The Big Kill was published by E. P. Dutton in 1951, the third Mike Hammer novel and one of the bestselling books of the early 1950s. The opening is one of Spillane’s most effective: a man stumbles into a bar where Hammer is drinking, places a baby on the bar stool, and dies. Hammer — whose violence usually serves his own rage — now has a protective motive: someone killed this child’s father, and the child (whom Hammer temporarily takes into his care) deserves justice.
The investigation leads into a pornography ring connected to corrupt politicians — a conspiracy that exploits the vulnerable (including children) for profit and protects itself through political connections and police corruption. Spillane uses the infant’s vulnerability as moral justification for Hammer’s escalating violence: when children are at stake, there are no restraints.
The novel’s structure is characteristic Spillane: episodic encounters (each involving either violence or sexuality, often both), a mounting sense of conspiracy, and a final revelation that allows Hammer to execute the guilty party with what the novel presents as righteous satisfaction. The prose moves at speed — short sentences, active verbs, physical specificity about violence — and the reader is carried along by momentum rather than subtlety.
The critics continued to condemn Spillane (Anthony Boucher called the Hammer novels “homicidal paranoiac fantasies”), and the public continued to buy millions of copies.
Collecting The Big Kill
First edition (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1951): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $80–$250
- Without jacket: $10–$25
- Signet paperback first: $5–$15