The Bloody Spur

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Mickey Spillane’s famous crime novels — in particular those featuring his breakthrough character, Mike Hammer — are often discussed in terms of their violence and sexual content, which seemed so revolutionary in the late 1940s and early ’50s. The sex seems almost tame these days, but the violence still packs a punch that Sam Peckinpah likely envied.

What more insightful commentators have always known is that the Mike Hammer stories are at heart about friendship and loyalty — the detective is almost always seeking the murderer of a friend, with an “eye for an eye” on settling that score. Most famously, in I, the Jury (1947), Hammer goes after the killer of his friend Jack Williams, his buddy in the Pacific who lost an arm while taking a Japanese bayonet blow meant for Mike.

Also central to the novels are Hammer’s friendship with Captain Pat Chambers of Homicide and the detective’s evolving relationship with his secretary Velda, who becomes the love of his life over the course of the decades-spanning series.

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