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