One Lonely Night

“Nobody ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost fog-like, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy, yellow lights off in the distance.”

“The rain. The damned never-ending rain. It turned Manhattan into a city of reflections, a city you saw twice no matter where you looked. It was a slow, easy rain that took awhile to collect on your hat brim before it cascaded down in front of your face. The streets had an oily shine that brought the rain-walkers out, people who went native whenever the sky cried and tore off their hats to let the tears drip through their hair.”

I led with the two passages above for those of you who’ve never read Mickey Spillane, writing him off as a sensational, pulp writer. This was the first Mike Hammer novel I’ve read and I was surprised by the subtlety and lyricism of Spillane’s prose. Don’t worry, there is plenty of drinking and smoking and gunplay. But Spillane should not be pigeon-holed as a hack with a formula. There are unplumbed levels to the story and to the characters.

[One Lonely Night] opens with Mike Hammer walking the deserted, rain-soaked streets of Manhattan, brooding over a tongue-lashing from a judge about his violent tendencies. As Hammer crests the Brooklyn Bridge, he confronts a bad man chasing a woman. Hammer shoots the man, only to have the woman jump over the railing to her death. Hammer investigates the background of the bad man and the woman using the only clue he finds: strange, matching green cards from the woman’s coat pocket and the man’s wallet. The trail leads to a local Communist group, an up-and-coming politician, and a missing set of secret military papers.

Hammer is hard; hard on the people in his life and harder on the bad men and women he targets, but hardest on himself. No one hates Hammer more than he hates himself. Throughout the story, he reflects on the words of the judge who sees him as a blood-hungry murderer. The difficulty for Hammer is that he recognizes that he enjoys killing, that he is good at it. So, a good deal of what the judge had to say about him is true. The question for Hammer is whether his violent nature is acceptable, given that he only exercises it against the deserving, and whether his judgment is sound in identifying the deserving. In some ways the answers to those questions say as much about the reader as they do about Hammer.

More than one review I’ve read of [One Lonely Night] has looked down the nose at Spillane. Some judge Spillane’s plots simpleminded and shallow. Some see Spillane as dated and irrelevant some sixty years later. And all of these reviews decry Hammer’s morals and Spillane’s views and treatment of women. Anyone who sees Spillane as simpleminded or shallow or irrelevant isn’t reading the material very deeply. And Spillane’s women, while a product of the time for which they were written, are more complex and stronger than the titillating covers give them credit for.

Bottom Line: The author who defined the noir genre is more than meets the eye – Highly recommended.

5 bones!!!!! ( )