A man who has no memory arrives in the town of Lyncastle and immediately discovers that, whoever he may be, no one wants him around.  One person tells him that his name is Johnny McBride and that the police are looking for him.  Our stranger may not know who he is but he’s fairly sure that he’s not Johnny McBride.  But yet everyone in town insists that he is.  When the police try to check his fingerprints, they discover that he has no fingerprints!  Apparently, he lost them at the same time that he lost his memory….

That’s the set up for Mickey Spillane’s 1951 novel, The Long Wait.  I won’t spoil the rest of it because 1) this book is full of shocking twists, 2) none of them make much sense, but 3) they’re all so over-the-top and ludicrous that you can’t help but love them.  Reading The Long Wait, one gets the feeling that Spillane made up the plot as he went along and it’s hard not to admire his dedication to sticking with the story, no matter how weird and, to be quite frank, ridiculous things got.

This is not one of Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels.  Hammer is not in this book.  If anything, our amnesiac hero is even more violent and brutal than Hammer because the hero of The Long Wait literally has nothing to live for.  Hammer at least had an office and a life that he could return to after killing all the bad guys.  The hero of The Long Wait may not know who he is but he still knows that’s he’s pretty angry with a lot of people.

Violent, melodramatic, and at times thoroughly gratuitous, The Long Wait is an entertainingly absurd book.  I read it in a hotel room and I recommend you do the same.

(Check out last week’s book here!)