Read Series: Mike Hammer
by Author Mickey Spillane
My Gun Is Quick (2015)
Is Mickey Spillane still worth reading, and if so, why?I found myself pondering that question recently after working my way through My Gun is Quick, a 1950 book that is one of Spillane's earlier novels.The relatively simple story line follows an arc familiar to those who have read any of Spillane...
The Girl Hunters (1963)
Around the time I entered my thirties, I had a sudden memory blindside me as if I were deliberatley speeding through red lights and only briefly realized what I was doing and should slow down, ease the pace a bit. For whatever reason, men's adventure novels were part of that memory. There was th...
The Killing Man (1990)
As I wrote in another review, the first Mickey Spillane novel I ever read was THE ERECTION SET, a shameless, over-the-top potboiler of a thriller with plenty of steamy sex and cold, satisfying revenge. When I reached its end, which figuratively and literally came with a bang, I once and for all u...
Vengeance Is Mine (2015)
Mike Hammer is the most tough guy of tough guy detectives, just as Micky Spillane is the most hard-boiled of hard-boiled writers. A Mike Hammer book does not start with someone bringing him a case, instead a person he knows will die and he'll swear revenge and set about taking it. Noses are broke...
The Body Lovers (1967)
So after Mike Hammer does Agatha Christie (in the previous volume ‘The Twisted Thing’), we return most definitely to Mike Hammer does Mike Hammer. ‘The Body Lovers’ is the classic formula. Hammer is out on the streets on New York one night when he stumbles across the corpse of a beautiful woman (...
The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume II (2001)
Mickey Spillane, while perhaps not as revered in literary circles as Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, provides what could be the greatest raw detective-adventure stories. Spillane's Hammer is more raw and brutal than either Hammett's Spade or Chandler's Marlowe; I think he's also more satis...
The Mike Hammer Collection: Volume I (2001)
I had been meaning to read this shit for, like, seven years. From a page in, I could tell that every parody of hardboiled detective stories (seriously, EVERY one) from the 1950's onward was, in large part, parodying Spillane: even if they didn't realize it. I had always hesitated jumping into Mik...
Black Alley (1996)
Tough guy detective Mike Hammer is back from the grave, almost literally, for one last adventure. It begins with getting shot to pieces and left for dead at what was supposed to be a hit on the last of the big-time Mafia dons, arranged by one of the don's sons. After Hammer put a bullet in the fa...
The Goliath Bone (2008)
Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer series draws to its chronological end (there are some books set earlier yet to come) with this post 9-11 tale of terrorists, politics and two youngsters stumbling upon the archeological find of the new century -- Goliath's oversized femur. Sort of a Phillip Marlow me...