In keeping with my interest in mystery fiction, I decided to take a step back into yesteryear and read a few Mike Hammer novels (Mickey Spillane). I forgot that I had the printed version on my bookshelf, so I bought an anthology off of Amazon that contains the first three books: I, the Jury (1947), My Gun is Quick (1950), and Vengeance is Mine (1950). Since all three books combined are about the size of a single Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling) book, I figured I’d just read all three and then write this review.
First things’s first: the Kindle version of this is littered with typos that aren’t there in the printed version. So if you decide to read these, keep that in mind.
Second: you probably don’t want to read these if you’re at all wedded to modern sensibilities. This is male fantasy, tough guy fiction that, besides being wildly unrealistic, is also sexist and (at least in the first book) overtly racist. I think it’s always a mistake to read fiction from yesteryear and apply modern morality to it, although I do find it interesting to understand the lens of the culture through which fiction is written. But if you have thin skin and are easily angered by politically incorrect anything, then skip this. But if you’re interested in foundational mystery story telling that echos through our modern version of the genre, then read on.
Mike Hammer is a tough guy. His back story is that of a WII Pacific War vet who returns home and becomes a private investigator. He has a P.I. license from the city of New York, and a license to carry a gun from the same. He’s large, loud, mean, ugly, and deadly. And yet all the gorgeous women throw themselves at him, and despite his habit of openly announcing to anyone who listens that he’s going to straight-up murder some sonofabitch, he retains both his license to carry and his P.I. license (although in the third book those get pulled — I assume he gets them back in the fourth book). The fact that he actually straight-up kills people — although he’s at least somewhat careful to make it look like self defense — and he still keeps his licenses just makes me shake my head.
If you don’t understand this already, you have to know that New York state has some of the most restrictive gun control in the United States. For New York, it all started in 1911 with the Sullivan Act, so don’t think that just because these books were written in 1949/1950 that access to guns in NYC was easier back. That said, New York gun licenses were selectively enforced and prone to corruption at least as late as the middle 1950’s. (Actually, they still are prone to corruption everywhere in the United States where the state seeks to limit the public’s access to them.) My dad used to tell a story about a New York cop offering to get him a license to carry for $50. So maybe a character like Mike Hammer could have a license to carry in NYC in the 1950s. But the second he started making a habit of killing people? Naw.
I could go on. I could argue at length about all the ways this shit just couldn’t happen. I had to force myself to suspend my disbelief. I mean, for fuck’s sake, beautiful women just don’t throw themselves routinely at ugly men in the way that Hammer is constantly being propositioned. He’s also a male slut. On one page he can be professing his undying love to a stunningly beautiful woman, and fifty pages later be having sex with yet another stunningly beautiful woman. And the women know it. And they still want him. It happens all the time in these books. I had to tell myself to shut up and just go with it pretty often in these pages.
And don’t get me started on the physical damage he takes at places in these books and he sort of just … shakes it off with a couple of cigarettes, a few beers, and a good night’s sleep. Seriously.
Like all fiction, Mike Hammer almost certainly comes from a previous version of the genre. I can’t say for certain what came before him (although I’m going to take a peek at Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams in the near future, along with some Agatha Christie). But I really do wonder if his predecessors were this overblown.
The thing about Hammer is that he’s overtly violent and, I believe, the explicit sex scenes were quite the shocker back in the day. But what I see echoing down through to modern era fiction, especially to Rowling’s Cormoran Strike, is an ugly, tough, military vet turned private investigator, who inexplicably seems attractive to at least some women, and who has a highly capable assistant/secretary who is as beautiful as she is curvy, and who is way smarter than the cops. The plot of these stories also don’t stray too far from one another. The one who dun it in My Gun is Quick is eerily similar to the one who dun it in The Cuckoo’s Calling. Not identical, mind you. But the theme is the same. And the twists and turns in the story telling all feel the same, although Spillane is a fairly obvious writer while Rowling (as Galbraith) is not. I also find it interesting that both Hammer and Strike have a habit of baiting the bad guy into attacking them so they have the excuse of self defense. Culturally there are differences — the British are disarmed by their government and so there’s no gun play, at least in the first two Cormoran Strike books — but nevertheless they’re both playing the same game on a meta level.
As for curvy assistants, the similarities between Hammer’s Velda and Strike’s Robin are certainly there. They’re both beautiful women, both smart as hell, and both much more capable than the author lets on in the early going. What’s different is that Velda was written in a sexist era where the mainstream culture expected women to stay home and be anything but capable outside the kitchen. Tellingly, Velda has no backstory — not even a last name. We don’t find out that she has a P.I. license and a license to carry a gun until the third book in the series. Strike’s Robin, conversely, very much has a backstory and it’s pretty clear that she’s much more capable than initial impression right from the very beginning of the first book. This shouldn’t be surprising. Rowling is very much pro-woman — although people online seem to argue about whether she’s actually a feminist. In any case, I hardly expect her to create a central female character and then leave her as a one-dimensional cardboard cut out in the way that Spillane treats Velda.
Velda’s and Robin’s relationship to the male lead is also different but also similar in key ways. Velda is in love with Hammer, jealous of him, and willing to marry him at a moment’s notice. Robin states that the idea of being with Strike is repulsive, and I believe her. There is zero sexual tension there, at least, not from her end. But yet, both women are very much dependent on their bosses for their entry into, and participation in, the private investigator game. We see very little character growth from Velda (not in the first three books, anyway), so I don’t know how she came to have her licenses. As for Robin, we very much see that part of her character arc, and its obvious that she’s going to come into her own through tutelage from Strike as the series goes on. But we also see Velda receiving investigation advice (which she ignores at critical times) from Hammer. In the end, there’s an overlay here, but not a perfect one. Echos of ghosts, I think. Enough to remind one of the other.
I would very much love to know if Rowling read any Spillane as she was creating the Cormoran Strike character. I can’t find online any reference to her being directly influenced by Spillane, not that my research was particularly rigorous or lengthy. I will say that probably she is the recipient of downstream, indirect, cultural influences. I say probably because I expect Rowling to be very widely read, and so it wouldn’t surprise me if she sampled the mystery genre going back quite a ways. Still, I have to grin at the thought of her reading a Mike Hammer book and not throwing the damn thing through the window. Yes, the sexism is really that bad.
Should you read the Mike Hammer books? I’d say, give it a pass unless you’re interested in doing this kind of genre compare and contrast. They are an interesting view into another culture, one where women were subservient to men but yet managed to make their wily ways through a man’s world anyway; one where everyone chains smokes; one where men wore suits every damn day and women wore dresses; one where the strict morality of an earlier era is still hanging in there but slipping away day by day, eroded by an increasingly overt sexuality that is a precursor to the sexual revolution that would arrive twenty years later. But ultimately this is a fantasy world, and not one worthy of nostalgia either. It was not a better world. These were not the good old days. Nor do I believe it is a world worth remembering for most people, except those with at least an itch to look backwards and see where we came from. The writing is also not A-quality. This is pulp fiction that grew out of a failed comic book idea. There are far better examples of the genre out there. You can probably give this a pass — unless, as I said, you have some kind of an itch to look backwards.
That said, if you decide to read this anthology, get the printed book. The typos in the digital version are straight-up irritating.
C’ya!
