Word: killingly
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...Mickey to the image of the serious fiction writer, showing a brisk contempt for the elevated anguish of creating literature. In just five years, between 1947 and 1952, he served up seven novels: I, the Jury; My Gun Is Quick; Vengeance Is Mine!; One Lonely Night; The Big Kill; Kiss Me, Deadly; and the non-Hammer story The Long Wait. (The six Hammers are collected in two volumes of The Mike Hammer Collection.) By the mid-50s, those seven titles were among the ten all-time best-sellers. When his critics deplored this stat, Spillane riposted, "Aaah, you're lucky...
...fact, Mike loves to hate, to beat, to kill. From Mi>Vengeance Is Mine!: "I loved to shoot killers. I couldn't think of anything I'd rather do than shoot a killer and watch his blood trace a slimy path across the floor." The fights he gets into are manuals for barroom brawlers. Here's a how-to from My Gun Is Quick: "I jammed four big, stiff fingers into his gut right above the navel and he snapped shut like a jackknife. I opened him up again with an openhanded slap that left a blush across his mouth...
...Anything short of execution is excusable. "I didn't kill him," he says after one encounter. "All I did was shoot him in the leg a little bit." (In Hammer's world, that's a towel slap.) Sometimes he imagines the awful-delicious retribution. "If anything happened to Velda I'd tear the guts out of some son-of-a-bitch!" he muses in One Lonely Night. "I'd nail him to a wall and take his skin off him in inch-wide strips!" Other times, he keeps the violence strictly verbal, on the level of threat...
...disdain for the politics of his books. No question, he was right-wing. Each novel had a different conspiracy for Hammer to expose: drugs in I, the Jury, the call-girl racket in My Gun Is Quick, a blackmail ring in Vengeance Is Mine!, illegal gambling in The Big Kill, the Mafia in Kiss Me. Deadly. But it was the enemy in One Lonely Night - the U.S. Communist Party - and his gunning down of 100 of them, that soldered liberal horror of Spillane...
...Every time Bateman patronizes his secretary—calls her “doll,” derides her wardrobe, or tries to kill...