“You have an accident, son?” he asked.
Crowley glanced down at the handkerchief around his knuckles. He shook his head. He wanted to say something, but somehow the words wouldn’t come.
“Maybe you had a fight,” the patrolman said. He moved a little closer to Crowley.
“No,” Crowley said. He couldn’t take his eyes from the revolver on the policeman’s belt. “I... I tripped on a curb,” he said. “I fell down and scraped my knuckles.”
The patrolman stared at him. “You’re lucky you didn’t hurt your clothes any, aren’t you?”
The other patrolman had moved over in the seat to watch, and now he got out and walked up beside the first one. He looked Crowley over slowly. “You been down in the Village tonight, boy?” he asked. He said it the same way he would ask someone the time of day.
The goddam New York coppers, Crowley thought. You never know what the hell’s going on in their mind. He shook his head again. “No. I haven’t been downtown at all.”
One of the patrolmen looked at the other. “That assault and robbery we got on the radio about nine o’clock,” he said. “The guy was dressed just like this.” He looked back at Crowley. “And the physical description matches up, too.”
“Listen—” Crowley began.
“Suppose you just step over to the car there,” the patrolman said. “Just lean up against it with your hands flat on the top.”
“You got no right to search me,” Crowley said. “Just because I fell and hurt myself don’t mean—”
“Up against the car,” the patrolman said, almost pleasantly. “We don’t like to do it this way, son. But there’s an alarm out for a guy could be your twin. He slugged a girl down in the Village earlier tonight and took two whole bucks off her. She—”
Crowley whirled and began to run. And almost instantly he heard the two fast warning shots which meant that if he took another step a third shot would kill him. He stopped.
8.
In the police car, on the way to the station house, one of the patrolmen said, “Where’d you get all that junk in your pockets, son?”
The other patrolman said, “That girl you slugged in the Village. She was a cool one. You didn’t knock her out, but she was smart enough to make you think you had. She gave the precinct detectives a damn good description of you.”
But Crowley wasn’t thinking about the girl he’d slugged in the foyer. He was thinking about Kate Maynard, and remembering she’d said her sister was coming by the apartment at nine o’clock in the morning. She’d find Kate, and she’d know exactly what was missing from the apartment. And when the police matched the list up with the things they’d taken off him a few moments ago...
“You got that girl’s mad money,” one of the patrolmen said. “She was waiting for her date, and she’d just stepped into that foyer for a minute.”
It was just a kind of appetizer, Crowley thought. Just a little warm-up. And all I got was two bucks. Two stinking, lousy bucks. Her mad money, for Christ’s sake.
“Stop the car,” he said suddenly. “I’m going to be sick at my stomach.”
Mickey Spillane
(b. 1918)
Few readers of crime fiction are indifferent when it comes to the merits of Mickey Spillane and his creation, Mike Hammer. They either love or hate the pair, and with considerable passion in either case. Max Allen Collins, co-author of a book about Spillane and his work, One Lonely Knight (1984), considers him “one of the most remarkable literary artists ever to confine himself to a popular genre.” In a 1955 Good Housekeeping article on Spillane’s work, Philip Wylie concluded that “if millions of people are reading [his books] voluntarily the public must be losing its senses.” Anthony Boucher, who would later develop a grudging admiration for Spillane’s accomplishments, in 1951 reviewed The Big Kill as “the ultimate degradation of the [hard-boiled] school.”
The first Mike Hammer novel, I, the Jury (1947), sold 8 million copies in its various U.S. paperback editions; the five that followed it in the early 1950s were likewise multimillion-copy sellers. (Aggregate sales for all of Spillane’s novels were estimated in 1984 to be an amazing 160 million copies.) The Hammer books inspired ten theatrical and television films (in one of which, The Girl Hunters [1963], Spillane himself played Hammer), a radio show, two television series (with a third in the works at the time of this writing), and a syndicated comic strip.
Spillane’s influence began to wane in the 1960s. Mike Hammer was properly a child of the postwar 1940s and the Red Scare — dominated 1950s, and the tactics of a violent, vigilante private eye grew less appealing to readers and writers in later decades. Recognizing this, Spillane at first considered turning Hammer into a secret agent, so as to make his brand of justice more contemporary and therefore more palatable. He abandoned the idea, however, in favor of creating a new character, Tiger Mann, his American “answer” to James Bond. Mann is an agent in the employ of Martin Grady, an ultra-right-wing billionaire whose “Group” is his own privately financed personal espionage organization. In such novels as Day of the Guns (1964) and Bloody Sunrise (1965), Mann with impunity slaughters Russian assassins and other villains bent on destroying America’s democratic freedom. His adventures have neither the power nor the passion of even the minor Hammers; they are imitations rather than the real thing.
Spillane’s output of short fiction is relatively small and was produced for the most part between 1953 and 1960. A few of his stories appeared in Manhunt, notably a four-part serial, “Everybody’s Watching Me,” in the magazine’s first four issues; most of the rest were published in such men’s magazines as Cavalier and Male, and featured a variety of tough cops and criminals. None of his short stories or novelettes, significantly, has as its protagonist Mike Hammer or any other private detective. “The Screen Test of Mike Hammer,” which originally appeared in Male in July 1955 and was reprinted with the title “Killer’s Alley,” is as close as Spillane came to writing a Hammer short story (with one exception, an even shorter vignette for the cover of a radio-show-style record album entitled Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer Story, also produced in the mid-1950s). The playlet was written for a test film directed and produced by Spillane, in the abortive hope of casting a friend, actor Jack Stang, in the film version of Kiss Me, Deadly (1955). In microcosm, “The Screen Test of Mike Hammer” has all the hard-boiled elements and all the intensity of a Hammer novel.
B. P.
The Screen Test of Mike Hammer
(1955)
SCENE: Mike in near darkness in narrow passageway between two buildings. Lighting from low left only, focusing on face. Mike smoking. He does not come in until he lights his cigarette, then the light holds. From outside camera range come feet running, pause, heavy breathing. Bum comes stumbling up, sees Mike, is terrified.
Bum (breathlessly): Mike... Mike! (Then fast.) They’re closing in. The cops got everything covered. There ain’t no place that kill-happy maniac can get out. He’s trapped on the street, Mike. (Pause.) Mike... he’s around here someplace. Already he shot up two more. Like he said, he’s gonna wipe out the whole street, piece by piece.