Mickey Spillane’s Day of the Guns

Day of the Guns was the first of Mickey Spillane’s four Tiger Mann espionage thrillers written between 1964 and 1966.

Not surprisingly the formula is not all that different from Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels. There’s plenty of sex and violence. Tiger Mann resembles Mike Hammer in that he gets personally involved in a case and the case quickly becomes a kind of one-man crusade.

Tiger Mann is a counter-espionage agent but he doesn’t exactly work for the US government. Although he does at times work in with official intelligence agencies his actual employer seems to be a wealthy individual named Martin Grady who runs a kind of private intelligence and espionage operation. Grady’s organisation runs operations that the official intelligence agencies are not prepared (or not permitted) to handle. Whether Grady’s outfit operates with the unofficial blessings of the government is not entirely clear. Grady clearly has powerful political connections and there are many important people who are happy to allow him to run his private spy operations but it’s also made obvious that there are other important people who would like Grady’s outfit shut down.

So Tiger Mann is an outsider of sorts, or rather he’s very much like Mike Hammer in being not quite an insider and not quite an outsider. Tiger does not worry overmuch about legal niceties. In fact he doesn’t worry about such things at all. He not only ignores the law when he finds it convenient to do so he also totally ignores matters like diplomatic immunity. Soviet spies operating under diplomatic cover generally don’t have much opportunity to claim diplomatic immunity when they encounter Tiger Mann - he usually just kills them and lets someone else worry about clearing up those kinds of irritating details.

Spillane’s Mike Hammer was a character who was inclined to take the law into his own hands, a habit which upset many of Spillane’s critics. Tiger Mann takes things much further than Hammer. To Tiger the threat of communist subversion is so great that it can only be countered by using methods that are just as ruthless and immoral as those of the communists themselves.  

In fact of course just about every fictional spy hero at some point finds himself doing things that are technically illegal and morally dubious.  Espionage is a dirty game. Tiger Mann is just more blatant about it than most. He doesn’t even pretend to play fair and he doesn’t make any attempt to disguise the elements of vigilante justice and personal vengeance in his motivations. Some readers might feel that Spillane pushes these things too far in this novel but really if you’re squeamish about such things you probably shouldn’t be reading Mickey Spillane at all.

Day of the Guns opens with Tiger Mann encountering a woman quite by chance. He hasn’t seen her for twenty years but he recognises her immediately. Rondine Lund had been a Nazi spy during World War 2 and a young American spy named Tiger Mann had fallen in love with her. Tiger paid a high price at the time for making such a foolish mistake. Rondine had also been responsible for the deaths of a number of American agents. Tiger has nursed his hatred of Rondine for two decades and now he knows she’s alive and in New York City and he intends to kill her. 

Rondine doesn’t look quite the same. She has had plastic surgery and she now claims to be Edith Caine, an English translator working at the UN. Tiger however has no doubt that Edith Caine is indeed Rondine Lund. He also has no doubt that she is up to her old games of espionage and he intends to find out exactly what nefarious conspiracies she is currently involved in. Once he finds that out he can kill her.

Of course it is immediately obvious that while Tiger hates Rondine he still loves her as well. Even Tiger is aware of this.

While the sexual tension between Tiger and Rondine is one of the engines driving the plot there’s no graphic sex and by later standards the sleaze is fairly muted. The violence on the other hand is quite graphic at times. 

Spillane had dealt peripherally with espionage themes in several of his Mike Hammer novels so it was an obvious move to start writing actual spy thrillers. Day of the Guns isn’t quite your usual spy thriller. It’s more of a crossover crime/espionage tale which has (like the Mike Hammer books) a mystery to be solved. Tiger Mann is very much like Mike Hammer, only more so. Since the plot involves the UN Spillane takes the opportunity to express his views on that subject - not surprisingly he is not a fan of that organisation.

If you’re not a fan of the Mike Hammer books then you’re not going to like this one. If you are a Hammer fan then you’ll find much to enjoy, with typical Spillane themes of love, friendship and betrayal and lots of action and violence. In fact Day of the Guns is pretty much non-stop action with just about everyone wanting to kill poor old Tiger. It’s good hard-boiled fun with a characteristic Spillane plot twist at the end. Recommended for Spillane fans.