I, the Jury is a great title, both apt and unforgettable to the point of being iconic. My Gun is Quick isn’t nearly as good. Mickey Spillane’s second Mike Hammer novel does have a great dedication though: “To all my friends / past, present and future.” That’s nice.

We don’t hit the ground running. Instead, things kick off with an uncharacteristically philosophical prologue as Mike muses over the difference between a comfortable life of reflection that is safely removed from the savage life and lawlessness of the jungle “out there.” Meaning, in Mike’s case, life on the mean streets. This opening feels out of place and dropped in apropos of nothing, but I suspect it was meant as a response to some of his critics. And by “his” I mean Spillane’s.

Moving right along, and that quickly, Mike confronts a pimp in a diner with language that again shows his influence on Dirty Harry. “Just touch that rod you got and I’ll blow your damned greasy head off. Go ahead, just make one lousy move toward it.” Yeah. Make my day, punk.

Not that Hammer didn’t have his earlier screen progenitors. When he checks himself out in a mirror he sees “a character straight out of a B movie.” It’s a look that makes him grunt in satisfaction. He’s a type of the hard-boiled private dick: a tough guy who can handle himself as well in the bedroom as a barroom brawl (and in both locations he gets plenty of opportunities). You can beat the crap out of him if you catch him by surprise, but that only makes him angry. And women don’t just throw themselves at him, but run to the kitchen to make him coffee and bacon and eggs in the morning: “Breakfast is served, my lord.” Now that girl’s a keeper!

All of which is pretty much what you’d expect from a hero of this genre. But Hammer also has some individual traits that set him apart. In the first place, he’s a bulldog. This is the quality that his police buddy Pat Chambers respects and finds useful. “You could be a good crook but you’re a better cop,” Pat tells him. “You get something and hang on to it longer than anybody else and make something of it.” Plus, he knows how to play the game. As he explains to Lola:

I hate the lice that run the streets without even being scratched. I’m the guy with the spray gun and they hate me, too, but even if I’m a private cop I can get away with it better than they can. I can work the bastards up to the point where they make a try at me and I can shoot in self-defense and be cleared in a court of law. The cops can’t go that far, but they’d like to, don’t forget it.

I don’t know how accurate a statement of the law this was in 1950, but it’s hard to imagine a cop getting in trouble for shooting someone who pulled a gun on them first in the twenty-first century. Leaving that aside, what makes Hammer so tenacious is his thirst for vengeance. He knows what he wants to do to whoever killed Nancy: “They were going to die slower and harder than any son of a bitch had ever died before, and while they died, I’d laugh my goddamn head off!” No, a guy with that kind of fire in his belly isn’t going to quit. He’s going to hang on longer than anybody. And, finally, what provides fuel for his vengeful crusades is the dark cloud of fatality that surrounds him. “I’m trouble for everything I touch,” he warns Lola. But such a warning comes too late, leaving him to mete out brutal justice after the fact. And so the Mike Hammer plot is concluded in a blaze (a literal blaze here) of guts and glory: “He was still screaming when I pulled the trigger.” Then, onward! As Spillane advised one younger writer: “The first chapter sells the book and then the last chapter sells the next book.”

Now just a few other things I pulled out.

In my review of the Ross Macdonald story “Death by Water” I mentioned its interesting plot point about a victim who is drowned in a bathtub and then taken out and thrown in a swimming pool so it would look like an accident. The clue is that the water in the victim’s lungs is bathwater and not the chlorinated pool water. That sounded like the big clue in the movie Chinatown where Hollis Mulwray is found drowned in a reservoir but he has salt water in his lungs. But “Death by Water” had been written in 1947 and it had never been published so Robert Towne couldn’t have had it in mind. He might, however, have been thinking of this novel, which was published in 1950. Here we have Ann Minor being found drowned in a river. Hammer knows she didn’t kill herself so he has the water in her lungs tested and it turns out to be from the tub in her apartment.

Maybe this was an idea that had been around for a while, which makes me wonder what the first mystery story to use it might have been.

Did Spillane and Ross Macdonald both have a fetish for busty women? Or were breasts just a substitute or synecdoche for sexuality in general? Either way, it leads to some crazy paeans like the following: “She was a wide-shouldered woman with the high firm breasts of youth unrestrained by the artifices of a brassiere, each a soft hemisphere of beauty desiring to be touched.” This is the same girl, I’ll add, who makes breakfast for her lord. Is it any wonder he proposes? Lola is turned on by his toughness (“You have a brutish quality about you that makes men hate you, but maybe a woman wants a brute.”), and she makes her desire clear in her kisses: “Her mouth was a soft bed of fire, her tongue a searching thing asking questions I had to answer greedily. . . . She didn’t have to tell me that she was mine whenever I wanted it. I knew that.”

Sure you can make fun of all this, but I suspect Spillane was laughing too as he wrote it and it’s a hoot to read. Of course some of the sexual politics have dated – homosexuals, or “butt boys,” are again figures of weakness and degeneracy – but that too is part of the genre landscape. Noir was of a time and place.

My Gun is Quick is a longer book than either I, the Jury or Vengeance is Mine! (the next Hammer novel), and while it never drags it did lead me to feel some impatience, especially as it was so obvious from the get-go who the main villain was. I don’t think many people rank it among their favourite Hammer adventures. But Spillane already had his formula set and delivers what he knew his readers wanted. There’d be plenty more of much the same.

Hammer index

I think I knew that Stephen King had written a Sherlock Holmes story, but finding “The Doctor’s Case” was still a bit of a surprise. Detective fiction wasn’t really his thing. Luckily this came out in 1987, a time when King was writing at the height of his considerable powers. I’ve written before about the Rule of Ten when it comes to authors, and for King you could place his big decade roughly in the 1980s. 1987 was the same year as Misery, one of his best books. So Holmes was in good hands here.

The doctor whose case this is, you’ll be interested to know, is Dr. Watson himself. The hook here is that it is Watson who actually solves the case, or mostly solves it. And this is no small matter of just providing Holmes with a helpful nudge, perhaps unconsciously. No, this is a prize “locked room” mystery that Lestrade has specially invited Holmes in to investigate and it is Watson who figures out how the murder was committed. Admittedly the house where the crime took place is full of cats and Holmes has an allergy to felines so he is congested and breaking out in a rash, meaning he’s not operating in peak condition, but still it’s impressive how Watson scoops him. And Holmes does give him credit, while belittling him a bit at the end for not extending his observations so far as to grasp the full story of what happened.

This is a solid pastiche that never winks at the reader with parodic intent but deals out various canonical elements while presenting a neat puzzle that’s basically a sort of magic trick. Then there’s a denouement that involves a shuffle of moral justice that Doyle often indulged. In short, King knew the assignment and delivered. Whatever else you want to say about him, the man has always been a total pro.

Holmes index

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
My Gun is Quick

Mystery and Detective Fiction