Book Review : The Goliath Bone

I enjoyed this book. It’s the first Mike Hammer book I’ve read and it’s a real page turner. There’s a lot of dialogue and almost all the scenes contribute to the story. It is fast-paced with no unnecessary descriptions of a scene or long tedious musings on a character’s existence. No wonder a lot of literary critics panned these books, but then John Steinbeck’s ‘Sweet Thursday’ was detested by some critics too.

As you might expect, the story gets a bit silly at times – for example most skeletons are found with two legs, so shouldn’t there have been two bones to be dug up, more or less side by side? Many of the characters don’t make it to the end of the book and Hammer’s 45 does jam at a most convenient time, but this aside I liked the ending and how he got rid of all the assassins regardless of how he felt about them.

There was a subtle change of writing towards the end and I’d love to know which parts of the book were written by Max Allan Collins, who took over when Spillane passed away.