Vengeance is Mine

This installment #3 of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, and it is increasingly hard not to feel sorry for any of the women Hammer falls in love with, as his track record continues here.

This is a pretty excellent opening couple of sentences - “The guy was dead as hell. He lay on the floor in his pajamas with his brains scattered all over the rug and my gun in his hand. I kept rubbing my face to wipe out the fuzz that clouded my mind but the cops wouldn't let me.”

So this time around Mike isn't working a case, he is a part of the case. As the quote alludes to, Hammer has been out on a bender with a friend, and they stayed in his hotel room, and when Mike woke up, his friend had apparently committed suicide, with Hammer's gun. The DA takes pleasure in suspending his PI license and his gun license. Except of course, it wasn't suicide at all, it was a murder.

So for a large part of this book, Hammer is on the wrong side of the law, with only his friend Pat on the force to help him out (and Mike pushes the boundary on this relationship, as usual), and without his favourite gun. Back at the office he reminds Velda that she not only has a gun license, but also her PI license; he tells her she runs the show now, and he does the legwork. So Velda steps up her involvement in this book more than she has done previously.

The plot unwinds fairly slowly, and while I can't say I was completely satisfied with the ending (in terms of being believable), the pathway there was fun. Unusually, Hammer wasn't the source of the bodies piling up, but was a factor in who became a liability to the murderer. I can't really expand on the issues without massively spoiling the book, but the twist in this tale just didn't hold up to the level of scrutiny applied beforehand...(this would hopefully make sense to someone who has read it!).

So another hardboiled detective fiction guilty pleasure book done.

3 stars.