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