The Mike Hammer Collection Volume 1 (Paperback)

by Mickey Spillane (Author), Max Allan Collins (Introduction) "I shook the rain from my hat and walked into the room..." (more)
Key Phrases: ten other guys, private cop, Vengeance Is Mine, Feeney Last, George Kalecki (more...)

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.

Review
Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer is the eponymous American private eye. Tough, uncompromising and gritty, he is famous all over the world and has been immortalized on screen by Stacey Keach and Mickey Spillane himself, amongst others. Surprisingly, considering how universally Hammer is recognized, there are only 13 books featuring the detective to date, though as Spillane is still writing there is always the chance of more. In this, the first volume of Mike Hammer stories, we meet Hammer as he started out on his literary career in I, The Jury, first published in 1947. The collection also includes the next two Hammer stories: My Gun is Quick (1950) and Vengeance is Mine! (1950). For those coming to Spillane for the first time, this is the perfect place to start. To read a Hammer thriller is to make a journey into a seedy world; you expect Humphrey Bogart to glance at you sideways from beneath his trilby at every turn. Spillane paints a world in which it always seems to be dark, smoky, sultry and raining. The sex, the violence, the plot twists and surprise endings may be stock-in-trade devices of modern murder mystery, but they were groundbreaking at the time and still seem very well executed today. The first novel, I, The Jury, rocked its audience and critics, sold millions, and continues to sell. The pace is fast, the sentences short. The action is hot, the women (and yes, they are 'broads') hotter and always deadly. Considering this was the first novel, the characters, particularly the central figures of Hammer and Velda, are well formed. My Gun Is Quick showed that Spillane was no one-hit wonder, and by the time you have reached the end of Vengeance Is Mine! you will be well and truly hooked. A perfect introduction to some classics of noir. (Kirkus UK) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: NAL Trade (June 12, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451203526
• ISBN-13: 978-0451203526
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #63,696 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #3 in	Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Authors, A-Z > ( C ) > Collins, Max Allan
  #3 in	Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Authors, A-Z > ( S ) > Spillane, Mickey

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	David W. Nicholas (Montrose, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

14 of 16 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 (REAL NAME)

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Babes, Blackmail and Murder, March 9, 2003

By	Dr. Freeman (Perry, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews

Very good treatment of what i would describe as the ultimate in hardboiled fiction. The first three novels of Spillane's anti hero keep one reading late into the night. Each novel better than the last. Nice package.