The Mike Hammer novels come directly out of the traditions of the hard-boiled detective fiction of the 1920s and 1930s when writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were creating a new and vital American prose genre. From their beginnings in the pulps, especially The Black Mask, the writers worked to develop a writing style stripped of all its literary pretensions and to depict a world of crime, particularly murder, which dealt with actual criminals and avoided all of the excesses of the Sherlock Holmes's school of eccentric and mannered private investigators. The hard-boiled dick actually got down among the petty grafters, rummies, hookers, and pimps to investigate his crimes. He was also not above being seduced occasionally by money, sex, or power. He drank and swore and got beaten up. By the time Mickey Spillane began writing just after the war, the traditions of the...