The body count is high, but Hammer himself isn’t responsible, although the vicious climatic fight with the Russian agent called The Dragon concludes with one of the most casually brutal acts Hammer ever perpetrated. With surprising ease, Spillane moves his fifties detective into the sixties, espionage substituting for the Mob and other more conventional villains. Hammer had fought “Commies” before (in One Lonely Night), but here he’s entered the world of his British offspring, James Bond. There’s a showbiz element connected to Spillane’s own celebrity, including the use of real-life columnist Hy Gardner, a rival and contemporary of Walter Winchell and Earl Wilson.
Spillane is at his best in The Girl Hunters, his storytelling fast-moving, consistently entertaining, and with crisp, tough dialogue and action that shocks when it comes, plus mood-setting descriptions that show off his gift for noir poetry. Spillane employs a surprising narrative technique, the absence of Velda from the story—she is the girl being hunted, but she does not appear.
Spillane saves her reappearance for The Snake, the eighth Mike Hammer and a direct sequel to The Girl Hunters. Readers should understand, however, that The Girl Hunters and The Snake were never intended to be one book, one continuous story, and are advised to keep in mind that three years separated the publication of the two. Those fresh from spending time with a drunk Mike Hammer who was struggling to get back to his old self will need a grain of salt, at least, to accept Hammer in The Snake—which begins perhaps an hour after The Girl Hunters ends. Improbably, Hammer is not only his old self again, but is accepted around Manhattan by his cronies as if he’d been away for seven weeks, not seven years.
Still, The Snake is a first-rate tough mystery, with Spillane abandoning espionage for more traditional Mob concerns. Hammer and Velda are instantly the team of old as they help a damsel in distress and wade into the murky waters of big-time politics. In some respects, this is as close to a “standard” Mike Hammer mystery as you’re likely to find. Had Spillane—like Stout, Christie, Gardner, and so many others—chosen to write dozens of Hammer novels rather than just a dozen (well, a baker’s dozen), The Snake might have been the template. Moving around Manhattan with ease, Hammer works his contacts among journalists and reestablishes a working relationship, if not quite his friendship, with Pat Chambers. Even Spillane’s old enemy Anthony Boucher praised the novel’s craft, calling it “certainly Mike Hammer’s best case.”
The ending is (as they used to say) a corker, although the ambiguous nature of what happens next—i.e., do Velda and Mike consummate their love?—remains unresolved, at least as far as Spillane was concerned. This piece of continuity bedeviled Spillane, who, post-Snake, went back and forth on whether Hammer and Velda were intimate.
Clearly Spillane intended to write another batch of books about Mike Hammer, but several things interfered. He was sidetracked for a while working as screenwriter and star of the British-American production The Girl Hunters (1963). Last-minute funding problems caused the film to be shot in black-and-white, making it look shabby next to the early Bond films with which it was in direct competition (sharing Bond girl Shirley Eaton, who costarred in The Girl Hunters and had the small but memorable golden-girl role in Goldfinger).
Spillane received raves for his portrayal of his hero, a remarkable accomplishment—after all, it’s not as though Edgar Rice Burroughs could have pulled off Tarzan onscreen, although Agatha Christie would have made a pretty fair Marple. The high concept of mystery writer playing his own detective attracted lots of media, in particular a witty Esquire magazine piece by Terry Southern. But Bond’s emergence, and frankly dominance, screwed things up for Spillane—Ian Fleming, the Brit used by Signet to fill in for Spillane during “the long wait,” was now on top of publishing and movies.
The Snake had been intended to be the basis for the second Spillane-as-Hammer film, and the Lolita-ish Sue was written as a role for his then wife, Broadway starlet Sherri Malinou. But The Girl Hunters didn’t do well enough to justify a second film, and discouraged Spillane from focusing on his most famous character. Instead, he developed the Hammer clone Tiger Mann, a hard-boiled secret agent whose four adventures sold in the millions but did not generate TV shows or films despite the surrounding spy craze.
A brief aside—The Girl Hunters title was derived from the “Girl Hunt” ballet in the classic 1953 Fred Astaire film The Band Wagon, which overtly and beautifully spoofed Spillane and Mike Hammer. This gave the mystery writer great satisfaction, because Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies were Mickey Spillane’s cinema of choice.
Spillane wound up publishing only four Hammer novels in the sixties, although he began a number that were set aside for various reasons; over the remainder of his career, he began and set aside even more Hammer novels that he never published. After The Snake, Spillane developed a Hammer story that pitted his hero against the drug racket in a context of the swinging sixties. But he found himself up against a deadline to Dutton and Signet for a new Hammer novel, and rather than finish what would eventually become The Big Bang (published in 2010 as “the lost Mike Hammer sixties novel”), he pulled down a certain old, unpublished manuscript from his shelf—For Whom the Gods Would Destroy—and sent that instead, under the title The Twisted Thing.
This was, of course, the rejected novel he’d written right after selling I, the Jury (1947) to E. P. Dutton, making it chronologically the second Mike Hammer mystery. When Signet had a huge success with the paperback reprint of I, the Jury, however, the editor at Dutton came back to Spillane requesting For Whom the Gods Would Destroy, but (as indicated earlier) Spillane said no.
He chose to write My Gun Is Quick (1950) instead. The response from readers to the sex and violence of I, the Jury dictated a different Mike Hammer novel to follow the first. For Whom the Gods Would Destroy went onto a shelf in the writer’s upstate New York home, where the sole manuscript was nearly lost in a fire. The retrieved pages lacked only the final one, which had been burned black; Spillane wrote a replacement last page for it in 1966, though a restoration of the charred page revealed he had remembered the original ending almost word for word.
Spillane’s noir universe was so timeless that very little revision was required for publication in 1966 of a novel written in 1948. A small passage with Hammer’s cop friend, Pat Chambers, makes reference to the events of The Girl Hunters and The Snake, and The Twisted Thing fits in well with the 1960s Hammer novels, which were tough and sexy but eased up on the emotional fire and extremes of violence and passion that had made I, the Jury (and the five Hammer novels that quickly followed it) such icons of controversy in the early 1950s.