Bloody Sunrise by Mickey Spillane

The book is a good story as are all of Mickey Spillanes'. The seller put a tape stuck to the front and back covers - page edges not taped - to hold the thing together, I guess. When I went to pull the tape off, it tore the picture on front and blurbs on the back. Right across the face of the girl he put a bar code. I'll try alcohol to get that off. I'll not use this seller again. Hell, he could have used a rubber band to accomplish the holding and put the bar code somewhere on his anatomy! out of site!

First some housekeeping: if you are thinking of reading Bloody Sunrise (1965), I suggest you first read Day of the Guns (1964), Mickey Spillane's first Tiger Mann book, as it has some background to what happens in Bloody Sunrise. In fact, Bloody Sunrise is full of spoilers for Day of the Guns, and so has this review. So if you plan to read Day of the Guns, stop reading here.

Okay, that said, on to Bloody Sunrise (and the title only becomes clear toward the end of the book). It is the almost perfect Mickey Spillane book, with our resolute, dogged, slightly deranged hero (Tiger Mann) battling though bad guys, broads and bureaucracy to save the American way of life from those damnable Commies. He's the only one who can do it, you know…by his own admission as he relates the narrative in first person.

Which is a bother because when the book opens, Tiger is about to wed Rondine, the chick he had spent almost all of Day of the Guns tormenting with intent to kill (don't ask me to explain it, just read the book if you're curious…). Anyway, a call comes in right on the morning of the wedding and, damn it all, it's a Plato call, which means it's super duper serious. Duty calls and the hell with the wedding and Rondine (whose name is actually Edith Caine: Rondine is her dead sister but Tiger likes to call her Rondine because he used to be in love with Rondine even though he was intending to kill her in the most painful way possible…).

Most of the book concerns Tiger trying to foil a plot by the Reds to get to a high profile defector before he can spill the beans. He does this in part by figuring out something no one else has, which is that this defector is in love with another, earlier defector. He has this singular insight simply by seeing one old photo of them briefly meeting at an Olympic Games event years earlier. It is intuition like this that makes Tiger the Plato go-to man.

I won't go any further into the plot, which sparkles from end to end with the kind of action and dialogue Spillane excels at. Plausibility not so much…

There are also moments of deep introspection in which Tiger torments himself with the knowledge that he is fated to always be the last best hope of mankind and even Rondine/Edith must take a back seat to duty. Of course, that duty also occasionally calls for sack time with comely not-Rondine/Ediths but that's the hand that fate has dealt Tiger Mann and he stoically accepts it, as he must…

I admit I did figure out the double cross that explodes toward the end of the book but that didn't spoil my enjoyment of this book, which is Spillane at his best. I don't often give five-star reviews but felt this one deserved it because it delivers everything you could want from a book in this genre.

Bloody Sunrise by the renown Mickey Spillane is a mercifully short cartoonish take on the spy genre. Spillane didn't waste any time doing research. Why bother? It's pretty apparent he just started typing and composed the plot, such as it is, on the fly. Protagonist Tiger Mann goes from one harrowing situation to another at breakneck speed, neutralizing his Soviet adversaries with amazing finesse. Between the many gun battles and other forms of mayhem, Tiger is true to his reputation as a ladies man, romancing no less than three of the female characters.
In short, this is mindless reading designed to appeal to consumers of Argosy magazine and similar periodicals. In truth, it isn't very good at all and should be avoided like the plague.

Excellent!!!