Besides being the longest Spillane novel, The Erection Set is among the best written. Longer, more descriptive passages replace the short, dialoguedriven earlier prose, and rather than relying on the terse sketchy accounts of the weather or the locale, Spillane uses detailed, extensive renderings to set the scene. The departure from his usual style may be because the novel ranges outside the normal Spillane terrain.

The small town milieu is not Mike Hammer's usual turf, and when appropriating it for The Erection Set, Spillane may have felt that a more descriptive style was needed.

Another peculiarity of the novel are the "Reflections," or internal dialogues, given to various individual characters.

They allow Spillane to insert the thoughts of others in his first-person narrative. Most of them are about Dog, and they reveal not only what the other characters are thinking but also something of their own psychology, which...