One Lonely Night

'[Spillane] was a quintessential Cold War writer, an unconditional believer in good and evil' Washington Times

Before Jack Reacher . . . there was Mike Hammer

PI Mike Hammer is out for a late-night walk in the rain when he sees a woman being pursued across a bridge. He deals with the man, but, terrified, the woman jumps to her death.

Pat Chambers, Hammer's police department friend, identifies the pair as Communists. Hammer visits a meeting of the local party and is mistaken for a Soviet spy. Into the mix comes Oscar, the insane brother of a political candidate on an anti-corruption ticket, who Hammer must deal with so that the politician's career prospects aren't spiked. But is Oscar really what they say he is?

Meanwhile, Velda, Hammer's adored secretary, goes missing, and Hammer soon finds out that the two incidents are linked by a deadly thread . . .

About the Author

Born Frank Morrison Spillane in Brooklyn, New York City, Mickey Spillane started writing while at high school. During the Second World War, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and became a fighter pilot and instructor. After the war, he moved to South Carolina. He was married three times, the third time to Jane Rogers Johnson, and had four children and two stepchildren. He wrote his first novel, I, the Jury (1947), in order to raise the money to buy a house for himself and his first wife, Mary Ann Pearce. The novel sold six and a half million copies in the United States, and introduced Spillane's most famous character, the hardboiled PI Mike Hammer.

The many novels that followed became instant bestsellers, until in 1980 the US all-time fiction bestseller list of fifteen titles boasted seven by Mickey Spillane. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally. He was uniformly disliked by critics, owing to the high content of sex and violence in his books. However, he was later praised by American mystery writers Max Alan Collins and William L. DeAndrea, as well as artist Markus L pertz. The novelist Ayn Rand, a friend of Spillane's, appreciated the black-and-white morality of his books. Spillane was an active Jehovah's Witness. He died in 2006.