A Mickey Spillane Companion


Book Description

At one time, Mickey Spillane had authored seven of the top ten bestsellers in history, and may have been the most widely read author in the world. Spillane masterful storytelling grabs his readers with his first paragraph and leads them spellbound toward his climax. Along with Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald, he remains one of America's greatest mystery writers. This book is a convenient guide to his works. An opening chronology lists the chief events in his life and career. The bulk of the volume presents several hundred alphabetically arranged entries on his writings. Lengthier entries summarize the plots of his works, including I, the Jury; My Gun Is Quick; Vengeance Is Mine!; and The Long Wait. Shorter entries identify his numerous characters, including his particularly memorable detective, Mike Hammer. Select entries list works for further reading, and the volume concludes with a brief bibliography.




A Mickey Spillane Companion


Book Description

Hundreds of A-Z entries detail the plots and characters of one of America's greatest mystery writers.




Me, Hood!


Book Description




My Gun Is Quick


Book Description

The second novel in Mickey Spillane's classic detective series starring hard-boiled private eye Mike Hammer. When a red-headed prostitue is killed in a hit-and-run "accident" Mike Hammer hunts down her killers and uncovers a powerful New York prostitution ring.




American Mystery and Detective Novels


Book Description

Mystery and detective novels are popular fictional genres within Western literature. As such, they provide a wealth of information about popular art and culture. When the genre develops within various cultures, it adopts, and proceeds to dominate, native expressions and imagery. American mystery and detective novels appeared in the late nineteenth century. This reference provides a selective guide to the important criticism of American mystery and detective novels and presents general features of the genre and its historical development over the past two centuries. Critical approaches covered in the volume include story as game, images, myth criticism, formalism and structuralism, psychonalysis, Marxism and more. Comparisons with related genres, such as gothic, suspense, gangster, and postmodern novels, illustrate similarities and differences important to the understanding of the unique components of mystery and detective fiction. The guide is divided into five major sections: a brief history, related genres, criticism, authors, and reference. This organization accounts for the literary history and types of novels stemming from the mystery and detective genre. A chronology provides a helpful overview of the development and transformation of the genre.




I, The Jury


Book Description

Before Jack Reacher . . . there was Mike Hammer 'The king of hard-boiled crime fiction' USA TODAY Classic pulp crime fiction from an author who has sold over 200 million copies worldwide. When Jack Williams is discovered shot dead, the investigating cop Pat Chambers calls his acquaintance, and Jack's closest friend, PI Mike Hammer. Back when they fought in the Marines together, Jack took a Japanese bayonet, losing his arm, to save Hammer. Hammer vows to identify the killer ahead of the police, and to exact fatal revenge. His starting point is the list of guests at a party at Jack's apartment the night he died: Jack's fiancée, a recovering dope addict, a beautiful psychiatrist, twin socialite sisters, a college student and a mobster. But as he tracks them down, so too does the killer, and soon it's not only Jack who is dead . . . And now Hammer is firmly in the killer's sights.




Gumshoe America


Book Description

DIVSees hard-boiled crime fiction in relation to a changing literary marketplace and as an arena for conflicts about citizenship, class culture, and democracy during the New Deal./div




Kiss Her Goodbye


Book Description

Mike Hammer stalks disco-era drug-runners and a fortune in Nazi diamonds in this two-fisted new Spillane novel.




The Street Was Mine


Book Description

This book considers a recurrent figure in American literature: the solitary white man moving through urban space. The descendent of Nineteenth-century frontier and western heroes, the figure re-emerges in 1930-50s America as the 'tough guy'. The Street Was Mine looks to the tough guy in the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler ( The Big Sleep ) and James M. Cain ( Double Indemnity ) and their popular film noir adaptations. Focusing on the way he negotiates racial and gender 'otherness', this study argues that the tough guy embodies the promise of an impervious white masculinity amidst the turmoil of the Depression through the beginnings of the Cold War, closing with an analysis of Chester Himes, whose Harlem crime novels ( For Love of Imabelle ) unleash a ferocious revisionary critique of the tough guy tradition.




Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers


Book Description

Provides an introduction to American pulp fiction during the twentieth century with brief author biographies and lists of their works.