Day of the Guns was the first of a new series featuring Tiger Mann, Spillane's American James Bond. Although he had Mike Hammer on occasion investigate communism in America, most notably in One Lonely Night (1951), where he slaughters a whole warehouse full of commie agents, it was in his spy series, which he began in the mid-1960s, that Spillane really opened up the genre. As many critics have pointed out, Tiger Mann is really Mike Hammer as a secret agent, but, for that matter, all of Spillane's heroes are just Mike Hammer clones who use the same methods of detection, are as violent, and pursue women with an identical single-mindedness. Spillane even went so far in plotting Day of the Guns to recycle many of the events of I, the Jury (1947), complete with the strip tease conclusion, but this time with a happy ending.

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