The Big Bang (Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins, written in mid 60s, finished and published 2010)

Ok, I know I’ve bitched about Spillane, but still, I couldn’t resist buying The Big Bang. At the local bookstore, they were selling it for next to nothing, and I decided to try it out since this is a Mike Hammer novel and not some sissy old-aged Jack Stang crap.

Big Bang starts with some big fucking bangs, alright! Hammer springs into action no sooner than in the second paragraph (!!!) by smashing the guy “into a bloody mess“! His buddy gets it even worse: “I broke billy boy’s arm between the wrist and elbow, took half his teeth out, snapped his jaw loose from its hinges, and send the bastard’s balls on a trip…” And all he could think of was “..what the hell these chintzy little shits thought … taking on an old tiger.“

So, in case we have forgotten about Mike Hammer by some miracle, we are immediately back on track. Pace of course steadies a bit (could it possibly go faster and more violent after such an opening!?) and leaves space for the story to develop. In this one, we are dealing with drugs. There’s some big fuck-up happening in New York, and the streets are bone dry. Junkies are climbing walls, and for the last six months, supplies have been provided in small quantities. Mafia (Evello family, also Syndicate) is puzzled and pissed off about their shipments getting intercepted by police, and there’s a new gang led by the guy named Snowbird trying to take over their turf. And in the meantime, they are all just waiting for the Big Bang - super shipment coming from Europe.

Hammer has just returned to the city, and all he wants is to chill (cool his heels) and smoke his Luckies when he gets pulled into this mess. To understand his actions (and reactions), we need to examine his attitude towards drugs. I think the best way to do that is to let the main man explain it himself:

• Human garbage – these fucking drug-heads are all the same, scumbags, all of ‘em, and the gutter’s too good for them.
• It’s the plague – and the best way to deal with a plague is to wipe out as many rats as possible.

So it’s no surprise that he starts a war against anyone and everyone. And bloody war this will be, by the time he’s finished, the body count will rise into two-digit numbers. In the process, he’ll avoid police (“Fuck them!”) and get an unlikely ally in a colleague professor whose personal loss made his attitude towards drugs even less tolerable (!!!?) than his. Plus, of course, he’ll fuck a girl or two because – to use his words again – “I was just a human”.

This stuff leaves you speechless; it’s too brutal even for Spillane. It’s probably the best possible cheap pulp fiction on the market, and once I got over the initial shock, I had actually started to enjoy this insanity. I mean, the plot is tight and the writing is good, but there’s just nothing holding it back in its political incorrectness. Okay, we were used to Hammers contempt of law, his macho misogynistic persona, mocking of homosexuals, vegetarians, pacifists, communists, hippies, etc, but here everything goes into the tenth degree. Novel is too (or should I say still) extreme even in this day and age, and I doubt very much that any of the contemporary writers would go that far in creating such a conservative asshole main protagonist. I wonder whether Spillane (or his publisher) was aware of all that in the 60s when he wrote it, and had maybe abandoned it for these reasons.

Unique stuff. Was and still is.

3/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Mike Hammer, PI

Location: 
New York

Body count: 
Thousands! Hammer lets the poisoned heroin be distributed on the streets so “Thousands would die. And their friends and families would be so consumed by rage that they would rise up as one and they would take down the Maffia. Hit the Maffia, kill them all.” 

There are 14 "individual" killings (only two of them not committed by our Mikey boy). Let’s see a few of the more graphic ones:

•  His Colt left one eyeball plastered to his cheek to  dangle there
•  .45 slug entered his right temple, splattering blood and brains onto the dead driver
• .45 slug angled through his open, yelling mouth and up through the roof of his bald head, bursting it in bloody chunks like a target-range melon
• Shotgun blast, which took her head off her shoulders and some of her shoulders too
• Shotgun went off, shearing off the front of his face and leaving him a ghastly wet mask and still alive enough to scream until I leaned out and shattered his skull with a .45 slug and put him out of his misery. 

Yep, it is indeed - like his pal Pat Chambers has concluded - worst mob bloodbath since St. Valentine’s Day!

Dames:
His secretary/lover, Velda Sterling, of course, is holding down the fort while he’s out chasing Indians. Shirley Vought, a society girl who has chosen to associate with the wrong crowd.

Cover: 
Pretty generic but still cool.

Blackouts: 
Surprisingly, there are two of them. The first one is described just briefly, “I was clawing for the .45 when the chloroform found my face, and my last memory was them dragging me.” The second is much better. He’s drugged by LSD, and the description is much better. Hammer sees some collage pictures of Buster Keaton, Guadalcanal, Woody Woodpecker, Lana Turner and Adolf Hitler. 

Cool lines:
She had a tuna salad sandwich. She didn’t eat meat, she said. That would be news to the tuna.[The Coolest!]

She nodded and gave me a look that made the need-anything-just-whistle one Bacall gave Bogie seem like kid stuff. 

She began by falling to her knees to worship the part of me that seemed to be in charge.

“What kind of condition is he in?” 
“Cold,” Pat said. 
“The kind of cold you get when they file you away in a drawer at the morgue.”

I’ll start with re-breaking your goddamn leg, then see where inspiration takes me.[The Coolest!]