Forgotten Books: Me, Hood -- Mickey Spillane

I'm not sure what the story is on this book.  The edition pictured here contains two novellas about a hood called Ryan or Irish.  The front cover says "First Time Published in the U. S.!  The back cover says "two pulse-racers never before published in the U.S."  The two novellas were, however, published in Cavalier magazine years before the book came out, at least according to this website, which also gives three items as the contents of the book.  Though the photo is of the book I have, mine has only two novellas, one of of which is different from the one mentioned on the website.  Google Books has excerpts from that edition, and obviously it's not the book I have.  What does all this mean?  I have no idea.  Maybe Max Allan Collins does.

Oh, one other thing.  My copyright page says the book is "published by arrangement with E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc."  As far as I can discover, there was no Dutton edition of the book.


The two novellas in my book are "Me, Hood" and "Return of the Hood."  The first one has Ryan pressed into service by the cops and the feds, and the MacGuffin is, well, nobody's sure.  Ryan's job is to find it.  Lots of others are looking, and a deadly Mafia assassin is on the job.  If you don't guess who the assassin is, you've never read anything else by Spillane.

"Return of the Hood" has a different MacGuffin, a bit of microfilm stuck in a capsule.  The capsule is passed to Ryan by a spy, a woman who's about to be shot because, well, he looks like the kind of guy who can protect it.  Ryan promptly loses it.  He follows quite a bloody trail to get it back.  In the process he's [SPOILER ALERT] totally helpless twice and gets rescued each time by the same woman.

I got a kick out of both stories, though there are some offhand remarks in both novellas that are so politically incorrect that I doubt they'd be published today.  And I think everyone can agree that the back-cover blurb is one of the all-time greats:  "Me, Hood!  You, Corpse!"  Classic.