Saga, and Manhunt.
He stayed in contact with his book publishers, however, and may have been angling for an improved contract before getting back to work. He was notoriously casual about the business end of things, despite his workingman’s pride in his craft, and made a number of bad decisions toward the start of his run of success that he spent much of his life trying to correct. He may have been on a kind of informal strike with Dutton and Signet.
Whatever the case, his return in 1960 with the non-Hammer novel The Deep earned him mixed reviews (actually a big step up) and the expected blockbuster sales, particularly in paperback. But readers and reviewers alike were asking the same question: Where is Mike Hammer?
This collection answers that question, beginning with the novel that signaled the end of the long wait between Hammer books—The Girl Hunters (1961). Few Hammer fans would rate any of the later novels above the initial very famous six (I, The Jury; My Gun Is Quick; Vengeance is Mine!; One Lonely Night; The Big Kill; Kiss Me, Deadly). Most, however, would place The Girl Hunters next on that esteemed list.
Spillane is seldom credited with the innovative brand of continuity he developed in the Hammer series. Most mystery series have interchangeable parts—only the first and last of Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels have any real sense of continuity; Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe remain ageless as Rex Stout indicates the changing times around them; and—once Erle Stanley Gardner got his cast and format in place—Perry Mason, Della Street, and Paul Drake span four decades or more behaving exactly the same.
Spillane, however, explored the impact of events on his character, so that the shocking conclusion of I, the Jury haunts the detective, with his guilt coming to a head in the fourth Hammer book, the surreal nightmare One Lonely Night. Even in 1961’s The Girl Hunters , Hammer cops to feeling guilty over the “easy” decision he made on the last page of his 1947 debut novel.
The Girl Hunters answers the question of Hammer’s disappearance, literally—the detective, guilt-ridden for causing the seeming death of his partner-secretary, Velda, has been on a seven-year drunk, as evidenced by the famous first line: “They found me in the gutter.” Further, Spillane reveals that Hammer’s best friend, Captain Pat Chambers of homicide, is now his worst enemy, as Chambers too is revealed to have been in love with Velda. When word comes that Velda may be alive, Hammer the alcoholic goes cold turkey (well, beers don’t count, apparently) and soon is back on the mean streets.
But Spillane has a great time exploring his hero’s new frailties. This Hammer is weak and uncertain after having been out of the game for a long time, and must now coast on his old reputation—and Spillane seems almost puckishly aware of the parallel between himself and Hammer. Whether his religious conversion or the sex-and- sadism critical blasts were factors, it’s hard to say, but Spillane’s technique has changed—he is more sparing with the sex and violence, although both are present, used, as the writer liked to say, “as exclamation points.” The Girl Hunters signals a Hammer less likely to fire away with his .45 at the drop of a fedora, and shows a move to surprise endings that will often have Hammer tricking the bad guys into killing themselves so he doesn’t have to bear the direct guilt.
The body count is high, but Hammer himself isn’t responsible, although the vicious climatic fight with the Russian agent called The Dragon concludes with one of the most casually brutal acts Hammer ever perpetrated. With surprising ease, Spillane moves his fifties detective into the sixties, espionage substituting for the Mob and other more conventional villains. Hammer had fought “Commies” before (in One Lonely Night), but here he’s entered the world of his British offspring, James Bond. There’s a showbiz element connected to Spillane’s own celebrity, including the use of real-life columnist Hy Gardner, a rival and contemporary of Walter Winchell and Earl Wilson.
Spillane is at his best in The Girl Hunters, his storytelling fast-moving, consistently entertaining, and with crisp, tough dialogue and action that shocks when it comes, plus mood-setting descriptions that show off his gift for noir poetry. Spillane employs a surprising narrative technique, the absence of Velda from the story—she is the girl being hunted, but she does not appear.
Spillane saves her reappearance for The Snake, the eighth Mike Hammer and a direct sequel to The Girl Hunters. Readers should understand, however, that The Girl Hunters and The Snake were never intended to be one book, one continuous story, and are advised to keep in mind that three years separated the publication of the two. Those fresh from spending time with a drunk Mike Hammer who was struggling to get back to his old self will need a grain of salt, at least, to accept Hammer in The Snake—which begins perhaps an hour after The Girl Hunters ends. Improbably, Hammer is not only his old self again, but is accepted around Manhattan by his cronies as if he’d been away for seven weeks, not seven years.
Still, The Snake is a first-rate tough mystery, with Spillane abandoning espionage for more traditional Mob concerns. Hammer and Velda are instantly the team of old as they help a damsel in distress and wade into the murky waters of big-time politics. In some respects, this is as close to a “standard” Mike Hammer mystery as you’re likely to find. Had Spillane—like Stout, Christie, Gardner, and so many others—chosen to write dozens of Hammer novels rather than just a dozen (well, a baker’s dozen), The Snake might have been the template. Moving around Manhattan with ease, Hammer works his contacts among journalists and reestablishes a working relationship, if not quite his friendship, with Pat Chambers. Even Spillane’s old enemy Anthony Boucher praised the novel’s craft, calling it “certainly Mike Hammer’s best case.”
The ending is (as they used to say) a corker, although the ambiguous nature of what happens next—i.e., do Velda and Mike consummate their love?—remains unresolved, at least as far as Spillane was concerned. This piece of continuity bedeviled Spillane, who, post-Snake, went back and forth on whether Hammer and Velda were intimate.
Clearly Spillane intended to write another batch of books about Mike Hammer, but several things interfered. He was sidetracked for a while working as screenwriter and star of the British-American production The Girl Hunters (1963). Last-minute funding problems caused the film to be shot in black-and-white, making it look shabby next to the early Bond films with which it was in direct competition (sharing Bond girl Shirley Eaton, who costarred in The Girl Hunters and had the small but memorable golden-girl role in Goldfinger).
Spillane received raves for his portrayal of his hero, a remarkable accomplishment—after all, it’s not as though Edgar Rice Burroughs could have pulled off Tarzan onscreen, although Agatha Christie would have made a pretty fair Marple. The high concept of mystery writer playing his own detective attracted lots of media, in particular a witty Esquire magazine piece by Terry Southern. But Bond’s emergence, and frankly dominance, screwed things up for Spillane—Ian Fleming, the Brit used by Signet to fill in for Spillane during “the long wait,” was now on top of publishing and movies.
The Snake had been intended to be the basis for the second Spillane-as-Hammer film, and the Lolita-ish Sue was written as a role for his then wife, Broadway starlet Sherri Malinou. But The Girl Hunters didn’t do well enough to justify a second film, and discouraged Spillane from focusing on his most famous character. Instead, he developed the Hammer clone Tiger Mann, a hard-boiled secret agent whose four adventures sold in the millions but did not generate TV shows or films despite the surrounding spy craze.
A brief aside—The Girl Hunters title was derived from the “Girl Hunt” ballet in the classic 1953 Fred Astaire film The Band Wagon, which overtly and beautifully spoofed Spillane and Mike Hammer. This gave the mystery writer great satisfaction, because Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies were Mickey Spillane’s cinema of choice.
Spillane wound up publishing only four Hammer novels in the sixties, although he began a number that were set aside for various reasons; over the remainder of his career, he began and set aside even more Hammer novels that he never published. After The Snake, Spillane developed a Hammer story that pitted his hero against the drug racket in a context of the swinging sixties. But he found himself up against a deadline to Dutton and Signet for a new Hammer novel, and rather than finish what would eventually become The Big Bang (published in 2010 as “the lost Mike Hammer sixties novel”), he pulled down a certain old,
