Mike Hammer Omnibus: V. 1 [Paperback]

Mickey Spillane (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2002

A triple-shot collection from the undisputed master of detective fiction. In Mickey Spillane's classic private eye novels, the action exploded in a bonecrunching catharsis. Men and women didn't make love - they collided. Tough brutes used their fists to drive home a message. Tougher broads used guile. And no one's morals were loftier than the gutter. No apologies. Little redemption. These novels rendered critics powerless, shocked intellectuals, inspired a new wave of pulp mayhem, and left the public hungry for more. Given their hot, fever-pitch prose and breathless pacing, Spillane's Mike Hammer novels quickly became one of the most successful series in publishing history - an innovative, no-holds barred, ultravisceral explosion of sex and violence that made Hammer a literary legend and Spillane one of the bestselling authors of all time. After fifty years, neither has lost his power to deliver a knockout punch. Find out for yourself in this omnibus edition featuring the first three Mike Hammer novels by the living master of the hard-boiled mystery...I, The Jury, My Gun Is Quick, Vengeance is Mine!

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Mickey Spillane's first three Mike Hammer mysteries I, the Jury; My Gun Is Quick; and Vengeance Is Mine! are collected in The Mike Hammer Collection: Volume 1, with an introduction by Shamus Award-winner Max Allan Collins, who finds "[s]omething personal...at the heart of every Spillane novel." Hammer is a foul-mouthed, violent vigilante and a sucker for beautiful damsels in distress, some of whom pull the wool over his eyes. With his trusty, sexy assistant Velda keeping him honest (sort of), he exacts revenge on racketeers, cheats and murderers.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

Review

"Spillane is a master in compelling you to Always turn the pages." —The New York Times

--This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 516 pages
• Publisher: Allison & Busby (September 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 074900519X
• ISBN-13: 978-0749005191
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,356,732 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mickey Spillane (1918-2006) sold hundreds of millions of books. He introduced iconic detective Mike Hammer to readers in 1947 with I, THE JURY, and was named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master in 1995.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Spillane Still a crowd pleaser, February 22, 2003

By 

David W. Nicholas (Van Nuys, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mike Hammer Collection Volume 1 (Mass Market Paperback)

Mickey Spillane wrote detective novels half a century ago. It's well-known that he was not very well-liked by the literary community. There's a veiled derisive reference to one of his stories in one of the later Philip Marlowe novels. Even after all of this time, Spillane still gets little respect.

This is unfortunate, but this collection goes some way towards fixing that I think. The three books presented here are the first three Spillane wrote, published just after World War II, and Max Alan Collins' thoughtful introduction puts them in context so the reader knows what they're looking at. Basically, if you've seen plot twists or devices in other stories that appear here also, it's a good bet that Spillane invented them, and someone else used them (usually while not crediting Spillane himself).

The three books included in this series are I, the Jury (1947), My Gun is Quick (1950) and Vengeance is Mine (also 1950). All three are variations on the same plot, which apparently is a Spillane hallmark. The main character, Mike Hammer, is somehow involved in a murder, knows the victim, and swears revenge on the killer. He then spends most of the book sorting through clues, talking to witnesses, and getting beaten up. There's then a final scene where Hammer has figured out who the killer is, and confronts said killer. The killers never get arrested: Hammer shoots them, so that there's no trial.

The dialog and situations are very dated, and somewhat hackneyed. My wife read one of these books sometime ago, and her observation is very appropriate. Spillane invented the genre, but he's been imitated so much that the original looks a bit cliched.

That being said there are some really amusing cultural indicators here. For instance, while the books were considered scandalous at the time, there are no four-letter words in the text (none are spelled out anyway). There's much breathless necking and so forth, but the sex is actually pretty tame. In the first book, Hammer actually won't have sex with the girl he's romantically involved with because they aren't married yet. The slang is so dated that at times it's unintentionally funny: Hammer and his best friend Captain Pat Chambers call one another kid repeatedly, for instance. Hammer walks around telling everyone that he's going to kill the murderer in a fashion that no one would condone today, and no writer would try to slip past an editor.

I really enjoyed these books, and I would recommend them to anyone interested in detective novels, and noir fiction. They are definitely anachronisms, but they're fun, nonetheless.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "It Was Easy." (No, it only looks that way), March 24, 2008

By 

Robert McDowell "Robert McDowell" (Ashland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mike Hammer Collection Volume 1 (Mass Market Paperback)

Back in the day when I was teaching university literature courses, I would annually shock some English department colleagues by suggesting to students that Raymond Chandler was a better writer than F. Scott Fitzgerald. I smile to think of their reactions today if I were teaching a course in American literature, in which I would spend serious time reading and discussing Mickey Spillane and his unforgettable character, Mike Hammer.

Spillane was never a trickster or sensationalist. He was a hard worker and a born storyteller who knew more about pacing and dialogue than most writers will ever know. He got readers to pay attention and turn the page, and he left the always wanting more. Even today, I dream of another new Hammer novel or two turning up somewhere in the dusty bottom drawer of a roll-top desk.

But even if they don't, I'll revisit Spillane/Hammer every few years, probably for the rest of my life. So many books are made for one reading, and that's it. Not these. Spillane succeeded in creating an iconic American character, a deeply flawed rebel with an unbreakable will and unwavering sense of what is right and good in life. The author and his main character were always true to themselves, and we're the beneficiaries of that truth.

Staying with these two is not tough to do; it's easy!

--Robert McDowell, The Poetry Mentor (www.robertmcdowell.net), author of POETRY AS SPIRITUAL PRACTICE, July 15th, 2008, from Free Press.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Pioneer, November 30, 2001

By 

Rory Coker (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mike Hammer Collection Volume 1 (Mass Market Paperback)

Would you believe that, although I am past the age of 60, I had never gotten around to reading Mickey Spillane until this attractive collection caught my eye? The Mickster honed his craft writing scripts for Fawcett Comics, and Mike Hammer's first incarnation was as a comic character, Mike Danger, but the first Hammer novel is still quite crude. In I, THE JURY Hammer spends way too much print telling everyone how he is going to gun down the perp who offed his old Army buddy, and do it point blank and in cold blood, and that he can get away with it because he has a license to carry a pistol (?!?). There are also subtly wrong word choices that often reminded me of Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s somewhat similar hard-boiled crime novels. And the identity of the killer is obvious long before the famous ending in which Hammer does shoot the unarmed perp point blank in the gut, because there is only one person situated so as to carry out all the crimes Hammer brings home to the villain.

MY GUN IS QUICK is a far better novel in all respects, better written, better plotted, but still has the defect that the identity of the criminal mastermind Hammer seeks is obvious almost from the first, since again only one character in the book could possibly be the guilty party. It also has Hammer, despite the title, badly outdrawn by the bad guy and blasted down.

Spillane hits his stride in VENGEANCE IS MINE. There's a complex plot, started with a murder committed under the very nose of the passed-out-drunk Hammer, and ending with Hammer gunning down the killer in a sequence that is literally twisted on its side compared to the similar sequence in I, THE JURY. The action is integrated by occurring almost entirely during a heavy New York City snowstorm, and the identity of the killer is effectively disguised by having the obvious and apparently only suspect not turning out to be the guilty party. In fact, in a touch we are told Spillane was very proud of, the actual identity of the brutal killer, who should be easy to spot because he is so physically powerful that he can break necks almost instantly with nothing but his bare hands, is concealed from the reader not only until the last line, but literally until the last WORD of the last line! And, no, this word is not a character name!

Probably what made the Spillane novels best sellers in their day is that Hammer is continually meeting impossibly beautiful, impossibly desirable women who want to jump into bed with him (and usually do!) almost the instant they set eyes on him. What is not noticed as often is that Hammer operates with authentic 1950s morality--- if he plans to marry a girl, he doesn't lay a finger on her. In the first novel, Hammer and his "serious" girl friend pretty much have to go sit on mounds of ice to avoid losing control and "doing it" before marriage, an unthinkable happening even to the hard-bitten Hammer!

Coming to this late, as I did, I notice how many touches that have become routine in hardboiled detective fiction must have originated with Hammer. The similarities between Hammer and Andrew Vachss's justifiably paranoid private eye Burke are particularly striking, down to the battered car that conceals a gigantic, superpowerful engine and the gunning-down of unarmed bad guys when the opportunity permits.

As the introduction by Max Allen Collins notes, Spillane has garnered little literary respect or attention over the years. Like most true creators, his real legacy lies in the fact that he redefined a whole genre, and that all private eye novels to follow had to come to terms with his creation.