A Slaughter for a Quarter

THE LONG WAIT (256 pp.)--Mickey Spillane--Dutton ($2.50).

Sherlock Holmes wouldn't have been seen with Mike Hammer. Mike is a New York private eye, a big, ugly shamus with more brawn than brains, an oversized appetite for oversized nymphomaniacs and a noisy sense of social justice. A genuine Holmesian wouldn't give Mike shelf space, but five books about him in the past four years have become among the fastest selling mysteries of the decade. Four of them have sold well over a million copies each. When The Big Kill is brought out in reprint next month, it will make the biggest first-printing splash in quarter-book history: 2,500,000 copies. To help swamp the nation's newsstands, another million of the four earlier Mike Hammer chillers will come out on the same day.

Shoot Him In the Belly. Big Mike's creator is Mickey Spillane, 33, a lean-faced, Brooklyn-born Irishman with a crew cut and a personal relish for the gory stuff he writes ("Plenty of fast action and a socko finish"). To get his material, he hangs around with cops and police-beat reporters, and roams Manhattan's Bowery, where he isn't above buying and splitting a bottle with grateful winos ("Couple of my best friends are prostitutes"). A graduate from the pulps and comics, Spillane writes his stories in about a month. He writes them backwards, endings first. The rest of a Spillane book "is built like a joke--all the time working toward the big payoff."

Private-eye Mike Hammer does not figure in the latest book, The Long Wait, but Spillane fans need not be alarmed. In the first place, the hero is a guy just like Mike in every way. The book has the same wooden, hard-guy writing. ("I took off my coat and threw it over a chair. The gun in the pocket clunked on the floor. I stripped off my belt and dangled it from my hand. 'Take off your clothes, Vera.' ") When the villain is done in, the hero kills him with all of Mike Hammer's accustomed relish: "I shot him in the belly a little above the belt . . . 'For Bob Minnow and Mrs. Minnow,' I said.

"I shot him again, a little lower. 'For Logan and Looth Tooth . . .'

"I shot him in the head. For Johnny McBride,' I said."

Proud Beauty. Usually, Mike Hammer's women die by his own hand if they give him the double-cross. This time the hero keeps his girl, but she's the same old prop, right out of Minsky burlesque--"in the sheerest black underwear that could be made. Tall, tanned. Calendar legs. Smooth. The curve of her thighs sweeping into her stomach and on up around the proud beauty of her breasts. The flesh rippled with her breathing across the flat of her waist and her hands came up again to the bra, very slowly."

Spillane frankly likes his chain-smoking, booze-fighting, lecherous hero and the ill-made, unimaginative stories he writes about him. Believing himself to be "the medium-est guy I know," he works on the theory that other people will like his stuff too, and it looks as if he is right. But not everybody: "Funny thing is, my mother loves it and my [ex-bartender] father thinks it's crud."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.