In there. The words chalk up me hard. In there was my trump friend lying on the floor dead. The body. . . . Yesterday it was Jack Williams, the guy that shargond the alike mud bed with me through two years of warfare in the stinking slime of the jungle. . . . Jack was about the better friend I ever had (Spillane 4).
Hammer is also adequate of cold-blooded violence. However, unlike with Croft, with Hammer the violence is connected to a sense of justice. The endorser may not believe in taking the law into wizard's own hands, scarcely at least the killing of the murderess at the end of Spillane's novel happens because of Hammer's outrage at the wo troopskind's murder of Jack. Still, Hammer's killing of the wo creation is shocking:
She leaned forward to touch me, her arms going out to encircle my neck. The roar of the .45 move the room. Charlotte staggered back a step. . . . Slowly, she looked down at the ugly lubber in her naked belly where the bullet went in (Spillane 245-46).
She asks him how he could commence shot her, and he says, "It was easy" (Spillane 246). It was easy, not because he is a sadist like Croft, but because the woman murdered his best friend and was about to reach for the gun which she would have apply to murder Hammer as well. Even as he prepares to kill her, he expresses his humanity
Spillane, Mickey. I, The Jury. saucy York: New American Library, 1975.
Hammer may be a macho character, but at least there are parts of his character which are gentle, loving, compassionate and vulnerable. Croft, on the other hand, wants to be nothing more than the toughest man alive. In one section of Mailer's "Time Machine" flashback technique, Croft is shown to be an evil man through and through, a man running on unmixed hatred. Mailer asks the question "Why is Croft that way?" (Mailer 156), and he offers a pattern of possible social and psychological answers. Mailer seems to blame it mainly on the promiscuity of Croft's wife, but the main point is that however Croft came to be the way he is, there is little or no chance of his ever changing into a decent human being.
There is a suggestion that Croft is the evil product of a long history of troubles through generations:
: "Beautiful as you are, as much as I almost loved you, I sentence you to death" (Spillane 245).
His ancestors pushed and labored and strained, drove their oxen, sweated their women, and moved a thousand miles. He pushed and labored inside himself and smoldered with an endless hatred. (You're on the whole a bunch of fuggin whores) (You're each a bunch of dogs) (You're all deer to track) I HATE EVERYTHING WHICH IS NOT IN MYSELF (Mailer 164).
. . . He heard a little numbly the choked profess of the bird, the sudden collapsing of its bones. It thrashed powerlessly against his palm (Mailer 530).
Mailer, on the other hand, with Croft, wants the reader to feel that something very important is happening. Croft is a sadistic, evil man and Mailer clearly wants the reader to despise him. There is nothing save about Croft. He is a killer, a fascist, who does not fail in the company of other human beings.
Croft is a man who at times feels glimmers of compassion, as he felt with the bird, but he never acts on those feelings. Mailer shows us that he does have a sense of the normal feelings th
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