| Vintage Pulp | Jun 8 2013 |
Mike Hammer lets his inner predator come out.
Mickey Spillane's iconic private dick Mike Hammer is a lethal weapon and he wants everyone to know it. He constantly tells others and the reader how tough he is, how willing he is to kill, how afraid others are of him, and why they're right to be afraid. At some point that changed in crime novels and these days the toughest characters almost never boast about their abilities, or it's done in a leftfield way, such as in Lee Child's novels, in which Jack Reacher sometimes explains clinically how he's going to get the better of somebody. But Hammer just comes out with it: “I'm mean, I'm tough, I'm better than you, I have a code you can't possibly understand, and I'm going to kill you and everyone who tries to help you.”
This is never more true than in 1952's Kiss Me, Deadly, which revolves around Hammer accidentally becoming the patsy in a murder plot and seeking revenge, not only for the murdered woman (who's Swedish and has the awesome name Berga Torn), but also because anyone who would dare try to put him on the spot, and anyone who would wreck his custom built car, simply deserves to die. Spillane is great. This is still genre fiction, so it's never perfect, but the writing is visceral and the tightness of the plotting is unbeatable. When Hammer gets violent it's serious business. He rips a guys eyes out. He rips another guy's jaw loose. The man is a hammer alright, only his first name should be Jack.
Film buffs should note that Kiss Me, Deadly diverges significantly from the 1955 film version. There's no suitcase of— Well, if you haven't seen the movie we won't tell you what there's no suitcase of, but those who've seen it will know what we were going to say. Here the MacGuffin is drugs with a street value of two million dollars. Kiss Me, Deadly is fast, clever, unexpected, and quite a pleasure to read. It's basically preposterous, of course, the male antipode to the romance novel, with Hammer fulfilling male desires to be tough, unbeatable, irresistible, but still basically a good guy. We don't care if it's male wish fulfillment. It's a ton of fun.
Film buffs should note that Kiss Me, Deadly diverges significantly from the 1955 film version. There's no suitcase of— Well, if you haven't seen the movie we won't tell you what there's no suitcase of, but those who've seen it will know what we were going to say. Here the MacGuffin is drugs with a street value of two million dollars. Kiss Me, Deadly is fast, clever, unexpected, and quite a pleasure to read. It's basically preposterous, of course, the male antipode to the romance novel, with Hammer fulfilling male desires to be tough, unbeatable, irresistible, but still basically a good guy. We don't care if it's male wish fulfillment. It's a ton of fun.
