I, the Jury

I, The Jury (1947) is Mickey Spillane's first novel featuring private investigator Mike Hammer. The novel is set in and around New York City in the summer of 1944. Although she runs a successful private psychiatric clinic on New York's Park Avenue, Dr. Charlotte Manning — young, beautiful, blonde, well-to-do, and sexually starved (maybe) — cannot get enough. In order to increase her profit, she gets involved with a group of criminals — a "syndica... more

I, The Jury (1947) is Mickey Spillane's first novel featuring private investigator Mike Hammer. The novel is set in and around New York City in the summer of 1944. Although she runs a successful private psychiatric clinic on New York's Park Avenue, Dr. Charlotte Manning — young, beautiful, blonde, well-to-do, and sexually starved (maybe) — cannot get enough. In order to increase her profit, she gets involved with a group of criminals — a "syndicate" — specialising in both prostitution and drug-trafficking. The brains of the "outfit" is Hal Kines, who has had plastic surgery so that he looks much younger than he really is, this being how he gets hold of the young women whom he then turns into prostitutes. Manning herself has a rich and "ritzy" clientele — people who would not want their addiction to become public knowledge. But instead of weaning them off drugs in her private and exclusive clinic, Manning makes them even more dependent on both the drug — heroin in most cases — and on... less