I, the Jury

I, The Jury (1947) is Mickey Spillane's first novel featuring private investigator Mike Hammer. New York City, summer 1944. Although she runs a successful private psychiatric clinic on New York's Park Avenue, Dr. Charlotte Manning — young, beautiful, blonde, and well-to-do — 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...