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Tiger Mann #3
The Death Dealers
A tough-guy mystery to please even the most bloodthirsty of fans!
172 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1966
6 people are currently reading
106 people want to read
About the author
Mickey Spillane
316 books446 followersMickey Spillane was one of the world's most popular mystery writers. His specialty was tight-fisted, sadistic revenge stories, often featuring his alcoholic gumshoe Mike Hammer and a cast of evildoers who launder money or spout the Communist Party line.
His writing style was characterized by short words, lightning transitions, gruff sex and violent endings. It was once tallied that he offed 58 people in six novels.
Starting with "I, the Jury," in 1947, Mr. Spillane sold hundreds of millions of books during his lifetime and garnered consistently scathing reviews. Even his father, a Brooklyn bartender, called them "crud."
Mr. Spillane was a struggling comic book publisher when he wrote "I, the Jury." He initially envisioned it as a comic book called "Mike Danger," and when that did not go over, he took a week to reconfigure it as a novel.
Even the editor in chief of E.P. Dutton and Co., Mr. Spillane's publisher, was skeptical of the book's literary merit but conceded it would probably be a smash with postwar readers looking for ready action. He was right. The book, in which Hammer pursues a murderous narcotics ring led by a curvaceous female psychiatrist, went on to sell more than 1 million copies.
Mr. Spillane spun out six novels in the next five years, among them "My Gun Is Quick," "The Big Kill," "One Lonely Night" and "Kiss Me, Deadly." Most concerned Hammer, his faithful sidekick, Velda, and the police homicide captain Pat Chambers, who acknowledges that Hammer's style of vigilante justice is often better suited than the law to dispatching criminals.
Mr. Spillane's success rankled other critics, who sometimes became very personal in their reviews. Malcolm Cowley called Mr. Spillane "a homicidal paranoiac," going on to note what he called his misogyny and vigilante tendencies.
His books were translated into many languages, and he proved so popular as a writer that he was able to transfer his thick-necked, barrel-chested personality across many media. With the charisma of a redwood, he played Hammer in "The Girl Hunters," a 1963 film adaptation of his novel.
Spillane also scripted several television shows and films and played a detective in the 1954 suspense film "Ring of Fear," set at a Clyde Beatty circus. He rewrote much of the film, too, refusing payment. In gratitude, the producer, John Wayne, surprised him one morning with a white Jaguar sportster wrapped in a red ribbon. The card read, "Thanks, Duke."
Done initially on a dare from his publisher, Mr. Spillane wrote a children's book, "The Day the Sea Rolled Back" (1979), about two boys who find a shipwreck loaded with treasure. This won a Junior Literary Guild award.
He also wrote another children's novel, "The Ship That Never Was," and then wrote his first Mike Hammer mystery in 20 years with "The Killing Man" (1989). "Black Alley" followed in 1996. In the last, a rapidly aging Hammer comes out of a gunshot-induced coma, then tracks down a friend's murderer and billions in mob loot. For the first time, he also confesses his love for Velda but, because of doctor's orders, cannot consummate the relationship.
Late in life, he received a career achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America and was named a grand master by the Mystery Writers of America.
In his private life, he neither smoked nor drank and was a house-to-house missionary for the Jehovah's Witnesses. He expressed at times great disdain for what he saw as corrosive forces in American life, from antiwar protesters to the United Nations.
His marriages to Mary Ann Pearce and Sherri Malinou ended in divorce. His second wife, a model, posed nude for the dust jacket of his 1972 novel "The Erection Set."
Survivors include his third wife, Jane Rodgers Johnson, a former beauty queen 30 years his junior; and four children from the first marriage.
He also carried on a long epistolary flirtation with Ayn Rand, an admirer of his writing.
His writing style was characterized by short words, lightning transitions, gruff sex and violent endings. It was once tallied that he offed 58 people in six novels.
Starting with "I, the Jury," in 1947, Mr. Spillane sold hundreds of millions of books during his lifetime and garnered consistently scathing reviews. Even his father, a Brooklyn bartender, called them "crud."
Mr. Spillane was a struggling comic book publisher when he wrote "I, the Jury." He initially envisioned it as a comic book called "Mike Danger," and when that did not go over, he took a week to reconfigure it as a novel.
Even the editor in chief of E.P. Dutton and Co., Mr. Spillane's publisher, was skeptical of the book's literary merit but conceded it would probably be a smash with postwar readers looking for ready action. He was right. The book, in which Hammer pursues a murderous narcotics ring led by a curvaceous female psychiatrist, went on to sell more than 1 million copies.
Mr. Spillane spun out six novels in the next five years, among them "My Gun Is Quick," "The Big Kill," "One Lonely Night" and "Kiss Me, Deadly." Most concerned Hammer, his faithful sidekick, Velda, and the police homicide captain Pat Chambers, who acknowledges that Hammer's style of vigilante justice is often better suited than the law to dispatching criminals.
Mr. Spillane's success rankled other critics, who sometimes became very personal in their reviews. Malcolm Cowley called Mr. Spillane "a homicidal paranoiac," going on to note what he called his misogyny and vigilante tendencies.
His books were translated into many languages, and he proved so popular as a writer that he was able to transfer his thick-necked, barrel-chested personality across many media. With the charisma of a redwood, he played Hammer in "The Girl Hunters," a 1963 film adaptation of his novel.
Spillane also scripted several television shows and films and played a detective in the 1954 suspense film "Ring of Fear," set at a Clyde Beatty circus. He rewrote much of the film, too, refusing payment. In gratitude, the producer, John Wayne, surprised him one morning with a white Jaguar sportster wrapped in a red ribbon. The card read, "Thanks, Duke."
Done initially on a dare from his publisher, Mr. Spillane wrote a children's book, "The Day the Sea Rolled Back" (1979), about two boys who find a shipwreck loaded with treasure. This won a Junior Literary Guild award.
He also wrote another children's novel, "The Ship That Never Was," and then wrote his first Mike Hammer mystery in 20 years with "The Killing Man" (1989). "Black Alley" followed in 1996. In the last, a rapidly aging Hammer comes out of a gunshot-induced coma, then tracks down a friend's murderer and billions in mob loot. For the first time, he also confesses his love for Velda but, because of doctor's orders, cannot consummate the relationship.
Late in life, he received a career achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America and was named a grand master by the Mystery Writers of America.
In his private life, he neither smoked nor drank and was a house-to-house missionary for the Jehovah's Witnesses. He expressed at times great disdain for what he saw as corrosive forces in American life, from antiwar protesters to the United Nations.
His marriages to Mary Ann Pearce and Sherri Malinou ended in divorce. His second wife, a model, posed nude for the dust jacket of his 1972 novel "The Erection Set."
Survivors include his third wife, Jane Rodgers Johnson, a former beauty queen 30 years his junior; and four children from the first marriage.
He also carried on a long epistolary flirtation with Ayn Rand, an admirer of his writing.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
March 2, 2025
Published in 1966, Spillane's Tiger Mann #3 (of 4) continues his experiment in the espionage spy genre as a excursion from his gumshoe detective characters.
In this book Tiger has to get close to, protect and then extract assistance from a Middle Eastern Arab and his young bride, oil contracts playing off America with Russia. Add to the mix a dangerous assassin spoiling the American play and with revenge in mind for Tiger Mann while he is in the country.
Dated somewhat by it's racial slurs and rampant macho stance, it is however true to the era and the genre, so the reader shouldn't complain on those matters. There was no lack of action and at 172 pages it moves fast enough to keep up the interest.
There is little of challenge in the reading, as is usual with Spillane, but there was plenty to entertain me while this sat in my car to fill in those spare moments.
3 stars
In this book Tiger has to get close to, protect and then extract assistance from a Middle Eastern Arab and his young bride, oil contracts playing off America with Russia. Add to the mix a dangerous assassin spoiling the American play and with revenge in mind for Tiger Mann while he is in the country.
Dated somewhat by it's racial slurs and rampant macho stance, it is however true to the era and the genre, so the reader shouldn't complain on those matters. There was no lack of action and at 172 pages it moves fast enough to keep up the interest.
There is little of challenge in the reading, as is usual with Spillane, but there was plenty to entertain me while this sat in my car to fill in those spare moments.
3 stars
July 2, 2023
Spillane’s foray into espionage pulp is about what I expected. Formulaic to a bit of fault in terms of plotting but certainly worth seeing him give the rotten bastard Mike Hammer treatment to a Bond-esque character, making him so blatantly fascist and ugly it's impossible to ignore and just have fun with him. I kinda knew what I was in for when Tiger Mann was considering paralyzing a woman with a beretta to the spine for the crime of tailing him in the opening pages.
July 9, 2017
This is the third of the four Tiger Mann novels Spillane published in the mid-60's at a time when everyone and their grandmother was churning out spy novels. But Tiger Mann is not like any of the gadget- oriented spies that were so popular. With his temper and his .45, Tiger is the spy version of Mike Hammer. In some ways, he's almost Conan the Barbarianin a leisure suit. He's tough, self-assured, and has a take no prisoners attitude. This book is one of the best of this short series and involves a Middle Eastern sheik, his young bride to be, a whole mess of oil contracts, and a struggle for influence between the East and the West. No one else wrote such hard edged material. A worthy addition to your Spillane library.
February 20, 2020
While I am a fan of a lot of Spillane's work and characters, this one was underwhelming, filled with lots of lazy writing, cliches and coincidences. Mann is not a character you can get behind and root for, and this one mostly failed to draw me in and engage me. There were a few sequences that were well done, but they were too few and too far between.
December 2, 2017
Have never read a Micky Spillane, was a little too macho for me.
December 31, 2017
Not one of his better efforts but if you like Mickey Spillane, it's enjoyable reading. Tiger Mann gets into a little foreign intrigue in New York City.
May 6, 2021
Boring, uneventful, completely forgettable.
May 20, 2021
Another great Spillane read drenched in ultraviolence and megasex. It's fast and vicious and fun. I just wish he'd lay off the racial slurs.
March 6, 2023
Typical Spillane. Quick, easy, entertaining read.
October 19, 2025
Bros fiancé almost gets strangled to death and he responds by sleeping with this queen because the king is infertile and wants a son 🥀
July 22, 2021
1.2/5
I struggled with my decision to rate this a 1 or a 2, but decided on the 1. Having read a few of Spillane's Mike Hammer novels I thought I was prepared for some ridiculousness typical of this type of genre, but apparently I was not, as it took me almost a full year to finish reading the ebook. I almost gave up multiple times. Why?
I'll tell you why. Tiger Mann is a shithead. He's like a more racist, xenophobic, sexist, over-compensating version of Mike Hammer, and possesses less of a personality than Hammer, too. Normally I can laugh at characters like these, but Spillane writes him in a way that strikes me as disturbingly sincere, and that's sad, because in the first four chapters, he rants about how America is the only thing keeping the 'animals' in foreign countries from killing themselves and each other; he belittles a fellow field agent simply because she's a woman and that's not the kind of job a woman should be working, apparently--and also threatened to rape her on a number of occasions both for more classified information about her role in things (which he has no business knowing in the first place) as well as for his own gratification; and the cherry on top is when he unironically dresses in blackface to infiltrate a corporate meeting with the persons of interest from the other side of the globe.
If the story was competently written, I might've given this two stars despite the insufferable protagonist, but unfortunately, the story is boring and poorly written, and this particular Kindle edition is horribly edited. Run-on sentences describing a naked woman and more run-on sentences in Mann's rants about how Americans are so much better than everyone else. This is why it took me from October 2020 to June 2021 to finish this shitty 'thriller'.
Hard pass on the rest of the Tiger Mann series; Mike Hammer was performing a precarious balancing act on the threshold of bigoted self-parody as it is. Tiger Mann swan-dives into it.
I struggled with my decision to rate this a 1 or a 2, but decided on the 1. Having read a few of Spillane's Mike Hammer novels I thought I was prepared for some ridiculousness typical of this type of genre, but apparently I was not, as it took me almost a full year to finish reading the ebook. I almost gave up multiple times. Why?
I'll tell you why. Tiger Mann is a shithead. He's like a more racist, xenophobic, sexist, over-compensating version of Mike Hammer, and possesses less of a personality than Hammer, too. Normally I can laugh at characters like these, but Spillane writes him in a way that strikes me as disturbingly sincere, and that's sad, because in the first four chapters, he rants about how America is the only thing keeping the 'animals' in foreign countries from killing themselves and each other; he belittles a fellow field agent simply because she's a woman and that's not the kind of job a woman should be working, apparently--and also threatened to rape her on a number of occasions both for more classified information about her role in things (which he has no business knowing in the first place) as well as for his own gratification; and the cherry on top is when he unironically dresses in blackface to infiltrate a corporate meeting with the persons of interest from the other side of the globe.
If the story was competently written, I might've given this two stars despite the insufferable protagonist, but unfortunately, the story is boring and poorly written, and this particular Kindle edition is horribly edited. Run-on sentences describing a naked woman and more run-on sentences in Mann's rants about how Americans are so much better than everyone else. This is why it took me from October 2020 to June 2021 to finish this shitty 'thriller'.
Hard pass on the rest of the Tiger Mann series; Mike Hammer was performing a precarious balancing act on the threshold of bigoted self-parody as it is. Tiger Mann swan-dives into it.
July 19, 2016
Tiger Mann is a spy for a private espionage agency. Another operative is on a mission in the middle-eastern country of Selachin when something goes wrong and he sends a Skyline message via interpol to Tiger. This means that the operation is out of control and the operative could be dead. The leader of Selachin is coming to America to negotiate oil treaties and an old enemy of Tiger is going to attempt to assassinate him for Russian interests. Tiger must keep the Selachin leader safe in order convince him to protect his fellow operatives in Selachin, while fending off federal and Interpol investigations into his own group.
This was a great story, action packed, and well written. The prose was gritty and colorful. I enjoyed this book a lot. While dated by modern standards, if read as if you're watching a grittier version of a 60's Bond movie it's extremely entertaining.
This was a great story, action packed, and well written. The prose was gritty and colorful. I enjoyed this book a lot. While dated by modern standards, if read as if you're watching a grittier version of a 60's Bond movie it's extremely entertaining.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 4, 2017
#3 in the Tiger Mann series. They don't write pulp thrillers like this any more, but they sure were fun.
Tiger Mann series - TIGER MANN, THE SNARLING, SLUGGING SECRET AGENT WHO BREAKS ALL THE RULES, AIMS FOR THE GUT, WINS ANY WAY HE CAN. Watch Tiger. He's on a danger-charged mission involving Arabian oil, a king, an assassination plot, and a number one harem girl. The stakes are dynamite. So's Tiger.
Tiger Mann series - TIGER MANN, THE SNARLING, SLUGGING SECRET AGENT WHO BREAKS ALL THE RULES, AIMS FOR THE GUT, WINS ANY WAY HE CAN. Watch Tiger. He's on a danger-charged mission involving Arabian oil, a king, an assassination plot, and a number one harem girl. The stakes are dynamite. So's Tiger.
February 24, 2013
A normal Mickey Spillane story. I wonder why I liked his novels when I was younger.
Compared to Mr. Spillane both senator Joseph Mccarthy and F.B.I. boss J.Edgar Hoover appear to be very liberal and understanding individuals. This kind of nihilism and prejudice are hard to find anywhere on Earth.
Compared to Mr. Spillane both senator Joseph Mccarthy and F.B.I. boss J.Edgar Hoover appear to be very liberal and understanding individuals. This kind of nihilism and prejudice are hard to find anywhere on Earth.
December 22, 2008
Liked it but its pretty ridiculous....
November 23, 2014
Not as good as Mike Hammer, but still decent.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews