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Mike Hammer

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Mickey Spillane
(1918-2006)

“The monicker is Mike Hammer, kid. I’m a private eye.”
— please allow him to introduce himself (I, the Jury)

ONE TAKE

If you want something done right, do it yourself. Mickey Spillane as Mike Hammer in The Girl Hunters (1963).

Whatever else you may think about MIKE HAMMER, one word may well be appropriate: extreme. The Hammer books are not only extreme in their subject matter, but they also have a tendency to provoke an extreme reaction. The first – and best known – in the series, I, The Jury (1947), quite literally takes no prisoners. Written in six days (or nine, or nineteen) it is a fever dream pulp classic. Avenging a friend’s death, Hammer makes his mark following a code of violence which allows nothing to stand in his way. The bloody ending leaves no room for anything much, let alone subtlety. Extreme indeed but there is no questioning the impact of the book or the fact that, in picking up where Race Williams left off, Hammer was in the classic P.I. mold.

The reaction from Mickey Spillane‘s peers was equally extreme. Few writers have been as disliked as much (and as quickly) as Spillane. Anthony Boucher maintained that I, The Jury should be “required reading in a Gestapo training school.” The books, however, sold in their millions (by the early 80’s Spillane had sold nearly 150 million). But the genre continued to shun him. Although Hammer received a ‘life long achievement’ award from the Private Eye Writers of America, no similar honour was forthcoming from the Mystery Writers of America. Hated by the “liberal” writing establishment — for some reason — Hammer very probably represented a rampant right wing and reactionary politics. This is entirely in keeping with his historical context — the expansionist and paranoiac 50’s America — an age when America lost what little innocence it could pretend to have.

Call him sexist, perverse or psychotic, Mike Hammer wouldn’t have even understood what you were talking about — and would definitely not have liked it even if he did. Its interesting to note, for example, that the vogue for extreme violence — take any film from Dirty Harry to Natural Born Killers — is given huge support in opposing its censorship by the very people who would also condemn Hammer.

Hammer certainly took no prisoners. Within the first five books forty-eight people die violently — thirty-four of whom had Hammer to thank for their untimely demise. The books are littered with an almost casually extreme violence: a cigarette lighter flicked into an eye, clothes stripped of a woman who is a communist and who is then whipped. Whatever you thought about Hammer, he was not one to walk away from the fight. One Lonely Night (1951), for example, sees Hammer take on a liberal judge who condemns his actions. Critics? Who needs them?

Whatever else you say or think, it’s hard to ignore Mike Hammer.

Extremely hard.

Respectfully submitted by Peter Walker.

ANOTHER TAKE

Forget about comparisons to Chandler or Hammett. MIKE HAMMER‘s roots go directly to Race Williams, Carroll John Daly’s seminal eye-for-an-eye shoot-first private detective. If, as has often been repeated, Nero Wolfe is the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler, then Hammer is the bastard son of Race and his nemisis, The Flame (aka “The Girl With The Criminal Mind”) as suggested by Tony Sparafucile in the 1978 preface to a Race Williams reprint. Not for Hammer the frayed romanticism of Philip Marlowe, or the cold, amoral, passionless vengeance of Sam Spade. Nope, the fuel that stokes Hammer’s bloody fury is vengeance, and lots of it. The bloodier the better.

Clad in a trenchcoat, with his hat jammed down low on his forehead, his trusty .45 strapped on and loaded for bear, with his beloved secretary, Velda, holding the fort back at the office, Mike goes down the mean (and very viscious) streets of New York, shooting a few here, kicking a few groins there, the blood lust flowing in his veins as he makes the world safe for his particular brand of justice.

And, of course, all his victims had it coming.

Hammer’s “fever dream melodramas,” as Max Allan Collins calls them, must have struck a nerve with the public. His books were instant bestsellers. Indeed, Spillane has to be considered one of the bestselling mystery authors of all time, with over 160 million (and by some accounts, over 200 million) books sold.

Which means it didn’t take Hollywood long to take notice. In 1953, at the height of Hammer-mania, Hammer made it to the big screen in the Harry Essex-directed I, the Jury. Biff Elliot (who?) starred as Hammer, and managed to capture at least some of the brooding brutality of the character. It was originally offered in 3-D, no less, and while nobody will ever mistake it for John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, it got the job done.

The same year — it was a big one for Spillane and Hammer — That Hammer Guy made its radio debut. On air, Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled detective obviously couldn’t engage in the violence and sexual escapades that excited the millions of readers of the paperback novels. In fact, Spillane didn’t even write the radio scripts; Ed Adamson did, but Ed managed to convey the gritty realism of Hammer’s world, within the confines of network radio. The series debuted on January 6, 1953 but only ran until October 5, 1953. It was an excellent show of its type but since it arrived after television, it failed like many other fine radio shows.

Larry Haines’ voice fit Hammer like a pair of brass knucks, having previously been the tough guy lead on Treasury Agent and Manhunt. When he spotted “a sexy dame wrapped around a bar stool” or threatened a punk with “I’ll wrap your head around this bed post”, the listeners believed this guy was for real. Hammer’s daily arena of crummy dives, back alleys, and bourbon soaked flop-houses was the stuff of this radio series. At least once in most episodes, “smoke swirled up from the nose of a gun.” Jan Miner provided the voice of most of the hip-swinging broads Hammer encountered. Richard Lewis was the director; he had also directed radio versions of The Falcon and Murder and Mr. Malone. Even the sponsors for this Mutual Network series seemed to fit: Esquire Magazine (“…this month’s issue has a revealing sexual expose: Call Girls and Fall Guys…”), Camel Cigarettes (every character smoked on this show) and Kix cereal (“Food For Action!”).

1953 also saw the appearance of a Mike Hammer comic strip, From the Files of…Mike Hammer, scripted by Spillane himself. Sorta appropriate, since originally, Hammer was intended to be a comic book eye (under the name Mike Danger) until the bottom fell out of the post-war comic market. The strip appeared in dailys, and a self-contained Sunday continuity, and Spillane claims to have written most of the strip himself. Alas, this was the 1950’s, and what the public eagerly snapped up in paperbacks wasn’t looked on with much favor on the comics page. The strip was cancelled, in a censorship battle, over excessive violence, but Spillane fans like Max Allan Collins have had some prtetty nice things to say about it.

In 1954, there was a first attempt to bring Hammer to television. The 1954 pilot starred Brian Keith as Hammer, and was written and directed by Blake Edwards. By most accounts, it was pretty good, but nobody bought it. But a few years later, in 1958, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, starring Darrin McGavin, made its debut. The syndicated series ran for two years, and while McGavin was nobody’s idea of Mike Hammer, his arched eyebrow approach to the scripts made the at times casually extreme violence of the show all the more effective.

Meanwhile, Hammer continued to appear in films that never quite nailed the character Spillane had envisioned. 1955 saw Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, now acknowledged as a noir classic, but the California hipster Hammer (as played by Ralph Meeker) missed the mark by a mile, while the sudden mood swings in Robert Bray’s woodenly performance as Hammer in 1957’s My Gun is Quick (also set in California) practically shot out splinters.

Finally, in 1963,  after three films — and three less than satisfying Hammers — Spillane decided to show everyone how Hammer should be played, casting himself as Hammer in The Girl Hunters (1963). The film has its defenders, but they’re few and far between. The fact is, earnestness and enthusiasm can carry you only so far.

But by the mid-sixties, Spillane was slowly falling out of favor — and certainly even further out of critical favor. He still managed to sell an astounding number of books, of course, but Hammer’s essential conservatism and taste for violence seemed out of place in the increasingly swinging sixties or the “Have a nice day” seventies.

Then, in the more conservative eighties, with Reagan in the White House, Hammer came riding back, introduced to a whole new generation of fans when Warner Brothers released a new film version of I, The Jury, starring a smouldering, slightly psychotic Armand Assante as Hammer.

More significantly, however, CBS started airing Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, featuring Stacy Keach as Hammer. Unfortunately, for many fans, Keach’s Hammer was all wrong. The cheesy mustache, the anachronistic fedora and the glib attitude made it all seem like some rather smug period piece. In the books, Hammer didn’t wink.

Some decent scripts, by people like Joe Gores, and a lack of any real competition in the genre, though, were enough to keep the show going through various permutations for a few years. In fact, there was even a hiatus of sorts, when Keach was invited to stay at the crossbar hotel in the U.K. for a bit, due to the posession of a controlled substance or two. Even more interesting, impressionist Rich Little was called in to do Keach’s voice-overs of a few shows left in the can.

A few of the shows were even nominated for Edgars. The eighties also saw the publication of One Lonely Knight, Max Allan Collins and James L. Traylor spirited critical defense of Spillane’s much-maligned work. All the attention was enough to prompt Spillane to finally — after a nineteen year hiatus — pen a new Mike Hammer novel, The Killing Man (1989).

In 1993, John Lau was hired to script a made-for-television flick featuring Keach as an older Hammer, trying to adjust to life in retirement. But in their infinite wisdom, CBS decided to create an all new, younger Mike Hammer and stick him in the then hot location of the moment — Miami. “The anti-violence on TV movement was huge back then as it was an election year, and I was ‘advised’ to tone things down,” Lau relates, “so I made it funny and titled it Deader Than Ever.” It eventually aired as Come Die With Me, but it tanked in the ratings while Lau was writing the follow up.

But all the attention prompted Spillance to write another Hammer novel. Black Alley, popped up in 1996, just in time to coincide with a new syndicated television series that Jay Bernstein had managed to sell, with Keach returning as Hammer. The general consensus on Rara-Avis was that the series looked okay and the music was good; even the totally unnecessary new sidekick wasn’t too bad, but the scripts weren’t as strong as they could be.

But anyone looking for a return of the show’s glory days (or any resemblance to Spillane’s Hammer) were out of luck.

Far better were Collins’ continuation of the series. As the duly appointed successor and executor of Spillane’s literary estate after his death in 2006, Collins was left with everything from almost complete novels to rough notes and scribbles that Mickey left behind.

Starting with The Goliath Bone (2008) and winding up fifteen novels (and a few short stories later) with Baby, It’s Murder in 2025, Collins gave one of the most influential characters in crime fiction (and American literature) one of the longest and unexpectedly respectful (and unapologetic) encore performances in the Shamus Games’ history.

As Kirkus Reviews said of Baby, It’s You, “Don’t worry about being overwhelmed by sentimentality: The legendary shamus still kills and maims with the best of them.”

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks to Max Allan Collins and Lynn Myers for their help.

TRIVIA

UNDER OATH

THE EVIDENCE

NOVELS

 

SHORT STORIES

COLLECTIONS

RADIO

COMIC STRIPS

COMIC STRIP COLLECTIONS

COMICS

FILMS

TELEVISION

PLAYS

REFERENCE

ALSO OF INTEREST

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Thanks to Peter Walker (original profile), Jim French (radio info), Max Allan Collins, Christopher Mills, William James Slater, SRey44@aol.com and Lynn Myers for their much-appreciated help with this page.

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