The Mike Hammer Omnibus

View books by Mickey Spillane.

Mickey Spillane: the Master of Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction - Rated
I recently discovered this collection of three Mike Hammer novels and was absolutely blown away. These are still as fresh as they would have been a couple of decades ago - the violence still had the power to make me wince and I was engrossed in the plots until the final, final twist.

Mike Hammer is also everything you expect and demand of a gumshoe private eye; ready to take some risks that the average cop shies away from and with quite an eye for the broads. Spillane still has a lot to teach crime writers of today. Now I'm off to get volume 2...

I, Witness - Rated
Here's food for thought: Mickey Spillane, known for the high sex and violence content of his stories, is a long-time Jehovah's Witness. He grew up in a tough neighbourhood and, if he had come knocking on my door trying to convert me, I would have been careful how I argued with him. In truth, what seemed shocking at the time seems almost puritanical today. His hero, Mike Hammer, continually declines offers of sex from beautiful women on the grounds that it would be morally wrong. His is an Old Testament, vengeful, eye-for-an-eye morality, doling out death as the wages of sin. Even the title of one of these stories, "Vengeance is Mine", has a biblical ring to it.

Hammer was based on a comic book character Spillane had created, and the stories have the simplicity, directness and lack of literary pretension that one would expect from such a pedigree. Spillane found a marketable formula and stuck with it and all three of these stories are similar in many ways. The post-war reading public wanted a hero who righted wrongs simply and neatly, with fist and gun and no due process. Notice that all three titles have a first-person pronoun in them. Spillane invites you to become your fantasy macho hero for a while.

Racier stories and more skilful plotting are now available from other authors, but Spillane is still worth a look, if only to see how the genre evolved after Chandler and Hammett. One reason his work has survived (although he is not very widely read now) is the success of the excellent film noir adaptation of "Kiss Me Deadly", the star of which, Ralph Meeker, was a very fine actor. Watch that movie, read at least one story from this collection, then move on to better things.