I guess I haven’t talked as much about Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer here as you might expect. But my pal Andrew Sumner – also my editor in the UK at Titan Books – sent me this fun audience-recorded clip of Ray Gelato and his band performing “Harlem Nocturne,” which was the theme of the Mike Hammer TV show. It’s a lovely job of it.
For Andrew and a lot of Hammer fans, the entry point for Mickey and Mike seems to be the three TV series and the various TV movies starring Stacy Keach, which were the last time Hammer hit the popular culture hard in the late twentieth century, a time when Mike Hammer ruled until James Bond came along, an imitator of sorts who usurped the original. Stacy was Mike starting in 1983 and as late as 1998 (not counting the early 2000’s audios I did with him).
You might expect my entry point to have been the novels themselves, and I started reading those and Mickey’s other books at a very young age. But my introduction to Hammer was through the 1958-1959 syndicated series starring Darren McGavin. Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer was a tough show with episodes written by various pulp writers and adapted from pulp stories with McGavin extraordinarily hardhitting and violent with just enough tongue-in-cheek humor to get past the censors despite the bevy of sexy ‘50s starlets who also inhabited the series.
Pat Chambers was present, played mostly by Bart Burns, but Velda – mentioned a few times – was not. (In my fannish mind she was absent because, in the books, she disappeared behind the Iron Curtain for a decade or so.) At times, in interviews, McGavin disowned the character, but the persona he developed on the series was one he carried with him into The Outsider, The Night Stalker and countless other TV appearances post-Hammer.
The series was mostly shot on the Republic backlot but with enough location shooting in NYC to sell it. McGavin was a great Hammer, though Mickey was unhappy that a .38 replaced the trademark .45. Part of what made McGavin work for viewers at a time when Spillane himself was a big media figure was McGavin’s physical resemblance to the character’s creator.
Check out this complete rendition by Martin of the full Riff Blues/Hammer theme, with some cool images.
Hammer on screen was always a problem. The first-person nature of the novels meant that everybody had a mental image of who this tough private eye was. That included Mickey, who didn’t think the original screen Mike Hammer, the still underrated Biff Elliot, was big enough. Mickey lobbied for his cop pal Jack Stang, who did a test film directed by Mickey and whose image appeared as Hammer here and there in the mid-‘50s.
But Stang was no actor. In the film Ring of Fear (1954), Stang was implied to be Hammer under an alias, but it was Mickey playing himself – famous mystery writer Mickey Spillane – who seemed like Hammer come to life.
That led to Mickey taking over the role in the first movie following McGavin’s TV run, The Girl Hunters (1962). Though not everyone agrees with me, I’ve always felt Mickey did a terrific job, and one that was actually compatible with McGavin’s take. Mickey also fit in well with the other accurate screen Hammer, the aforementioned Biff Elliot, who was the first motion-picture Mike in I, the Jury (1953).
Already you may have noticed there’s a small army of actors who have portrayed Hammer. Ian Fleming was lucky the producers of Dr. No (also 1962) stumbled onto Sean Connery. And a question I am often asked is: who’s your favorite Hammer on screen?
First, let’s rule Mickey out. Obviously he’s my sentimental favorite – The Girl Hunters (1963) is the most faithful to the character and the novels, and Mickey was and is Mike Hammer, so let’s set that aside.
Who are Hammer actors that are not favorite Hammers of mine? Robert Bray is physically correct but overacts blusteringly throughout the rather dismal My Gun Is Quick (1957). A bare-headed Brian Keith played Hammer well enough in the abortive pilot that preceded the McGavin series; but he’s not really Hammer. Kevin Dobson in Margin for Murder (1981) was just okay (Cindy Pickett was badly miscast as Velda). Rob Estes was Hammer in name only in Come Die With Me (1994).
Now it gets tricky.
Ralph Meeker is the best big-screen Mike Hammer, but his take – and director Robert Aldrich’s and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides’ – is so counter to Spillane’s intention as to be irrelevant to this discussion. Meeker and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) are oranges while we are discussing apples. I love the movie – it’s my favorite Hammer film by a country mile – but it sits in a niche of its own, the anti-Spillane movie that nonetheless captures Spillane’s mood, sex, violence, pace and tone better than any other.
Who does that leave?
Stacy Keach did the impossible – he lightly kidded Hammer while remaining tough; in this he’s similar to McGavin. But McGavin – and Biff Elliot, Ralph Meeker and Mickey Spillane himself – were of the original Hammer era. The Keach Hammer is a man out of time, a motif the series effectively played with in its best episodes. I’m honored to have worked with this great actor on two audio dramas and hold his Hammer in high regard.
I have to rule out Gary Sandy, who appeared in the only stage version of Mike Hammer to date – in three live productions at three venues, the final time in Muscatine, Iowa, and captured on camera in Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder, which I wrote and directed.
But it was Darren McGavin’s Hammer who captured my adolescent imagination. And the episodes hold up. A good half dozen of the 78 episodes were rage-filled, vengeance-fueled visits to Spillane’s world at its harshest.
So, with my arm twisted, I have to tip my invisible fedora to Darren McGavin. And admit that Skip Martin’s “Riff Blues” – the Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer theme – will always take my personal first place over the great “Harlem Nocturne.”
Listen and look: here is the McGavin opening followed by the three Keach openings with some of the greatest private eye music you’ll ever hear.
M.A.C.
