The Killing Man (Mickey Spillane, 1989)

I'm not sure what the story behind 'The Killing Man' is, but according to Spillane's Wikipedia page, it was originally published as a short story and later adapted into a novel, which was also serialised in Playboy magazine. I have no idea which came first, but the serial concept would explain why this is all over the place.

Once again, Hammer doesn't even get properly hired by a paying customer. Trouble finds him when he walks into his office on a Saturday noon. He finds his beloved Velda beaten, unconscious and half-dead lying on the floor. Keeping her company is a very dead dude tied to a chair. Tortured, his fingers cut, and with a sinister, threatening message addressed to our hero pinned into his head. A bit gruesome, but so far, so good. This shit is going to be personal!

We have a fluke going here and I don't know where or how, but damn it, I'm involved now. I'm sure as hell involved. When he put Velda down I was in and I'm going to stay in until that fucking psycho gets nailed to the wall.

But then, with every single chapter (or was it every monthly Playboy issue?), it goes wilder and crazier, and I got the impression that Spillane didn't really have any concept and was just making up this shit as he went along. Because it soon makes no sense whatsoever. The plot doesn't progress at all, and the only amusement I had was trying to predict who or what would come on the scene next. We start with the usual NYPD and DA involvement, joined later by the State Department, CIA, FBI, Mob, Medellin drug cartel, some super-smart guy called General Skubal, etc.

And yes, you've guessed it by now:

"Penta's beginning to have an international flavor." +
"...the security of the United States could be compromised."  +
"Now we're into the heavy cocaine scene."

I wanted to like it, but it's really a mess. In the end, there's some ludicrous vice-president assassination attempt/plot thrown in, and the big finale twist is nothing more than an amateurish "twins mistaken identities" trick. Depressing read. It made me a bit sad about the ageing maestro...

Published 20 years after the previous Mike Hammer novel, it was likely intended to be a dramatic comeback and was therefore written in an over-the-top style. Again, I'm not familiar with its backstory, and I'm not particularly intrigued to do research (but I will definitely try to find the original short story!). I thought that The Goliath Bone was the lowest point of modern Hammer, but this one beats it.

2/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Mike Hammer, P.I. 

Still grinning all the time (43 times to be precise), still bossing everyone around without hardly ever saying "please" or "thank you", still calling everyone kid or kiddie (and women are still kittens, dolls, sugars, honeys,...).

But he is getting older because it's been four years now since the last time he "took down" a bad guy (that "son of a bitch Julius Marco"). And in this one, he also makes just a single kill:

The grin got to him. I was grinning at him the way I had at his brother back in the courtroom...

He had thrashed around so he was pointing away from me, blood spatters streaking the wall. I felt some of it on my face and grinned again...

The agony foaming at his mouth. He saw my grin again and choked out another scream...

There was one smashing roar of the .45. His blood went all over the place. Fresh specks of crimson were on the back of my hand. I stood up slowly and gave him a hard grin he couldn't see any more.

Location: 
New York

Body count:  
9 + Penta's killing. 

But since Penta is so elusive and secretive, his killings are impossible to count. We'll need to trust General Skubal's super computer database: "Sixteen known assassinations were attributed to him, all of them with various forms of digital butchery done to the victims."

And in case you were wondering: 

I said, "Digital butchery?" 
"Newspeak for finger-chopping." 

The object of desire: 
Like everything else in The Killing Man, this, too, is hard to explain. At first - pretty out of the blue - Candace comes with this:

She put her finger under the $905 million total and said, "That's what they want to kill you for, Mike." 

I don't think it ever gets explained how Ice Lady came up with this number, but I think it represents the street value of "tractor-trailer solidly loaded with the purest cocaine you could find". But a bit later, she must have recalculated the whole thing or used a different methodology:

"Wild, huh? Tell me something. How much is the street value of the junk today?"
She told me. I let out a low whistle. No wonder Penta could afford to pass up the VP for an old hood. Nine-digit figures are understandable.
 

Dames: 
Candace Amory, presently working as an assistant to the district attorney but aspiring to become the president of USA:

She was a tall patrician-looking blonde with a cover-girl face and a body that didn't just happen. Every bit of her was carefully cultivated and when she moved you knew she danced and could ski and in the water could take two-hundred-foot dives in scuba gear.

You would never call Candace Amory "Candy." You would want to kiss the lusciousness of those full lips until the thought occurred that it might be like putting your tongue on a cold sled runner and never being able to get it off.  

There was a dominance about her that she was exuding like an invisible veil and I smiled, just barely smiled with my eyes licking hers, and for an instant there was the minutest change of expression, the cat suddenly realizing the mouse was a cobra, and the veil was sucked back in.

It goes on and on, and I don't want to bore you or myself with cobras and scuba gear.

Then there's Edwina West, General Skubal's secretary. But!

"Let's keep it simple and square, Miss West. No secretary garbage."
"Oh?"
"You're CIA, aren't you?"
There was no hesitation at all. "Yes, I am. Why should you ask?"

She has no function/role in the plot whatsoever, but still, there's a four-page description of her:

Some women can hit you with a visual impact you'll never forget... total thing that makes them woman...crazy electric blue eyes... beautifully full breasts... generous swell of her hips... she had a dancer's legs, muscularly rounded, but perfectly curved... they hardly make them like that any more... "You're some kind of doll, Miss West", "Please, call me Edwina."... "Watch it, Edwina, you're touching nerves I didn't know I had."...

But, having a role or not, this perfectly curved spook lady and Mike almost end up fucking mere five minutes after they've met. But Hammer is on the case. He needs to go and simply leaves her with:

"You are one special woman, Edwina. The air seems to shimmer around you. I can feel your body heat and watch you pulse with whatever's going on inside that body of yours."

And, of course, there will always be Velda:

"Velda. Beautiful, gorgeous Velda. Those deep brown eyes and that full, full mouth. Shimmering auburn hair that fell in a page-boy around her shoulders."

Blackouts: 
It wasn't a mugging. I felt the needle go into my hip and within seconds the drowsiness started.
 

Title:
"That one son of a bitch is going to fall. I don't give a damn what happens to all the money or all the coke as long as I get that bastard under my gun. We're playing around with somebody who likes to kill, likes to get paid for killing and likes to sign his name in chopped-off fingers."

But I think it should simply be titled "Penta" since this super assassin's code name is mentioned no less than 126 times! Or even better, what about "Penta, Penta, Penta" or "Killing Penta" or "Penta Killing"?

Edition:  
Clio Press, 1993. Published in "Large Print", which was something entirely new for me. Hardly any margins, and the font size is so large that it makes the book almost 350 pages long!

Cover:
Nice illustration credited to Kevin Feeney. For the details, see the bottom of the 'dames' section.

Cool lines:  

"You're a damn killer, buddy," he told me. "We need people like you." [The Coolest!]

I couldn't play it smart. I had to explode and rammed through the door in a blind fury ready to blow somebody into a death full of bloody, flying parts...[The Coolest!]

The Twisted Thing (Mickey Spillane, 1966)

After reading Goliath's Bone, I promised myself not to go near any of those semi-finished Hammer novels patched together by Max Allan Collins and to take at least a year's break from Spillane. I have bought a few of his paperbacks at a flea market since then, and I was growing increasingly excited and impatient as the end of my self-imposed embargo drew near.

But I picked up the wrong one. Nothing really works in this twisted thing. In short: Kidnapping case that soon turns into a murder investigation that quickly becomes an incomprehensible mess that drags itself like a fucking snail and finally reaches its climax with a pretty idiotic (but far from unexpected) twist.

The story is too complicated; it's part hard-boiled and part classical detective fiction, and it often doesn't make much sense. No decent characterisation: there's our superhuman Mike Hammer, and everyone else is either good or bad. Surprisingly, even depictions of Spillane's trademarks of sex & violence are somehow pathetic. Violence is pretty distasteful (torture, beating people to a pulp) and too repetitive (brain, blood, gore,... spurting, flying,... all over his coat, road,...).

Sex does deserve a separate paragraph. Check out these two descriptions:

• Roxy took a quick breath, grabbed the negligee off the bed and held it in front of her. That split second of visioning nudity that was classic beauty made the blood pound in my ears. I shut my eyes against it. "Easy, Roxy," I said, "I can't see so don't scream and don't throw things. I didn't mean it.".
• I followed her at a six-foot interval, enough so I could watch her legs that so obviously wanted watching.

Do you see where I'm getting at? I'm no psychiatrist, but this kind of behaviour seems to be a typical adolescent fear of adult women. You can watch them from a distance (and make remarks about them), but when you have one actually in front of you, your ass freezes. This is okay and sort of funny when you start looking at one of the toughest motherfuckers in the P.I. business in such a light.

It stopped being funny when a Lesbian arrived on the scene. And I didn't miss-type: she's lesbian with a capital L (used more than once). It turns more and more into a quite nasty, macho chauvinistic shit with remarks like "she only resembled a woman", "she being partially a woman", "she was only a half of dame", "if she thought it was like a man", etc. It looks like Mickey really got into this shit because our poor Myra's sexuality even plays a substantial part in the plot. 

Very disappointing. Not good, not exactly bad, but definitely boring as fuck. Something I never thought I'd write about Mike Hammer novel.

2/5 

Facts:

Hero:
Mike Hammer, PI

"I would like to know one thing, how good a detective are you?"
"I've killed a lot of men. I shoot the guts out of two of them...I hate the bastards that make society a thing to be laughed at and preyed upon. I hate them so much I can kill without the slightest compunction. The papers call me dirty names,... but I don't give a damn. When I kill I make it legal. The courts accuse me of being too quick on the trigger... I think fast, I shoot fast,.... and I'm still alive. That's how good a detective I am."

Location:
Wooster, near NYC

Body count: 

5

Dames: 

• Miss Malcom, aka (ex) stripper Roxy - a beautiful set of legs, natural curves, extraordinary pretty face
• Alice Nichols - concert of savage beauty
• Myra Grange (the Lesbian) - almost as tall as I was, ....figure that seemed to be well moulded
• Miss Cook, aka the Legs

Blackouts:
Yes, he gets knocked out several times (not 100% positive, but I think it was three times). There's nothing special about any of them, but there's one pretty crazy with a cool description of regaining his consciousness: "I came back together like a squadron of flak-eaten bombers re-forming."  

Title: 
Poor Ruston - an adult man trapped in a kid's body - is twisted.

Cover: 
Cool and pulp-ish (damsel in distress, gun) with an unusual yellow/red colour scheme. Not very accurate - even if it depicts a scene where Roxy was shot and wounded, there (1) shouldn't be the gun lying around, and (2) there should be some blood visible on her shoulder.

Cool lines:  
The guy knew guns. The safety was off and the rod was ready to spit. [The Coolest!]

Why is that some dames can work me up into a lather so fast with so little is beyond me, but this one did. I quit playing around. I pulled my .45 and let her get a good look at it. "You open that door or I'll shoot the lock off," I said.

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!]