One Lonely Knight: Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, and: Yesterday's Faces, Volume Two: Strange Days (review)
Over the years, the Popular Press of Bowling Green State University has been responsible for much of the best and worst criticism of popular fictional genres. The two books here reviewed present part of the spectrum of the press's success and failure. Let's enter near the bottom so we can come out on top. "Critics usually miss the point with Spillane," Max Allan Collins and James L. Traylor assert early in One Lonely Knight. Still, even Spillane's severest critics must admit, the authors continue, that Mike Hammer's creator is a master, in severe critic Anthony Boucher's words, of "compelling you to read the next page." Perhaps. I, however, suffer a different if related debility as reviewer: I feel I may have missed the point not of Spillane but of One Lonely Knight, though I do confess to having felt compelled to turn its pages, often hoping the next would be better than the last, occasionally hoping the next would be the last.