Ironically, critics—again including New York Times stalwart Anthony Boucher—greeted this “new” Hammer mystery with accolades. “I suggest,” said Boucher, “that [Mike Hammer’s] creator is one of the last of the great storytellers in the pulp tradition, as he amply demonstrates in The Twisted Thing.”
Boucher, in terming the novel “vintage” Spillane, didn’t know how right he was—or that he was responding enthusiastically to a novel written in the very period during which the critic had been (in his words) “one of the leaders in the attacks on Spillane.”
Looking at The Twisted Thing in that context, Spillane’s shelving it and substituting My Gun Is Quick is easy to understand: the latter novel plays off the violence and vengeance of I, the Jury with sexual passages that were frank for the day, and exhibits a generally seamy, sordid feel, beginning with Hammer’s encountering a friendly hooker in a diner.
The Twisted Thing, however, implies the vengeful Hammer of the first novel was not envisioned by the writer as the Hammer of all the novels—rather, I, the Jury appears intended to tell just that one tale of murdered-friend retribution. In The Twisted Thing there is casual sex and vintage Spillane rough stuff, but the dominant theme is a father-son relationship between Mike Hammer and fourteen-year-old child genius Ruston York.
The Twisted Thing takes place in a small town where Hammer is initially involved with rescuing young Ruston from kidnappers—both Velda and Manhattan are largely absent from the novel. A tough, corrupt local cop—the evocatively named Dilwick—provides the initial conflict, but the young genius’s wealthy father is soon murdered, and away Hammer goes. Hoods and a casino right out of The Big Sleep provide the toughest of tough dicks with further fun and games, but his detective work is right out of Christie, a search for missing documents more typical of Hercule Poirot than Mike Hammer.
The Girl Hunters is likely the best of the sixties Hammers, but The Twisted Thing isn’t a sixties Hammer at all, but rather a late forties one. The ending, revealing the identity of the murderer, comes in typical abrupt, shocking Spillane style, and makes a lot of sense as the second such ending Spillane wrote, a huge surprise in 1966 that still has power today. The small-town setting, the classic pulp cast—troubled millionaire, willing wench, crooked cops, casino thugs—represent classic pulp at its liveliest. But the father-son relationship at the novel’s core makes The Twisted Thing unique among Hammer novels.
Mike Hammer has come to be synonymous with tough private eyes, as has Mickey Spillane with hard-boiled mystery fiction. We may not know for a certainty why Spillane withdrew Mike Hammer, temporarily, from the public stage; but reading these, you’ll say it’s easy to understand why that public welcomed back both Spillane and Hammer so enthusiastically.
—Max Allan Collins
Summer 2010
Max Allan Collins has earned an unprecedented fifteen Private Eye Writers of America Shamus nominations, winning twice for novels in his historical Nathan Heller series. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award-winning Tom Hanks film. Shortly before Mickey Spillane’s passing, the writer asked Collins to complete various unfinished works, including the Mike Hammer novel The Big Bang (begun 1964, published 2010). Both Spillane and Collins are recipients of the Eye, the Private Eye Writers life achievement award.
THE GIRL HUNTERS
This one is for Elliott Graham
who sweated more waiting for Mike than he did as a dog face
waiting for us brown-shoes fly-boys to give him aerial cover.
So here we go again, E.G., with more to come.
But this one is for you.
CHAPTER 1
They found me in the gutter. The night was the only thing I had left and not much of it at that. I heard the car stop, the doors open and shut and the two voices talking. A pair of arms jerked me to my feet and held me there.
“Drunk,” the cop said.
The other one turned me around into the light. “He don’t smell bad. That cut on his head didn’t come from a fall either.”
“Mugged?”
“Maybe.”
I didn’t give a damn which way they called it. They were both wrong anyhow. Two hours ago I was drunk. Not now. Two hours ago I was a roaring lion. Then the bottle sailed across the room. No lion left now.
Now was a time when I wasn’t anything. Nothing was left inside except the feeling a ship must have when it’s torpedoed, sinks and hits bottom.
A hand twisted into my chin and lifted my face up. “Ah, the guy’s a bum. Somebody messed him up a little bit.”
“You’ll never make sergeant, son. That’s a hundred-buck suit and it fits too good to be anything but his own. The dirt is fresh, not worn on.”
“Okay, Daddy, let’s check his wallet, see who he is and run him in.”
The cop with the deep voice chuckled, patted me down and came up with my wallet. “Empty,” he said.
Hell, there had been two bills in it when I started out. It must have been a pretty good night. Two hundred bucks’ worth of night.
I heard the cop whistle between his teeth. “We got ourselves a real fish.”
“Society boy? He don’t look so good for a society boy. Not with his face. He’s been splashed.”
“Uh-uh. Michael Hammer, it says here on the card. He’s a private jingle who gets around.”
“So he gets tossed in the can and he won’t get around so much.”
The arm under mine hoisted me a little straighter and steered me toward the car. My feet moved; lumps on the end of a string that swung like pendulums.
“You’re only joking,” the cop said. “There are certain people who wouldn’t like you to make such noises with your mouth.”
“Like who?”
“Captain Chambers.”
It was the other cop’s turn to whistle.
“I told you this jingle was a fish,” my pal said. “Go buzz the station. Ask what we should do with him. And use a phone—we don’t want this on the air.”
The cop grunted something and left. I felt hands easing me into the squad car, then shoving me upright against the seat. The hands went down and dragged my feet in, propping them against the floorboard. The door shut and the one on the other side opened. A heavy body climbed in under the wheel and a tendril of smoke drifted across my face. It made me feel a little sick.
The other cop came back and got in beside me. “The captain wants us to take him up to his house,” he said. “He told me thanks.”
“Good enough. A favor to a captain is like money in the bank, I always say.”
“Then how come you ain’t wearing plainclothes then?”
“Maybe I’m not the type, son. I’ll leave it to you young guys.”