Hammer, Mike

The hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer appears in twelve of the twenty-one works Mickey Spillane produced between 1947 and 1988, but his first appearance is his most notorious. At the climax of I, the Jury (1947), he shoots his naked fiancée in the abdomen when he discovers that she has brutally murdered his old army buddy and five others. This first novel established the fevered sexuality and Manichaean perspective of Hammer's world, one that both captured and created the emotional tenor of Cold War America.

Although his pursuit of vigilante justice never again scales such luridly sexual heights, Hammer continues to mete out extreme punishment to the guilty. Showing a preference for smashing faces, fingers, and kneecaps over reasoned contemplation, he solves cases by a literal process of elimination: The last to remain alive is the culprit. An untrammelled id who repeatedly explodes in messianic rage—against effete intellectuals and homosexuals, against legal niceties and social conventions that impede his quest for vengeance, against oppression of the “little guy” by such organizations as the Mafia and the Communist Party—he has been little changed by his forty years of violent activity. When Hammer reappears in The Girl Hunters (1962) after a decade's absence, he is a drunken wreck consumed with guilt for sending his secretary Velda to what he mistakenly believes to have been her death, but by the novel's end he has mended.

Spillane intended his sketchy physical descriptions of Hammer—as a large and emphatically unattractive man—to allow readers to imagine themselves in the hero's shoes. Indeed, Hammer is a fantasy of irresistible masculine potency. Women often rip their clothes open in his presence, proffering an invitation he accepts with gleeful sadism that, readers are assured, they find exciting. Despite the sexual banter between Hammer and the voluptuous Velda, however, she is meant to preserve her virginity until the day he consents to marry her. The pair finally consummate their love in The Snake (1964), but Velda does not get her wedding ring.

See also Hard-boiled Sleuth; Sex and Sexuality; Violence.

Bibliography and More Information about Hammer, Mike

• Christopher La Farge, Mickey Spillane and His Bloody Hammer, Saturday Review (6 Nov. 1954): 11–12, 54–59.
• J. Kenneth van Dover, Murder in the Millions: Erle Stanley Gardner, Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming (1984).

—Jesse Berrett