I. The Jury - Mickey Spillane

As someone who hasn't previously read a Mike Hammer book or indeed anything by Mickey Spillane before, the first short opening chapter of I, the Jury (and possibly that title) looks like it tells you all you need to know about his famous PI creation. Hammer has just walked into the scene of the murder of his friend Detective Jack Williams, where someone has killed him with a snub nosed bullet shot from a .45 into the lower stomach. Williams saved Mike's life in the war, losing an arm in the process, and whoever shot him apparently just sat and watched him helplessly suffering an agonising death. Hammer is incensed and swears that he will see justice done. Not police justice, he tells his police detective friend Pat Chambers, but with himself acting as judge, jury and executioner.

It might sound like emotive talk, but Hammer soon puts any doubts about his methods behind, telling us the next day that people think he is a "kill-crazy shamus". "I shoot them like the mad dogs they are and society drags me to court to explain the whys and wherefores of the extermination". He tells the first suspect he questions that "when I find the one that did it, he dies. Even if I can't prove it, he dies anyway. In fact, I don't even have to be convinced too strongly". Pat Chambers isn't too bothered - "Okay, Mike, call it your own way". You suspect he would do the same thing if he was able to get away with it as a police officer.

Reading Spillane for the first time, it strikes you that there are other reasons why you couldn't have a Mike Hammer today. He's almost as lascivious as Shell Scott, his musings on curvy beauties and what he would like to do with them a little more direct and sexist than Prather's tongue-in-cheek poetic metaphors. Hammer is irresistible to every attractive woman but somehow manages to resist their advances, even one who is a "nymphomaniac", saying he prefers to wait until he is married before he will hop into bed with a stunning blonde big-breasted psychotherapist who is unable to resist him. He's not fond of "fruits" and "pansies", and Spillane's phonetic rendering of a "coal-black" "darky" maid "De police gennimums in de front room was 'specting you", doesn't read great now either.

It's still possible to take this as all part of the times and the pulp PI tradition, Spillane a little more hard-edged (or cruder) than Chandler or Hammett, dishing out the kind of content that would have appealed to a certain readership. It might not seem like it but it is however loosely related to the nature of the crime operation that Hammer unexpectedly finds himself investigating, dealing with drugs and prostitution. What remains a mystery to Hammer is where his good friend Jack fits into this. The answer is somewhat convoluted, but certain details lead you to suspect who Jack's killer is long before Hammer gets there. And when he gets there, he is indeed judge, jury and, hearing no pleas from the defence, executioner.

Reading notes: I, The Jury by Mickey Spillane was first published in 1948. I read a fairly battered secondhand copy of the 20th anniversary Signet paperback edition, 1968, 57th printing. The rather plain text cover boasts that it includes “the original cover in full colour”, and it is indeed strangely reproduced on the back rather than the front. Although the original is a classic pulp image, it's probably better that the publisher preferred a plain cover, since the original 1948 cover actually depicts the final scene from the book, which kind of ruins any sense of the case being a whodunit, and I'm not sure that a 'whytheydunit' would be enough of a compensation here.