The Last Cop Out by Mickey Spillane
First edition published 1973
My copy 1973 (Signet Paperback edition)
Cover designer unknown
192pgs
The Author
Frank Morrison “Mickey” Spillane (1918–2006) was known as the “king of pulp fiction.” The creator of the toughest two-fisted private eye hero of the classic pulp era, Mike Hammer, Spillane was a prolific writer who sold more than 225 million copies of his books during his lifetime, and they continue to sell today. The Mike Hammer books took the private eye fiction of Chandler and Hammett to a more violent and overtly sexual place, and later stories shifted their focus from gangsters and cheating wives to “communists and deviants.”
The most overtly right-wing of the classic PI novelists, Spillane’s books—and the comic books he wrote, including the slightly more suitable for children Mike Hammer equivalent Mike Danger—represented a push against the growing counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s, with the private detectives and, later in his career more frequently, police officers, at their center pushing back against the “rules” that prevented them from doing their jobs effectively. The Last Cop Out, today’s book, is one of those in the Dirty Harry vein, its hero a cop who’s been taken off the force for brutality but still wages a quest against the mob through his own violent means.
Spillane’s popularity, especially that of Mike Hammer, went far beyond just bestselling novels and comic books. Hammer has appeared in numerous theatrical and TV movies, including the highly influential paranoid cold war thriller Kiss Me Deadly with Ralph Meeker as Hammer, and the British-made The Girl Hunters, in which Spillane himself portrayed his own two-fisted hero. Darren McGavin played Hammer in a 1958 TV series, and Stacy Keach brought the character to a new generation in the 1980s and 1990s.
I’ve read a few Spillane creations over the years. Being such a prolific author, his output widely varies in quality. The first Hammer novel, I, The Jury, is a classic of the genre. His final novel, Dead Street, finished by his literary executor Max Allan Collins for the great Hard Case Crime imprint, is an interesting examination of a typical Spillane hero in the winter of his years. Killer Mine contains two hard-hitting novelettes, predictable but fun.
And then there’s The Last Cop Out.
The Book
The Last Cop Out, published in 1973, features as its hero Gill Burke, a tough, hard-nosed New York City cop who has been kicked off the force by the “liberals and do-gooders” in power. When a series of mob murders baffles the local cops, his former partner Bill Long brings him back into the fold to investigate. In what would be a spoiler-twist in any less predictable book, but is telegraphed from the very first chapter, Gill himself is behind the murders, using them to sow dissention in the ranks of the syndicate to bring it down. Think Yojimbo but way fucking dumber.
Now that I’ve ruined the book’s twist for you, you don’t have to read it. It is not good. For a book chock full of violence and sex—weirdly explicit, often non-consensual, and anally focused sex—it is profoundly boring, lacking any storytelling momentum or coherence. Gill Burke, a completely flat wish fulfillment character, makes Dirty Harry look like a a bleeding heart. All the mobster baddies are sexual deviants who are either small-dicked or impotent or both. The most evil mob hitman is, of course, not only a homosexual but FRENCH, if you can believe it. The female characters are either literal whores or long-suffering daughters of the policemen who keep our world safe from these deviants—when they’re allowed to. Gill Burke is in many places at once to commit all the murders he needs to for the plot to work, and everyone around him is a complete moron for not noticing right away he’s behind all of it. If it had a sense of humor about itself, it might work as parody or commentary, but it is deadly serious. Unlike the aforementioned I, The Jury or Dead Street, or even the predictable but fun Killer Mine, this is a truly unpleasant reading experience that should be avoided at all costs.
The Cover
Like many lesser books in the pulp canon, the cover is the best thing about The Last Cop Out. Unlike most of the books I’ve covered, this one isn’t hand-painted, just a simple photograph of a naked blonde’s beautiful backside. While the photographer and cover designer have been lost to history, the model has not—this tan-lined behind belongs to Sherri Spillane (nee Malinou), a nightclub singer turned model and sometime actress and the author’s second wife. The two married in 1965 when he was 46 and she 23, and divorced acrimoniously in 1983. She also appeared on the covers of several other Spillane novels of the era, most infamously this cover for The Erection Set.