Mike Hammer

Mike Hammer is the hard-boiled private detective created by Mickey Spillane — one of the most controversial and most commercially successful fictional detectives in American publishing history. A tough, violent, unambiguously right-wing New York PI who solves cases with his fists as often as his brain, Hammer is the avatar of a specifically American masculine fantasy that made Spillane one of the best-selling authors of the twentieth century and made critics who valued subtlety deeply uncomfortable.

Spillane introduced Hammer in I, the Jury (1947), a novel that sold in the millions and established a template for violent, sexually charged crime fiction that was entirely new. Hammer's willingness to shoot first and the novels' explicit (for the time) sexuality scandalized literary critics while delighting millions of readers. Seven of the fifteen best-selling novels of the 1950s in America were Spillane's.

The Hammer novels are important cultural artifacts as much as crime fiction — they express a particular postwar American masculinity that was enormously popular and that serious literary culture found repugnant. Reading them is reading a significant strand of American popular culture at its most unguarded.

Begin with I, the Jury (1947).