9/21/06: One Lonely Night (1951)

Is it just us, or has it been violent in here all week? We can’t even write about a nice Christian boy like Alice Cooper without the Devil getting assaulted. So let’s call it a theme week with the great American novelist who might be the true essence of right-wing trash.

One Lonely Night isn’t just the fourth Mike Hammer novel. It’s the novel that guaranteed Mickey Spillane’s place in pop culture. Unlike creepy commie Dashiell Hammett, Spillane was capable of recognizing true villainy amongst the Communist Party. This murder mystery has Mike Hammer going undercover amongst the would-be oppressors, and Spillane demonstrates that some Leftists are truly timeless:

A few latecomers closed in behind me and I had to stand there and hear just why anybody that fought the war was a simple-minded fool, why anybody who tolerated the foreign policy of this country was a Fascist, why anybody who didn’t devote his soul and money to the enlightenment of the masses was a traitor to the people.

The goddamn fools who listened agreed with him, too.

Things only get worse once Hammer has to be social:

I smoked and I watched, trying to make some sense out of it. Some of them even looked like Commies, the cartoon kind. There were sharp eyes that darted from side to side, too-wise women dazzled by some meager sense of responsibility, smirking students who wore their hair long, tucked behind their heads.

“I wanted to know how smart the people were who wanted to rule the world,” says Hammer. He finds out: “The crumbs couldn’t even make good coffee.”

That’s from pages 26 through 31 of our 25¢ Signet paperback. It’s hardly a spoiler to note that Hammer triumphs over his adversaries. The interesting thing about One Lonely Night, however, is how Spillane dwells on Hammer’s personal distaste. The recurring theme is the detective’s hatred for the Commies’ sense of intellectual superiority.

This comes to a climax on page 149, when Hammer finally brings a tommy gun to the Party. The spies and their useful idiots have made the mistake of torturing Hammer’s secretary. The lovely Velda is avenged with sprays of gunfire, and special attention is paid to a creep who got on Hammer’s nerves at the start of the book:

There was only the guy in the pork-pie hat who made a crazy try for a gun in his pocket. I aimed the tommy gun for the first time and took his arm off at the shoulder. It dropped to the floor next to him and I let him have a good look at it. He couldn’t believe it happened. I proved it by shooting him in the belly. They were all so damned clever!

They were all so damned dead!

We once had the pleasure of hanging out with Spillane, and he was everything that you’d expect—which is to say that he was everything he always claimed to be. He told us that his obituaries would be snide and patronizing and not nearly as kind as Hammett’s. Sadly, Spillane was mostly proven right when he passed away this past July. The guy didn’t seem like he'd care, though. Spillane knew the media was so damned clever.

Make it your own: Mike Hammer. Always on the job. Always in print.

 

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