The characters in Day of the Guns will seem familiar to readers of Spillane's other novels. Tiger Mann is a hard-hitting, ex-OSS officer who now works for a mysterious quasi-governmental agency called IATS. He is basically Mike Hammer re-dressed as a spy with both Mike's personal traits and political loyalties intact. His boss at the agency is Colonel Charlie Corbinet, who was also his superior officer in the OSS during the war. Just as in real life ex-OSS officers staffed the newly created CIA after World War II, Spillane's spy organization is full of ex-military men. There are lots of other functionaries from IATS who play minor roles in the fiction, but one deserves special mention: Ernie Bentley is the guy who invents all sorts of gee-whiz gadgets much like James Bond used in Ian Fleming's spy series.

In the novel there are two major female figures. The...