A quick, easy, noir escape from the political correctness I'm bombarded with daily. I like Philip Marlow much better, but Hammer was fun for a change. ( )

True to form Mike Hammer. Spillane is tops in the genre. ( )

I get a a kick out of these old books in what they could and couldn’t say. You know what I think of that? Horse manure!

A fun quick mystery with the hard nosed private dick Mike Hammer. Now I see why one of my favorite authors admired him so much. ( )

Mike Hammer is some sort of superhero PI. I can't really read this in any other way. He's unstoppable and unflappable. Every women wants to sleep with him on the same page he meets them. I'm worried there won't be enough criminals with grudges to come after him in later books since he leaves no bad guy alive.

This is silly. ( )

“My Gun Is Quick,” first published in 1950, was the second book in the Mike Hammer series by Mickey Spillane. Although throughout the 1950’s there were many other pulp authors who wrote stories about private eyes and themes about corruption and gambling and call girl syndicates, no one wrote more hardboiled stories than Spillane. Moreover, Mike Hammer was fairly unique in many respects. Hammer was larger than life and tougher than a Sherman tank. Hammer had a strict sense of right and wrong. He never wavered. And, Hammer would mete out justice as he saw fit without waiting for a corrupt and compromised legal system to work its way through the morass. Also, Hammer, unlike other detectives, didn’t always have a client. Things happen around him. Bodies drop. Bad guys get the drop on people and Hammer can’t sit around and read the funny papers.

Spillane explained at the beginning of “My Gun Is Quick” that the Romans used to watch wild animal rip a bunch of humans apart and, although there isn’t a Coliseum any more, the city is a bigger bowl and a man’s claws can be just as sharp and twice as vicious. This story starts with Hammer, barely awake, stopping into a hash house for a “couple of mugs of good black java to bring me around.” The place is a dump with two bums and a drunk seated there and a “fluff sitting off to one side at a table” with “red hair that didn’t come out of a bottle.” Hammer notices that she wasn’t pretty at all, but she once had been. He explains that “there are those things that happen under the skin and are reflected in the eyes and set of the mouth that take all the beauty out of a woman’s face.” He beats up a hood who wanders in with a piece to bother her and then, with a soft spot in his heart, gives her some dough and asks her to get out of the life, open up the classifieds, get a job, and get her life straight. She doesn’t live to see the next day and Hammer isn’t satisfied when told it was a hit-and- run. Hammer has a soft spot for all the people who get ripped apart by life, who have their dreams torn to tiny little bits as each gray day goes on.

Though he doesn’t learn her name till halfway through the book, Hammer tries to figure out what happened to “Red” as he takes to calling her and, on the way, steps into a web of corruption and blackmail and greed.

What’s great about this book isn’t necessarily the plot, which is typical of hardboiled fifties stories, but the great Spillane writing in it. The guys he deals with are “greaseballs.” The women are “dames” or “fluffs.” He finds a brunette in a bar, for instance, and notes that she was “Deep-dish apple pie in a black satin dress,” but she had “that look around the eyes and a set of the mouth that spelled just one thing. She was for sale cheap.”

Velda, his secretary, is “big and she’s beautiful, and she’s got a brain that can figure angles while mine only figures the curves.” Anyone who thinks Spillane is not a romantic at heart hasn’t read his books, hasn’t read the way Hammer falls for Velda and for all the other pretty dames he comes across.
And Hammer is somehow tougher than any other private eye you’ve ever read. He doesn’t sit around and figure the angles. He walks into a joint and grabs the first sleazeball he finds and starts hauling off on him until he’s satisfied with the answers he’s getting. Hammer might get into trouble because he is too quick on the draw, but he has no moral qualms about what he is doing. He knows right from wrong. He knows justice from two-sided bull. ( )