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BLACK ALLEY by Mickey Spillane Signet, September 1997 320 pages $out of print ISBN: 0451191021

It started with "I The Jury," back in 1947 and continued for more than a dozen novels through the 1950's. They were fast, hard-hitting and gritty. In the mystery field they made Mike Hammer a detective icon, much like Philip Marlowe of an earlier time. Hammer was, and is, a big, tough, take-no-prisoners P.I. He made the .45 cal automatic a cliché of the genre.

Hammer talked tough and acted tough and when he solved his cases, after bedding at least one of the principal women in the story, they stayed solved. He was the embodiment of the Marine saying, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no evil, for I'm the meanest son-of-a-bitch in the valley." Hammer could say it, mean it, and back it up.

Now it's late in the 1990's. After an almost twenty-year hiatus, Spillane and Hammer are back. But things aren't quite the same. Oh, the supporting cast, Pat, Velda and a full house of connected bad guys are, but there are differences. Here for the first time, we see Hammer as a vulnerable guy, still larger than life, but mortal. You get a powerful sense of that on the first page, when Hammer says, "Eight months ago I had come to Florida to die."

That's right. Hammer had been grievously wounded in a shoot-out on one of New York's infamous piers and been left for dead. Now, hardly recovered enough to be ambulatory, New York is calling and Hammer is responding. There are some debts to settle, and when Hammer returns to New York, without his doctor's blessing, he finds Velda, now a licensed agent, and confronts the possibility of marriage to his long-time secretary and companion. But he's still hurt, the wound in his side making it impossible to carry that big .45 in a shoulder holster, so he's vulnerable.

This is all classic Spillane, and he takes Hammer roaring through New York looking for a way to exonerate an old army buddy of stealing several billion dollars from the mob. To sort out this complicated tale, Hammer takes on the mob, the New York Police Department, and the Federal government. But he also takes on his own mortality. Spillane has himself looked down that dark, one-way alley we all face sooner or later; that alley we can't escape. The dark shadow of finality, waiting somewhere down that alley, lays its cloak over this novel from beginning to end, for Hammer, and for Mickey Spillane.

Reviewed by Carl Brookins, September 1997

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