I read my first Mickey Spillane book in 2008. It was “One
Lonely Night,” the 4th book in the Mike Hammer series. I gave it one
star. Here’s what I said: “I was really looking forward to enjoying my first
Mickey Spillane book. I'm still waiting. This one was awful. Personally, I
found it nearly illiterate. He's got only the tiniest fragment of the style of
Chandler and Hammett but without even a sliver of their talent. I won't be
reading another Spillane for a long, long time.”
Cue 2017, a long time in reading years. I’ve started my
second Spillane/Hammer book. “Vengeance is Mine,” book 3 in the series, and I’m
liking it a lot better. Not loving it, mind you, but at least it’s not a chore
to read. As I started thinking of this post about Spillane’s work, I did some
background reading on him. Turns out his first few books tended to focus on
Hammer coming up against gangsters. Then he switched to “Commies.” My
accidental selections of his books has apparently bracketed these periods. “One
Lonely Night” was from his commie phase while “Vengeance” involved gangsters. Maybe
that’s the difference. The “Commie” threat is certainly a lot more dated than
the gangster threat.
This time with Spillane, though, I can at least begin to see
the attraction many readers have for him. There is a rawness and an underlying
power that creates a momentum for the story. The dialogue is dramatic, if not
very realistic sounding. I can see why the Hammer tales are of interest to TV
and film makers. My interest may be higher this time, as well, because I’ve
been fiddling with a hardboiled story myself.
The books are also just chock full of items that grind my
teeth, however. Of course, every beautiful woman (dame) in the tale is a
knockout and every one of them has the hots for Mike Hammer, to the point they
can’t resist him and beg him to take them. Most of them also enjoy a good slapping
and accept being pushed around as their due. The cliché is sort of that they’re
good girls in bad roles and they recognize the ultimate bad boy in Hammer. I’d
never be one to say that you just can’t create this kind of female character. There
are all kinds of people in the world. But over and over and over to the point
of caricature and formula? I wince every time one of them is on scene in the
story.
I still have a number of Spillane titles on my shelves. See
the picture below. I picked these all up together at a library book sale. It
was 9 years between my first and second attempt at Spillane. It probably won’t
be so long for the third. I guess we’ll see.
