This site has been quite a catch basin of “sleuth mike” web queries for 3 days now. I must admit I have no idea who sleuth mike is except for the fact he is a name that appeared in my top search list. At one point, I thought he is a character in one of Alice Hoffman’s books…until keyword after keyword led me to American author Mickey Spillane then Wikipedia. Sleuth Mike turned out to be a fictional American detective Mike Hammer created in 1947.
Here’s a brief Mike Hammer bio courtesy of Wikipedia:
Mike Hammer is a fictional American detective created by the American author Mickey Spillane in the 1947 book I, the Jury (made into a movie in 1953 and 1982). Several movies and radio and television series have been based on the books about Mike Hammer. The actor most closely identified with the character in recent years has been Stacy Keach, who portrayed Hammer in a CBS television series, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, which ran from 1984–1987 and had a syndicated revival in 1997–1998. (An earlier syndicated version, originally aired in 1957–1958, starred Darren McGavin as Hammer.) Spillane himself played Hammer in a 1963 motion picture adaptation of The Girl Hunters.
While pulp detectives such as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe are hard-boiled and cynical, Hammer is in many ways the archetypal “hard man:” he is brutally violent, misogynistic, and fueled by a genuine rage that never afflicts Raymond Chandler’s or Dashiell Hammett’s heroes. While other hardboiled heroes bend and manipulate the law, Hammer holds it in total contempt, seeing it as nothing more than an impediment to justice, the one virtue he holds in absolute esteem.
Hammer is also patriotic and anti-communist. The novels are peppered with remarks by Hammer supporting American troops in Korea, and in Survival…Zero Vietnam. In One Lonely Night, where Hammer attends a communist meeting in a park, Hammer’s reaction to the speaker’s propaganda is a paragraph with only one word in it: “Yeah.”
So far as violence is concerned, the Hammer novels leave little to the imagination. Written in the first person, Hammer describes his violent encounters with relish. In all but a few novels, after a beating by Hammer, his victims are often left vomiting after a blow to the stomach or groin, the vomiting being a kind of Spillane signature.
The Washington Times obituary of Spillane said of Hammer, “In a manner similar to Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, Hammer was a cynical loner contemptuous of the “tedious process” of trials, choosing instead to enforce the law on his own terms.”
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