The multifaceted J. C. Masterman published this slight send-up of a Holmes story in 1952, and it still stands as one of the more complex entries in that genre.

So much so that one might even ask if it’s a send-up. The story is narrated by Inspector Lestrade, who is being interviewed at a Surrey nursing home by a writer digging for Holmesiana. As is so often the case, Lestrade is less interested in Holmes’s exploits than he is in his own, being the hero of his own story. He does, however, manage to recall this tale of the theft of the Dark Diamond of Dungbura from a semi-locked room (we know who went in and out of the room, and that the thief couldn’t have been anyone else). The reason he shares this story with the interviewer is because he sees it as casting Holmes in a bad light, as little more than the “gifted amateur” he wants to make him out to be.

But does he? It’s a quick story with a nifty trick to it, as there’s one person with access to the room who we don’t suspect. The real question though is whether Holmes might be ahead of the game, and is only looking on with a sense of irony as the culprit falls into what was a trap while the Gifted Amateur ends up getting paid.

That’s the feeling I had anyway, coming away from the story thinking that it was another example of Lestrade being too thick to understand, even after the fact, that he’s been played.

Holmes index

1951, the beginnings of the Cold War. Or the cold war, as it’s rendered here, as it hadn’t gotten around to being capitalized yet. (An aside: it’s thought that George Orwell was the first to use the term “cold war,” in 1945, and he didn’t capitalize it either.) Mike Hammer is going for a lonely walk that takes him across what I think is the George Washington Bridge, feeling morose after having been reamed out by an angry judge. It seem the Judge, a figure who will continue to haunt Mike throughout the novel, disapproves of Mike’s brutal methods. Standing behind the Judge might we see a shadowy cabal of book reviewers and the literary establishment taking their shots? I think it likely.

I’ve mentioned before how toxic a fellow Mike Hammer is, and how so many of the babes he encounters soon wind up dead. Indeed, this is something he frequently takes himself to task for, and is the excuse he gives in Vengeance is Mine! for not committing himself to Velda. Well, in One Lonely Night this fatal effect is felt immediately as Mike meets a beauty in distress who is being pursued by a gunman who is both a “dirty son-of-a-bitch” and a “fat little slob.” Spillane does like to pile it on when it comes to invective. Mike shoots the gunman and the girl, who is terrified of Mike, jumps off the bridge. So that didn’t take long!

Just to keep with this theme for a bit, there’s another babe that Mike meets who winds up being shot, but she actually gets to live. I think because we want to see her live to recognize the errors of her ways. And that’s all the curveball you’re going to get here.

The plot is chaotic, and more than a little far-fetched. Basically the two people on the bridge connect up with a ring of Commies who are getting together to plot . . . a bunch of dastardly Commie things, no doubt. You will be unsurprised to learn that Mike Hammer, despite having no interest in politics (“I haven’t voted since they dissolved the Whig party”) has an instinctual, homicidal hatred of Commies. And so does Velda. They are the Red Menace. They are a “tumor.” They are “a scurvy bunch of lice.” They are “dirty, filthy Red bastards!” You get the picture. It was the time of the Red Scare, a historical fact even if the Red Menace was a bogeyman of the explicitly “cartoon kind” presented here. Lots of upper-class pansies cosplaying as revolutionaries, like the loser the society beauty gets engaged to. For readers of Dorothy Sayers he sounds a lot like Goyles from Clouds of Witness or Harriet in “The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will.” (An aside: British mystery stories of the time found socialists and Communists a source of fun. It was in America post-War that they became a threat to the existence of Western civilization.) Anyway, the loser I mentioned in this novel is a “down-and-out artist who made speeches for the Communist Party and was quite willing to become a capitalist by marriage. He was a conscientious objector during the war though he probably could have made 4-F without trouble.” 4-F, in case you’re wondering, is a designation that someone is not qualified for military service due to medical, psychological, or moral reasons. But the main knock against this guy is that he’s not a true believer in Communist ideology, like the Red killers who are Mike’s real nemeses.

Joined to this plot that has Mike as Cold Warrior is another parallel story involving an up-and-coming politician, someone who is ready to take it to the Reds. Unfortunately, said politician is being blackmailed by a psycho twin brother. How these two plotlines intersect is where things get ridiculous, and I won’t try to explain. Suffice it to say that Mike piles up a lot of bodies before he’s through. He even has to break out a Tommy gun for the climactic slaughter. This is when he has gone completely kill-crazy, a Berserker fugue state where we get interior monologues like this: “Kill ‘em left and right . . . Kill, kill, kill, kill!” This is war, after all. “I was a killer and I was looking forward to killing again. I wanted them all, every one of them from bottom to top and especially the one at the top even if I had to go to the Kremlin to do it.”

That’s a tough hill to climb, but . . .

But some day, maybe, some day I’d stand on the steps of the Kremlin with a gun in my fist and I’d yell for them to come out and if they wouldn’t I’d go in and get them and when I had them lined up against the wall I’d start shooting until all I had left was a row of corpses that bled on the cold floors and in whose thick red blood would be the promise of a peace that would stick for more generations than I’d live to see.

A little of this goes a long way, and there’s a lot of it. There’s also a lot of soft, yielding babes throwing themselves into Mike’s arms. Even after Mike has apparently proposed to Velda, giving her a ring. Basically we ping-pong between scenes of sex and violence, so quickly that at times the two start to blur. Mike fantasizes about administering corporal punishment to one babe and gets as far as ripping her clothes off and getting set to enjoy “a naked woman and a leather belt” but she is shot through the window just as he swings the first crack of the belt across her thighs. Those dirty Reds again! It’s like Commie interruptus! Then later Mike will rescue Velda from perverse Red tortures, as she is being whipped while hanging “stark naked” from the rafters. A moment that made its way onto the cover even. Signet knew what they were selling.

If this were all there were to Spillane I don’t think I’d bother with him. You can see why so many critics were disgusted, and why Hammer was so popular. But Spillane could write. While there are sloppy moments when minor characters seem to drop in out of nowhere, there are also places where some care seems to have been exercised. The way the torn green Communist Party membership cards are described as twins, or how the movie Mike goes to see is about a man with a split personality, play into the good vs. evil twin motif. Or the way Velda is described as “a great big, luxurious cat leaning against the desk. A cat with gleaming black hair darker than the night and a hidden body of smooth skin that covered a wealth of rippling, deadly muscles that were poised for the kill. The desk light made her teeth an even row of merciless ivory, ready to rip and tear.” That may be boilerplate, but two pages later, as Mike and Velda are making their way through a foggy alley filled with rats we get this:

Soft furry things would squeal and run across our feet wherever we disturbed the junk lying around. Tiny pairs of eyes would glare at us balefully and retreat when we came closer. A cat moved in the darkness and trapped a pair of eyes that had been paying too much attention to us and the jungle echoed with a mad death cry.

As the scene develops Velda will actually kill a Red in the apartment they’re breaking into. We don’t have to reach far back to make the connection: Velda is the killer big cat in this urban jungle.

The other thing about Spillane that makes him such an easy read is his demotic style. As you’d expect, some of the language has changed in the last 75 years, but a plain piece of writing like this sentence still feels fresh: “It was a little before noon, so I hopped in the heap and tooled it up Broadway and angled over to the hotel where it cost me a buck to park in an unloading zone with a guy to cover for me.” Tooling one’s heap isn’t something we’d say today, but I think we still get a clear picture of what’s happening here. And with the language comes a certain vision of the traffic on the street, a vision without any Toyotas or Teslas in sight.

Even giving credit where it’s due though, I found this a slog of a read. The politics are crude and repetitive, it’s easy to figure out what the twist at the end is going to be, and the emphasis on sex and violence even managed to put me off. One gets the feeling that Spillane was just banging these out at this point, reducing the series to a lowest common denominator of character and plot.

Hammer index