THE GIRL HUNTERS
THE SNAKE
THET WISTED THING
“I write what people want to read.”
—Mickey Spillane
The muzzle of the gun was a pair of yawning chasms but there was no depth to their mouths. Down the length of the blued steel the blood crimson of her nails made a startling and symbolic contrast.
Death red, I thought. The fingers behind them should have been tan but weren’t. They were a tense, drawing white and with another fraction of an inch the machinery of the gun would go into motion.
The Girl Hunters
Mike Hammer’s voluptuous, long-lost love is alive—and targeted by the mastermind assassin known as The Dragon.
The Snake
Playing protector to a runaway baby-faced blonde, Mike Hammer trades barbs and lead with crooked politicos, snarling hoods, and sex-hungry females.
The Twisted Thing
A kidnapping case leads Mike Hammer into a fourteen-year-old mystery and into the sights of the most venomous killer the twofisted private eye has ever faced.
Also available:
The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 1, featuring:
I, the Jury, My Gun Is Quick, and Vengeance Is Mine!
Introduction by Max Allan Collins
The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 2, featuring:
One Lonely Night, The Big Kill, and Kiss Me, Deadly
Introduction by Lawrence Block
Praise for Mickey Spillane
“Spillane is a master in compelling you to always turn the next page.”
—The New York Times
“The toughest guy in all of mystery fiction.... In books like I, the Jury, One Lonely Night, and Kiss Me, Deadly, Spillane secured a permanent place for himself in the pantheon of such mystery greats as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald.”
—The Washington Post
“Is there any serious argument that Mike Hammer is the most famous fictional detective creation since the Second World War?”
—Donald Westlake
“One of the bestselling authors of the twentieth century. . . . With Hammer, Spillane secured his place in the pantheon, alongside such mystery greats as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.”
—Los Angeles Times
“[A] crime-writing legend.”
—New York Post
“There is not a single emotional word or adjective in Spillane’s description ; he presents nothing save visual facts; but he selects only those facts, only those eloquent details, which convey the visual reality of the scene and create a mood of desolate loneliness.”
—Ayn Rand
“I find [Spillane’s] early novels hugely entertaining in their meat-and-potatoes way. They go like lightning, they keep you guessing, and they don’t pretend to be anything other than ripping yarns.”
—National Review
“There are only a handful of towering figures in the history of the private-eye novel, which is one of the quintessential American contributions to the world of twentieth-century literature. Dashiell Hammett popularized the genre; Raymond Chandler was its greatest literary artist ; Mr. Spillane kept it alive when it fell out of favor.”
—The New York Sun
Mike Hammer Novels by Mickey Spillane
I, the Jury
My Gun Is Quick
Vengeance Is Mine!
One Lonely Night
The Big Kill
Kiss Me, Deadly
The Girl Hunters
The Snake
The Twisted Thing
The Body Lovers
Survival . . . ZERO!
The Killing Man
Black Alley
The Return of Mike Hammer
Among aficionados of tough crime fiction, few literary mysteries rival that of the disappearance in 1952 of fictional private eye Mike Hammer at the peak of his—and his creator Mickey Spillane’s—powers.
The still-unrivaled publishing success of this Brooklyn-born bartender’s son began inauspiciously in 1947 with the hardcover publication by E. P. Dutton of I, the Jury. A few reviewers noticed it as a particularly nasty example of hard-boiled detective fiction, a few praised it, most panned it, and sales were less than ten thousand copies. There was such little notice taken of Mike Hammer’s first adventure that when the young writer submitted a second Hammer novel, For Whom the Gods Would Destroy, Dutton rejected it. Spillane returned to the comic book field where, among other things, he wrote love comics.
Then, in December 1948, New American Library’s paperback edition of I, the Jury came out and started selling—and selling. In part thanks to a vivid cover portraying the now-famous denouement of the novel—a seated Mike Hammer’s back to the camera as he trains his .45 on a disrobing femme fatale—the book attracted legions of readers. Spillane was asked to resubmit For Whom the Gods Would Destroy, which he declined to do (more on that subject later), and instead My Gun Is Quick appeared in 1950, the second of six Hammer novels that would top bestseller lists worldwide, making Spillane the first pop-lit superstar—so big, it well and truly pissed off Ernest Hemingway, who asked to have Spillane’s picture removed from a barroom wall in Florida and got his own taken down for the trouble.
Sixty years later, to describe the impact of those six novels—and a seventh non-Hammer Spillane, The Long Wait—is to tempt credulity. The millions of copies the blue-collar writer sold unveiled an audience for franker, more violent popular fiction, and the mystery field in particular was riddled with his imitators. This went beyond just other writers copying Spillane—the first major publisher of paperback original fiction, Gold Medal Books, was created in 1950 to serve the market Spillane had uncovered. He was even their paid consultant, and provided a memorable blurb for one of their mainstays, John D. MacDonald (“I wish I had written this book!”). Gold Medal’s major Hammer imitation was the Shell Scott series by Richard S. Prather, zany comedies that nonetheless worked in the extreme violence and sex Spillane had first trafficked.
The sixth Hammer novel, Kiss Me, Deadly (1952), became the first private eye novel to crack the New York Times bestseller list (the likes of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner had never come close), and the paperback edition was as wildly successful as its predecessors. Hollywood, via British producer/director Victor Saville, came calling, and the new Spillane book and three others were headed for the silver screen.