I’m pretty sure that the first time I read Vengeance is Mine! I knew there was a twist coming in advance. Mickey Spillane had wanted to write a book where the big reveal at the end was withheld until the very last word. So knowing that going in I had things figured out pretty early. There aren’t that many very last words that are going to do the trick. “When you’re writing a story, think of it like a joke,” is a bit of advice Spillane had for writers. “What’s a great punchline? Get the great ending and then write up to it.” And that’s exactly how Vengeance is Mine! plays. It’s quite brutal, in ways that were already by this, the third Mike Hammer novel, starting to wear, but it also has a bit of tongue in its cheek. I don’t think Spillane took himself that seriously.
But if Vengeance is Mine! ends with a bang it also kicks off with quite a needle-drop. (Another bit of Spillane wisdom for writers: “The first chapter sells the book and then the last chapter sells the next book.”) Here’s how we begin:
The guy was dead as hell. He lay on the floor in his pajamas with his brains scattered all over the rug and my gun was in his hand.
Damn. Whether you’re into pulp or not, that’s a heck of a way to hook a reader.
The backstory is that Hammer met up with an old war buddy visiting the Big Apple and they’d gone out to party, leaving Mike “Whisky-drunk and out like a light with no memory of what happened.” Except he’s in a hotel room with a dead body. Sort of like Jane Fonda in the movie The Morning After.
It’s a great way to get things started, but it’s also a bit of a stretch and seemed to me to be both awkward and unnecessary as a plot device. In any event, not much is made of the situation beyond Hammer temporarily getting his gun permit pulled so that he has to get Velda to nominally take over the investigation, a job she turns out to be more than capable at. The other thing the set-up introduces is a conflict between Hammer and a District Attorney. Hammer can’t stand the guy and, being Hammer, isn’t afraid to tell him exactly what he thinks of him when he shows up at Mike’s apartment and tries to give him the third degree:
“Show me your warrant to come in my house and do that, then I’ll talk, you yellow-bellied little bastard. I’m going to meet you in the street not long from now and carve that sissified pasty face of yours into ribbons. Get out of here and kiss yourself some fat behinds like you’re used to doing. I’ll be all right in a few minutes and you better be gone by then and your stooges with you. They’re not cops. They’re like you . . . political behind-kissers with the guts of a bug and that’s not a lot of guts. Go on, get out, you crummy turd.”
There’s no subtlety in Mike Hammer! Maybe that’s how he got his name.
I mentioned earlier how I don’t think Spillane took himself all that seriously. I think that’s especially the case here, as he seems to have been having some fun with setting up his “punchline” of an ending. Even though Juno is a goddess (or, more pointedly, “a queen and she didn’t want to be. She wanted to be a woman”) there’s just something not right about her, just one thing that he can’t put his finger on. Maybe it’s her clothes that “covered everything up and let your imagination fill in the blanks.” Perhaps it’s her man hands. Hmm. It’s all kind of funny (both ha-ha and weird) that Mike Hammer could be so easily fooled. “Me, a guy what likes women, a guy who knows every one of their stunts . . . and I fall for this.”
And then there are all the pokes and double entendres. He comes on to Velda but says he’s “afraid of that rod you use for ballast in your handbag.” Yes, Velda does have a gun in her handbag, but is there a nod here to another woman in the book who is packing? Then when Hammer is looking at the bullet holes in the hotel room and realizes he almost got shot in the balls when he was passed out drunk he says “another inch higher and I would have been singing tenor and forgetting about shaving.” This is a book that has more than it’s share of dick references. When the D.A. stands over Hammer “so I could admire his physique, I guess” while berating him, our hero can only groggily remark to himself that “The D.A. was getting a big whang out of this.” What exactly is Hammer noticing and remarking on here? You be the judge.
The actual story I didn’t find very interesting. What makes it worth a read is the further insight we get into Hammer’s psyche, which isn’t very deep but is plenty dark enough. There’s a lot more on the mutual attraction (if that’s not too tame a word) between him and Velda. And if you want to know why they don’t just go all the way it’s because he’s haunted by the ghosts of all the women he’s gotten involved with who have met violent ends. Including the ones he killed himself, like in I, the Jury. And it’s a record he keeps up here as his girl-of-the-week Connie ends up another victim. So he’s protecting Velda by keeping her at a (relative) distance.
Then there’s Hammer’s personal brand of violent psychopathy. Here are his thoughts as he prepares for the final showdown and thinks about how the killer must be terrified knowing the force of vengeance that is now pursuing him:
He’d check old papers and court records and ask questions, then he’d know what I was like. He’d know that I didn’t give a damn for a human life any more than he did. I was just a bit different. I didn’t shoot anything but killers. I loved to shoot killers. I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do than shoot a killer and watch his blood trace a slimy path across the floor. It was fun to kill those bastards who tried to get away with murder and did sometimes.
I started to laugh and I couldn’t stop. I pulled the Luger out and checked it again when it didn’t need it. This time I pulled the trigger off half cock and let it sit all the way back ready to nudge a copper-covered slug out of the barrel and into a killer’s face.
How are we to read this? As over-the-top comic-book glorification of violence? As parody? Taken seriously, it’s quite unpleasant. But I don’t know how seriously to take it. I’ll leave things by saying that Spillane is a writer I can only manage in small doses, not just because he’s quite repetitive but because the effect can be numbing.
Alex Good 