The Twisted Thing

Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer #9
As other reviewers have pointed out, this one doesn't chronologically fit in the series. Velda doesn't feature at all, which is out of synch after the last two books (#7 The Girl Hunters & #8 The Snake) in which the story really was focussed around Velda. Pat Chambers is also only a brief mention, and without any of the intricacies of their relationship. Apparently it was written early and published out of sequence.

This one is also set out of New York, in a small town with its own corrupt cops - who we meet on page one, where they are interrogating (beating up) an ex-con kid called Billy, now going straight as a chauffeur for a wealthy scientist. The cops fancy Billy for a part in the kidnapping of the scientists boy, as Billy has a record - Billy used his one phone call to phone Mike Hammer. (Quite why the cops would let Hammer into the interrogation room I don't know!)

From this start, Hammer is off side with the cops, but frees Billy, and goes back with him to see Rudolph York, Billy's employer. He ends up being commissioned to find the kidnapped boy (a boy genius, no less, who is the result of the scientists confidential research into learning techniques). The boy is quickly recovered, and things enter your usual Mickey Spillane spiral from there, with York being murdered.

As we come to expect there is the usual brutality (dished out by, and received by Hammer), plenty of shooting, blackmail, car chases, local criminals and attractive women falling at Hammers feet. In this case everyone in the extended York family was a suspect, all wanting a sniff of the scientists money.

This one was a good story, lots of confusing things going on, multiple layers of mystery to be unravelled. As the story evolves and Hammer is drawn from one aspect to the next, some things fall into place, but others remain out of reach and the reader shares with Hammer the inability to pull the threads together (well I struggled...).

I can't resist mentioning the archaic view Spillane puts forward of lesbians though, I thought that very odd, and thought for a while that the twisted thing of the title was going to be the lesbian character, the way Spillane describing her before it becomes obvious she is lesbian as as mannish, wearing slacks, and (god forbid) without makeup; then after as not a real woman, more like half-man. Reflective of the times I guess.

3 stars