Customer Reviews

Day of the Guns

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Spillane is largely unique in writing in a tough and uncompromising style, not just in the attitude of his characters but in the tone of the prose. Tiger Mann is a veteran of the Second World War, having battled the Nazis and their collaborators in Europe. The war has been over for some time and now he is battling the communists and the people he views as their collaborators. Mann is uncompromising with people on both sides of the fight, in many ways he reserves his greatest contempt for the "pinkos", people who don't consider communism that bad or that much of a threat.
Tiger also has some serious emotional baggage left over from the war, where his great love turned out to be a ruthless Nazi collaborator that tried to kill him. Her name was Rondine and now he thinks she has returned from the dead in another guise after extensive plastic surgery. After many challenges and battles, the woman that he suspects of being Rondine proves that she is not in a rather unusual sexual way.
This is a novel that fit well into the mass mentality during the height of the cold war when the Red Scare was peaking. At that time, people thought communist agents were everywhere and it was necessary to root them out using any means necessary. However, now that the Cold War has been over for two decades, people unfamiliar with that time will find his writing difficult to understand.