My Gun Is Quick

“My Gun Is Quick,” first published in 1950, was the second book in the Mike Hammer series by Mickey Spillane. Although throughout the 1950’s there were many other pulp authors who wrote stories about private eyes and themes about corruption and gambling and call girl syndicates, no one wrote more hardboiled stories than Spillane. Moreover, Mike Hammer was fairly unique in many respects. Hammer was larger than life and tougher than a Sherman tank. Hammer had a strict sense of right and wrong. He never wavered. And, Hammer would mete out justice as he saw fit without waiting for a corrupt and compromised legal system to work its way through the morass. Also, Hammer, unlike other detectives, didn’t always have a client. Things show more happen around him. Bodies drop. Bad guys get the drop on people and Hammer can’t sit around and read the funny papers.

Spillane explained at the beginning of “My Gun Is Quick” that the Romans used to watch wild animal rip a bunch of humans apart and, although there isn’t a Coliseum any more, the city is a bigger bowl and a man’s claws can be just as sharp and twice as vicious. This story starts with Hammer, barely awake, stopping into a hash house for a “couple of mugs of good black java to bring me around.” The place is a dump with two bums and a drunk seated there and a “fluff sitting off to one side at a table” with “red hair that didn’t come out of a bottle.” Hammer notices that she wasn’t pretty at all, but she once had been. He explains that “there are those things that happen under the skin and are reflected in the eyes and set of the mouth that take all the beauty out of a woman’s face.” He beats up a hood who wanders in with a piece to bother her and then, with a soft spot in his heart, gives her some dough and asks her to get out of the life, open up the classifieds, get a job, and get her life straight. She doesn’t live to see the next day and Hammer isn’t satisfied when told it was a hit-and- run. Hammer has a soft spot for all the people who get ripped apart by life, who have their dreams torn to tiny little bits as each gray day goes on.

Though he doesn’t learn her name till halfway through the book, Hammer tries to figure out what happened to “Red” as he takes to calling her and, on the way, steps into a web of corruption and blackmail and greed.

What’s great about this book isn’t necessarily the plot, which is typical of hardboiled fifties stories, but the great Spillane writing in it. The guys he deals with are “greaseballs.” The women are “dames” or “fluffs.” He finds a brunette in a bar, for instance, and notes that she was “Deep-dish apple pie in a black satin dress,” but she had “that look around the eyes and a set of the mouth that spelled just one thing. She was for sale cheap.”

Velda, his secretary, is “big and she’s beautiful, and she’s got a brain that can figure angles while mine only figures the curves.” Anyone who thinks Spillane is not a romantic at heart hasn’t read his books, hasn’t read the way Hammer falls for Velda and for all the other pretty dames he comes across.
And Hammer is somehow tougher than any other private eye you’ve ever read. He doesn’t sit around and figure the angles. He walks into a joint and grabs the first sleazeball he finds and starts hauling off on him until he’s satisfied with the answers he’s getting. Hammer might get into trouble because he is too quick on the draw, but he has no moral qualms about what he is doing. He knows right from wrong. He knows justice from two-sided bull. show less

Not really sure why I liked this, the second Mike Hammer book, slightly better than the first, the notorious I, the Jury: could be that I was beguiled by the opening paragraph that was straight out of Creative Writing 101 ("When you sit at home comfortably folded up in a chair beside a fire, have you ever thought what goes on outside there? Probably not. You pick up a book and read about things and stuff, getting a vicarious kick from people and events that never happened. You're doing it now..."); perhaps I was touched by the seminal 1950s pop cultural hard man Mike Hammer, private eye, falling deeply in love with one of the dames who crossed his path; possibly I enjoyed the "NYC Vice Racket in the 1940s for Dummies" plot in spite of show more myself; maybe I appreciated the relative restraint that Hammer showed in his tooth-gnashing breast-beating as compared to I, the Jury; I might've found unintentional amusement in the way that Hammer had not just a good friend on the NYC police force, but a police captain friend, Pat Chambers, whom he pretty much led around by the nose as though he were his teenage sidekick and Spillane was writing Hammer as one of those lantern-jawed, cleft-chinned mystery men in tights that dominated comic books in the 1940s, which he used to write; I definitely got a kick out of the Wagnerian dime novel ending in which, yet again, Hammer nearly gets his ticket punched even as he's evening the score and dispensing some richly-deserved street justice of his own (I sense a trope here, methinks); could be that I was subliminally touched by the tragic red-headed call girl whose sudden demise sets the ball rolling, if only because of an acknowledged weakness for redheads. (*Nods to the missus*)

Maybe I'd been desensitized by the crudities and the admittedly still brutally shocking ending of I, the Jury; but I suspect that I was just more receptive this time to the frenetic tattoo that Spillane's prose beats out in the minds of his readers, even as Hammer's fists and gun beat one out on the skulls and GI tracts of the lowlifes he battles more for love than money than I was when I read I, the Jury.

I doubt that I'll ever like Spillane's prose as much as I do Donald Hamilton's (author of the Matt Helm series); but you don't always feel like steak: sometimes you want a thick, greasy burger, nearly raw, smothered with hot onions and spicy mustard. If that's what you're looking for in a book, Spillane's My Gun is Quick is not a bad bet. show less

Mike Hammer is some sort of superhero PI. I can't really read this in any other way. He's unstoppable and unflappable. Every women wants to sleep with him on the same page he meets them. I'm worried there won't be enough criminals with grudges to come after him in later books since he leaves no bad guy alive.

This is silly.

His gun may be quick, but his brain sure isn't. Hammer commits one stupid blunder after another as he stumbles his way toward the solution of the murder of a prostitute he knew for a short while. This books lacks any strong thread to pull you through to the inevitable conclusion, which comes as a surprise to no one. A few strong scenes along the way - but more than outweighed by the awful awful love scenes Spillane throws in to try to make you care about his characters. The writing on these pages is just terrible. I doubt a woman could even get through a single read of this book - it is that condescending. A bitter disappointment after the brutal effectiveness of its predecessor (I, the Jury).

I get a a kick out of these old books in what they could and couldn’t say. You know what I think of that? Horse manure!

A fun quick mystery with the hard nosed private dick Mike Hammer. Now I see why one of my favorite authors admired him so much.

A quick, easy, noir escape from the political correctness I'm bombarded with daily. I like Philip Marlow much better, but Hammer was fun for a change.

You don't need a dictionary with Micky but he sure does remind you of city life , trolleys,subways,diners,gutters,and cops.