathing suit: “A little heavier than the movie experts consider good form, but the kind that makes you drool to look at.” She has muscular abs, broad shoulders, and “breasts that jutted out, seeking freedom from the restraining fabric of the suit.” When he later meets her in the flesh she’ll be dressed in business garb, but still he’ll notice how her “breasts fought the dress as valiantly as they had the bathing suit.” And here she is in evening wear: “Her breasts were laughing things that were firmly in place, although I could see no strap marks of a restraining bra.” It’s like they have a life of their own. When he kisses Charlotte he can even feel them “pulsating with passion.”

It’s not much of a detective story, with few real clues to follow. Hammer just has to beat enough heads in and survive long enough (meaning until all the main suspects are killed off) so he can take down the last one standing. Which he does in a great climax that comes by way of a strip-tease, ending with a notorious and brutal final line. Comic book stuff to be sure, but it’s comfort food that’s hard to put down once you get going.

Hammer index

An index to my reviews of the Mike Hammer stories and novels by Mickey Spillane (and others).

I, the Jury

Mystery and Detective Fiction

This story was first published in 1925, making it one of the first efforts from A. B. Cox, a prominent golden age mystery writer probably best known today for the books he wrote under the pseudonym Frances Iles.

The fact that it is only two pages long is all I can think of to recommend it. It’s a trivial piece that’s basically just a single gag, and the gag doesn’t land. A “dasher” (I guess a looker, in modern terms) of a young lady named Cissie Crossgarters writes to Holmes complaining that the man who proposed marriage to her while under the influence of the Demon Rum doesn’t want to go through with it the morning after. One would have thought Cissie more likely to consult with a lawyer on a matter such as this, as there is no mystery to resolve, but it’s all just a set up to Holmes himself getting engaged to Cissie at the end.

This doesn’t sound like Holmes, and that’s the main problem I had with the story. For parody to work you have to take elements in the original and distort or exaggerate them in some way, not change them entirely. Cox makes a lot of play here about Holmes ending nearly everything he says to Watson with “what?”, “what, what?” or even “what, what, what?” I don’t know if Holmes ever talked like this in any of the canonical stories. I could be wrong, but the fact that I don’t recall him ever saying “what, what?” at least means it’s not something that ever stood out. So why did Cox want to run with it? I get that it’s a joke, but it’s a joke I don’t get.

Holmes index

This is another proto-Lew Archer story where the detective’s name was changed, by Macdonald himself, from Sam Drake to Lew Archer for publication in the aptly titled collection The Name Is Archer. It’s a long story that feels rushed in not being a novel. And when Macdonald feels rushed you know things are moving quickly. I think all of the action here takes place in under 24 hours, and it involves Archer visiting multiple locations, some several times, one fist fight (which Archer wins because there’s just no time for him to take another whupping and have to recover), and the discovery of two murdered bodies. I’ve mentioned elsewhere how the sheer amount of running around in an Archer novel is enough to make your head spin and “The Bearded Lady” is very much the same way. It’s like Archer needs to keep moving in order to think.

You get a double dose of other what-would-become-standard elements too. There’s not just one big house to visit but two: one the home of the Colonel – or wait, he’s an Admiral this time – and the other the fortress of a shady crime boss who is crippled in some grotesque way. The plot revolves around Archer trying to figure out who killed an old war buddy he’d come to San Marcos to visit, but there’s also a stolen Chardin to find. That would be the painter Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), which is something anyone who could read was presumed to know in 1948. And finally there are the twisted family dynamics. The way it works is all here in embryo: the no-good trophy mother-in-law (oversexed, alcoholic, “raddled with passion”) and the dangerously sexy daughter who is pretty poison to all the men she meets. At least I think she’s supposed to be sexy. How would you take a description of a girl who “filled her tailored suit like sand in a sack”? Is that a compliment?

It all goes by in a rush and I enjoyed every page of it. Though I did have to go back and re-read parts to understand what was actually going on. When Archer visits the crime boss’s mansion he’s taken to a library where “the walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling – the kind of books that are bought by the set and never read.” The boss is only a collector, you see. Is he ever going to take that Chardin out of his wall safe? Probably not. But some of us do read books by the set, so my notes on the Archer files will continue.

Archer index