Baby Bye Bye Bye

It appeared that Bill Doolan’s death was a suicide. He was dying of cancer. He had just gotten word from his doctor that he could expect to live about three more months, and they would be filled with pain. And so, Doolan put his affairs in order: he even called a cemetery and bought a plot there. Then, while listening to music in the dark, he shot himself.

The medical examiner, the cops, the next of kin... everyone agreed this must be what happened. Everyone, that is except Mike Hammer, who has spent a year away in Florida, trying to keep a low profile after having gunned down Sal Bonetti, the sadistic son of a notorious gangster. Mike can’t shake the feeling that something is off, and so he begins a separate investigation into the death of his former mentor. Before long, the corpses begin piling up as Mike Hammer makes his grand return to the streets of New York, dispensing his particular brand of violent justice…

Hear Me Roar

Mike Hammer is really getting too old for this job. He ought to retire sometime soon. Just this morning, as he was on his way to his office, he narrowly escaped an assassin’s carefully-aimed bullet thanks to a conveniently placed dictionary. But while the Mike Hammer of I, The Jury or One Lonely Night would have jumped up, pumped the bad guy full of lead and declared war on the guy who ordered the hit, this Mike Hammer needs to take a few minutes to catch his breath and recover. Who tried to kill him and why? It wouldn’t have anything to do with that $89 billion dollars Mike is hiding, would it?

Meanwhile, Mike’s good cop friend, Captain Pat Chambers, is dealing with a spot of trouble of his own. One of his old cases has come back to haunt him – it was the case that made Pat Chambers a captain, but years and years later, it seems that the wrong man may have been arrested. As though that weren’t enough, cops around the city are dropping like flies. Some get killed in the line of duty, some are in the wrong place at the wrong time, at least one of them drops dead from apparently natural causes. But all the same, the statisticians don’t like it – the odds of this many cop fatalities in so short a time are astronomical. And before long, Mike Hammer begins to concur with the statisticians.

Mike the Giant Killer

Times are sure a-changing. And nowhere is that more obvious than in Mike Hammer’s New York. The city has not forgotten that fateful September 11^th of 2001. The Communists are of course gone. Organized crime is no longer the main threat. No, what people really fear is a repeat of those terror attacks. All it might take is a single spark to set the powder keg off. That spark might just come from an unlikely source, from a Biblical giant who’s been dead for thousands of years.

Everyone knows the story of David and Goliath, of course… and when two post-graduate students uncover a massive human thigh bone in the Valley of Elah, the circumstantial evidence seems to point towards Goliath as the bone’s original owner. A crisis ensues. Islamic terrorist groups begin to target the students and their loved ones, trying to get the bone of a fallen hero. The Mossad is also expressing its concerns – after all, for Jews around the world, the bone of Goliath would represent a victory over a seemingly-unconquerable opponent. And Mike Hammer is damn interested, because he just saved the kids from getting shot in a subway terminal by shooting the gun out of their assailant’s hand…

The Keep-Your-Mouth-Shut Files #1: Mickey Spillane

I’ve been blogging for more than two years now, and I like doing it. I use this blog to record my thoughts, feelings, and opinions on the mystery genre, and to steer readers in the direction of books they might enjoy. I try to read every book based on its own merits and to judge them all fairly. And I think I’ve done a decent job overall. That being said… I’m only human. I make mistakes. It took me a while to figure out just what a “proper” review was and how different criteria will apply to different subgenres. It took some time for me to accept that the modern crime fiction scene is far more interesting than I at first gave it credit for. And every once in a while, I went out and said something very… er, opinionated.

The funny thing about opinions is that they can change. And it can take you off guard. And boy, I’ve sure thrown around a lot of opinions here on this blog. Sometimes, I think back on what I wrote a year or two ago, and wonder just what on earth I was thinking at the time. And so I’d like to introduce a new feature on this blog, one which I hope will prove interesting: “The-Keep-Your-Mouth-Shut Files”. Although I might change the title if I think of something better, this is the part of the program where I revisit old blog posts and confirm everyone’s impression of me as an opinionated jackass who should just keep his mouth shut sometimes. And I can think of no better an inaugural subject than Mickey Spillane.

Too Tough To Die

It’s late at night, the rain is pouring down hard, and Mike Hammer is walking on a bridge. He’s feeling depressed, humiliated, and completely alone. Just that day, Hammer was berated in court by a judge, whose speech began calmly and turned into a vicious, hateful speech. The judge accused Hammer of being a violent, unrepentant psychopath who had gotten a taste of death during the war and who couldn’t get enough of it now. He condemned Hammer as evil incarnate, the worst kind of criminal scum, and he prophesied that a rain of purity would wash him into the sewer with the rest of the scum. Hammer left the court humiliated, his soul laid bare and dissected for all to see, feeling cut off from society and bitter about it.

That’s when he sees the girl. She’s running from something, terrified. She falls into Mike’s arms and begs for his help. That’s when a fat man comes out from the shadows, a gun in his pocket pointed at Hammer. The fat man grins and prepares to shoot them both down, but Hammer’s gun is quick: he shoots the fat man in the face with a .45. But the girl is terrified. She thinks Hammer is “one of them”, and in desperation, she throws herself off the bridge. Hammer is left stunned, with only the corpse of the fat man for company. And that’s how Mickey Spillane’s novel One Lonely Night kicks off.

The Return of Mike Hammer

By Gad, sir, you are a character.

- Casper Gutman, The Maltese Falcon

Regular readers of my blog know that when I read I, The Jury, the first Mike Hammer novel, my reaction was very negative. Well, that’s the nice way of putting it: truth be told, I was positively disgusted by the “hero” and the graphic violence. In fact, I chose it as one of my worst reading moments of 2011. But like him or not, Mike Hammer’s influence on the genre cannot be denied.

Indeed, the best defenses I’ve read of the character come from Max Allan Collins. In the collection Books to Die For, Collins wrote about Spillane’s I, The Jury. He drew some surprisingly astute comparisons between the book and an Agatha Christie plot – although no mention was made of the major plotholes, which were pointed out by Bill Pronzini in Gun in Cheek. But once again, I found myself impressed with Collins’ defense of the series, though it didn’t make me like Mike Hammer any more. Last week, when I reviewed Collins’ novel True Detective, I was honoured when Collins himself visit the blog and left a comment, where he asked me not to give up on Mike Hammer.

Gangsters and Gunsels and Gals (Oh My!)

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

—Maxwell Scott, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Max Allan Collins is something of a recurring figure on this blog. I’ve quoted an interesting article he wrote on “The Hard-Boiled Detective” in Encyclopedia Mysteriosa. I’ve read two of his Batman short stories. But I hadn’t yet read any of his novels. I finally took the first step in that direction a while ago, where ten of Collins’ Nate Heller books formed the Kindle Daily Deal – each priced at $1.99. I bought all ten of them. But then I figured to myself, why start in the middle of a series I know nothing about? Why not start where the series started? And so I bought True Detective, the first novel in the Nate Heller series.

The Kindle edition begins with a terrific introduction from the author. He talks about how he came up with the concept for this series and how this book came to be. He tells readers how he named his son, how his literary idol Mickey Spillane complimented him on this book, and how (due to its length and content) it was a challenging book to sell. He also expresses a genuine hope that readers will enjoy the book. I know for a fact that there’s at least one insane reader in Canada who loved every page of it.

All aboard the S. S. Van Dine!

I’m afraid that readers of this blog will begin to think that I’m simply stealing my reading list off of other blogs. Once again, today’s book was inspired by a previous review—and yet again, it was Bill from Traditional Mysteries who inspired it. The book is Murder in Pastiche by Marion Mainwaring, and after the enticing review Bill wrote in January, the book flew near the top of my to-be-read pile… and now that it’s April, I figured it was about time to give it a read. (Yeah, I’m not sure how to explain the physics behind that… Apparently, the last few months on this blog have been a massive game of Jenga with my to-be-read pile, and nobody was aware of it.)

But I digress. We find ourselves on board the R. M. S. Florabunda as it sails from Liverpool to New York. And, by an astonishing coincidence, nine prominent detectives have all come on board the same ship! These sleuths are parodies of some of the most famous detectives of all-time: M. Atlas Poireau (Hercule Poirot), Sir Jon. Nappleby (Sir John Appleby), Jerry Pason (Perry Mason), Broderick Tourneur (Roderick Alleyn), Trajan Beare (Nero Wolfe), Miss Fan Sliver (Miss Silver), Spike Bludgeon (Mike Hammer), Mallory King (Ellery Queen), and Lord Simon Quinsey (Lord Peter Wimsey). With any one of these detectives on board, a mystery is bound to explode— but with nine? That’s just tempting fate.

Predator

I hope you people have fun with your words. But I don't care if you call yourselves the Red Cross, you owe me forty-five thousand dollars and you'll pay me back whether you like it or not.

—Parker; The Hunter

I’m not entirely sure how to kick off this review. I tend to follow a formula: first introduce the plot; then talk about the book as a whole: setting, characters, the plot’s quality, etc.; and finally sum everything up in a paragraph containing the word “overall” somewhere. But today’s book, The Hunter by Richard Stark (really Donald E. Westlake in disguise) is very different from the kind of book that I usually review—it isn’t really a mystery in the proper sense of the word, unless you’re working in a bookstore. So how to begin? Well, in the blog’s time-honoured tradition, I’ll take the cleverly-lazy way out and let someone else do the talking for me. The following text has been unashamedly stolen from William L. DeAndrea’s Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (an invaluable reference tool for the mystery fan):

“One night in the early 1960s, car trouble forced author [Donald E.] Westlake to walk across the George Washington Bridge between New Jersey and New York on a winter evening. The wind and the cold and the cars zooming by made him feel very alone and very alienated. He began to wonder what sort of person would belong in that sort of environment.

The result was Parker, a professional thief shot and left for dead by his associates and his wife. When he is introduced, at the beginning of The Hunter (1962; British title Point Blank), he’s walking across the George Washington Bridge, planning his revenge.”

Elementary, my dear Colonel...

Is it a coincidence that at around the time I participated in a Sherlock Holmes-themed podcast, I suddenly was reviewing a lot of Sherlock-related material? Not entirely. If you’ve listened to the podcast (as I’m sure you have), you’ll know that I was very excited to mention Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles by Kim Newman. I claimed that it took the character of Colonel Sebastian Moran and Professor James Moriarty and made them into twisted reflections of Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes.

It’s all quite cleverly done. Similar to Watson and Holmes, Moran and Moriarty are introduced by a man named Stamford. They too share rooms and have a housekeeper named Mrs. Halifax (often referred to as Mrs. H) who keeps a brothel. Holmes has the Baker Street Irregulars? Moriarty matches him with the Conduit Street Comanche. And throughout the entire proceedings, author Kim Newman reimagines the familiar Holmesian universe through the eyes of Colonel Sebastian “Basher” Moran.

But these are not merely Holmes stories retold from the villains’ perspective. Rather, these are entirely original adventures that intertwine with the Holmes stories we all know and love. We see just how Moriarty manages to influence the cases Holmes was soon going to crack. And Holmes rarely appears onstage, but as the short story collection progresses, his presence becomes more pronounced, ultimately culminating in The Problem of the Final Adventure. In fact, all the short stories in this fine collection have titles that play around neatly with the titles of the original Holmes adventures.

We like to get the trial over with quickly, because it's the sentence that's really the fun!

It’s rare for me to be thoroughly disgusted by a novel. There have been plenty of unpleasant reading experiences, such as Anthony Wynne’s The Toll House Murder or Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. I have been alarmed a handful of times, such as with a disturbing central character in Peter Lovesey’s Mad Hatter’s Holiday. But until now, only George Baxt’s The Affair at Royalties had thoroughly disgusted me— I can now add Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury to the list.

Spillane was once the most vilified writer in America. His hero, Mike Hammer, is as politically incorrect as they come. He refuses to forgive the Japanese for the war, he plays games with his secretary, he sleeps with every woman he comes into contact with on the job, and he threatens or beats up half the suspects he interrogates. And that’s just the first few chapters.