Customer Reviews

THE COMPLETE MIKE HAMMER COLLECTION. Six Volumes. Kiss Me, Deadly, One Lonely Night, The Big Kill, Vengeance is Mine, I, The Jury, and My Gun is Quick.

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I know that my title may be an exaggeration, but Mickey Spillane's first and last chapters of this book, contain some of the best American prose, word for word, outside of Hemmingway. The narrative picks you up and carries you along in a stream of muscular, swift, clearing written words. Mike Hammer is having doubts about whether he is a mindless killer who deserves to live or a normal man with a quick temper. By the end of the novel Mike Hammer has the answer.

BTW, the "MVD" that Spillane constantly refers to is the Soviet Secret Police, this organization has been called the "CHECKA", "NKVD", and "SMERSH". Or to put it more international terms, its the USSR equivilent of the GESTAPO.

An odd beginning of sorts. Mike Hammer is out of sorts after being scolded by a judge who condemns him as a murderer (although unconvicted). A bit sensitive, Mike takes a lone walk which brings him to a lonely bridge where this story begins with an attempted murder, Mike killing the assassin and the intended victim, scared out of her wits, jumping off the bridge to her death. Mike covers up his own involvement and finds, in searching the man's pockets, a green card. (It turns out its a club card to a Commie (the book's word) organization meant on destroying America as we know it. (The year is 1951, the height of the "Red Scare")

It's all suspense and tough as nails action on the part of Mike after that. What's interesting is how much of the political talk, rants against the people in political office, is the same talk we hear today. Indeed, given the debate about politics today this book could be as relevent today as in 1951 in that regard.

Mike is also throughout the book considering the judge's words. Is he a murderer as evil as any other? I'm not giving any of the story away by saying that by the end of the book he determines he is...and that's OK for he has one difference, he kills only bad guys. Yes, he likes it, but there you go.

Tough as nails.

Mickey Spillane writes like Dashiell Hammett, his character Mike Hammer is like Hammett's Sam Spade, and the gloom and doom of their P.I.'s cases are similar. But, in some uncommon and difficult-to-explain way, the books of each are decidedly different.

First, the issues of "One Lonely Night" involve more than greed - the impetus for murder and mayhem in Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon." This book involves stolen documents containing "information of destruction." Papers of mass destruction. Microfiche.

And, this book involves speeches, news alerts and fears about the Commies. The political hero tells the, ". . . nation of the calamity that had befallen it." Americans were warned ". . . with a special bulletin that told of all ports being watched, the roundup of suspected aliens . . . The world was in an uproar when the stuff was safe as hell . . . " Written in 1951, it may seem dated, but recent events are making it retro.

The fear mongers in this fictional account mirror those that administer our union today. Each has an agenda, each has a cause for its igniting a match to fear's kindling. But, in order to prevent ruining this novel - I tell you that the underlying reasons for the fear mongers of this book are hopefully different than those reasons of our political leaders. Oh, how I hope it is so.

Hammer is cool. He gets in on with women, he smokes Lucky Strikes, he measures his drinking by the bottle - not the glass, and he kills a lot of people. And, each of those people deserve death. Torturous death. Slow, painful, excruciatingly slow and painful death. But, for the most part they are blown away by his 45.

Like Hammett and others of this genre, the similes and hyperbole are wonderfully unique and blue collar. Occasionally, metaphors further color the writing which made Spillane rich and famous - probably two attributes he was not concerned to obtain, but felt no inhibition in accepting the former as it would increase his ability to womanize like his Hammer.

This book is good fun.

Mickey Spillane's popularity in the 1950s was meteoric. This novel is a prime example of Spillane at his snarling best. The anti-Communist hysteria of post WWII America is the backdrop of this tale of lonely death and bloody vengeance. "One Lonely Night" is the archetype Mike Hammer story. All the classic elements are present, most particularly Velda, Hammer's delectable secretary. A young woman's dive off a New York bridge draws Hammer into mystery-adventure mayhem. A nest of Commie (the vernacular is everywhere) spies is hard at work on the streets of New York. Unrestrained by official red tape, and at loggerheads with the authorities, Hammer embarks on a typical one-man war against the Russian-based MVD (whatever that is). Spillane's prose is as rough as his fictional alter ego. What the writing lacks in literary style, it gains in attitude and action. Hammer's earthy first person narrative enhances the character. The underside of the big city comes alive. The body count is large. The sex is raw rather than erotic. The climactic scene in the warehouse, on the inevitable rainy night, is compelling. As Velda hangs naked by a rope from the ceiling, the guy with the scythe and the black cowl stalks at Hammer's side and the machine gun belches blue flame and thunder. The day of the guns prevails. Good reading for genre fans and those who enjoy Mickey Spillane's viewpoint. ;-)

The centerpiece of this book is the chasing down of an innocent woman by a commie thug, because the commie thug has a gun, and in New York only commie thugs have guns. This scene is really well done, as is the rest of the book. Anyway fortunately "our hero" happens to be in the neighborhood...

Hard-hitting is the phrase that most accurately describes the character of Mike Hammer, he is as tough as they come in the private investigating business. The setting of this novel is the early 1950's, at the height of the red scare. Therefore, if you have little knowledge about the frenzy over communist infiltration of American society, then you will have trouble understanding the context.
When the story opens, Mike has just been chastised by a judge for his tendency to kill people and he wanders to a bridge. A frightened woman comes towards him and she is followed by a menacing man with a gun. Mike kills the man and the woman is so terrified that she jumps off the bridge to her death.
This involves Mike in infiltrating a communist cell, working behind the scenes to aid a decent politician and openly getting engaged to his secretary Velda. The dialog is fervent anti- communist, Hammer repeatedly describes them as vile, vicious and vermin to be killed without remorse. He succeeds in that mission, avenging many wrongs and using the combination of many wrongs to construct a major right.
It takes a specific kind of mentality or approach to enjoy the Mike Hammer stories authored by Mickey Spillane. If you find it difficult to absorb brutal killing and the toughest of tough guy dialog, then you will find this difficult reading. It is not spellbinding reading by any means, it is just about a hard man managing in a hard world.

Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer was such a huge phenomenon in the early 50s that you'll miss out on all sorts of references in popular culture if you don't read him-- at least one of his inimitably gritty books. This is as good as any (though the first, "I, The Jury," is the most logical start). Mike is a full-bore psychopath who hears music in his head when he's gone nuts for violence, who relishes beating and blowing big holes in people whom he's identified as deserving it: commies mostly, but criminals and egg-headed pantywaists of all descriptions had better watch it too. This is beyond parody, since Spillane's writing is already so loopy that it can't be made fun of effectively. But the guy sold FIFTY MILLION BOOKS in a few years' time in the early fifties, so it's impossible to overestimate his effect on the culture of the time.

No joke: read one and see. It's good fun, though the plots are a bit transparent by contemporary standards.

This book came out when America was all aflutter with the Communist scare. China had gone Red. The Soviets had "the bomb." We were at war (correction, "police action") in Korea. And Tailgunner Joe was in his ascendancy. Mickey Spillane's earlier Mike Hammer novels had been apolitical for the most part. The villains were just hoods, gangsters, motivated by money.

With "One Lonely Night" Spillane went full-bore anti-communist, without much understanding of the threat beyond the Chicken Little the-sky-is-falling outcry. The reality was that American communists were self-styled intellectuals talking revolution in darkened Greenwich Village espresso shops. The laboring class Marx so adored were not having any of it, and the threat wasn't much of a threat at all.

But Spillane made straw men out of the commies and shot them down. And somehow Mike Hammer was the loser for it. As a young man in the 1950's I admired the prose in Spillane's first few novels--and then I came to this one and was weaned. He was way off the mark, but I forgot that until I picked this up again after a hiatus of five decades or so.

I will admit that the first chapter is a gem of writing, perhaps the best Spillane ever did. But one gem is not enough to get the book much praise. It's just barely enough to get it two stars from me.

I should preface this review by owning that I'm not a fan of Mickey Spillane. I understand his importance to the genre, and when he's at what I think of at his best, then I can enjoy his novels. But he isn't really to my taste, so consider that a fair disclosure of bias.

_One Lonely Night_ tells the story of Hammer, returning angry and bitter from a trial where he is excoriated for "knocking off somebody who needed knocking off bad". Hammer is shaken and wonders if the judge's view of him is really true and accurate, whether he really is such a bad guy. While in the midst of this reverie, Hammer runs across a girl being chased by a bad man. He kills the bad man, but fails to save the girl as she jumps to her death rather than be part of whatever it was she was involved in. Naturally, Spillane gets involved, and as the plot expands to threaten his beautiful Vera, he gets very involved indeed.

The book seems like it's thumbing its nose at critics who accuse Hammer of being too violent. He has to be violent, it seems to say, the world is a dangerous place and violence and vigilence go hand-in-hand.

This book contains much of what I dislike most about Spillane's writing-- the simple black and white approach to good and evil, the obsession with the communist conspiracy, and stupid society dames who get messed up in the wrong element and don't deserve to live.

To be fair, many people find this one of Spillane's best works, but I really prefer the more crime-oriented Hammer books such as _Kiss Me, Deadly_.