ABSTRACT
In the late 1940s and early 1950s in America the lone vigilante par excellence was Spillane’s Mike Hammer, who, with massive egotism, assumes in his own revenging instincts the prerogatives of constituted authority (I the Jury). ‘God’s hit man’ as one critic called Hammer, purges society by the same judicial short cuts as his contemporary, Senator Joe McCarthy-a figure with whom he has plausibly been linked.
