Kerr and Leiber weren’t just mocking the style, but the tropes. Not the most enlightened views of much of anything were put forth in the Hammer novels, and a lot of it was tapping into as much Raw Id as possible. Hence both their power, when it works, and their acceptability to mass audiences, who could treat it as a Guilty Pleasure if it bothered them how much they enjoyed it otherwise. I forget what Kerr’s was titled (but I do clearly remember that the romantic interest orders “straight Clorox” at the bar, then turns to Hammer: “I’m clean inside, Mike.”), but Leiber’s was “The Night He Cried” and was an all-out mockery of the Spillane put forth through the Hammer novels.

It was William Nolan whom I first read making the observation, in THE BLACK MASK BOYS, that Spillane was clearly the heir to Carroll John Daly, except with a less clunky prose style and a lack of restraint about sexuality, all of which made Daly, in comparison, seem as out of date in Spillane’s heyday as you, George, posit Spilane is now. Otherwise, the self-righteous tough-guy vigilante, shooting first and not bothering much with questions, and other tendencies were rather similar. Andrew Vacchs might be the closest thing to Spillane on the contemporary scene.