Overview of 'Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer' Season 1

Episode 1 - The High Cost of Dying

Release Date: 1958-01-07

When a man convicted of armed robbery is mortally wounded in a prison knife fight, he calls on Hammer to perform a last service - retrieve the loot he hid before he was arrested and use the money to ransom his wife who has been kidnapped.

Episode 2 - Just Around the Corner

Release Date: 1958-02-14

When an elderly man living in Mike's hotel unexpectedly inherits $7500, Hammer appoints himself the man's guardian to ward off moochers and con artists.

Episode 3 - Hot Hands, Cold Dice

Release Date: 1958-01-21

After discovering his office has been ransacked, Mike receives a threatening phone call ordering him off "the case" and to drop his client, Sharon O'Closkey. Mike refuses, even though he wasn't working on a case and didn't have a client named O'Closkey. When the mysterious client calls and invites the private investigator to her room, Mike quickly agrees, only to fall victim to drugged meal. When he awakens, he discovers he's in Las Vegas and his beautiful client claims he flew to Nevada willingly to help her find her missing father.

Episode 4 - Death Gets a Diploma

Release Date: 1958-01-28

At the behest of an old friend, Mike investigates her son's relationship with a beautiful young woman whose sugar daddy, a mobster turning states evidence, was murdered outside a nightclub.

Episode 5 - So That's Who It Was

Release Date: 1958-02-11

Mike responds to a phone call from a small-time junkie requesting protection too late; he finds his friend shot to death in a Chinatown alley. Not satisfied that the police will exert themselves to find the man's killer, Mike launches his own investigation and links the crime to an earlier unsolved murder.

Episode 6 - Dead Men Don't Dream

Release Date: 1958-02-18

Mike returns to his old neighborhood when gunsels working for a protection racket murder a boyhood friend. Before long, his investigation into the gang's criminal activities results in more fatalities.

Episode 7 - Letter Edged in Blackmail

Release Date: 1958-02-25

While eating in a hotel restaurant, Mike spots a man take a package from a woman's table. Even though the package contains a necklace with a broken clasp as the man claimed, Mike smells foul play and traces the woman who left the box. When he arrives at her house, he learns that she was pushed down her stairs and badly injured. Investigating further, he discovers she is the victim of a vicious blackmailer.

Episode 8 - Death Takes an Encore

Release Date: 1958-03-07

Mike investigates a dishevelled man's wild tale about a man that he killed six months ago dying a second time in a car accident two days ago. When his client turns up dead, Mike follows his only clue, the phone number of a pretty piano player billed as "Miss Patti".

Episode 9 - Lead Ache

Release Date: 1958-03-14

Mike is hired to find the murderer of a newspaper reporter. The trail leads to a ballroom whose hostesses, usually small-town girls with no relatives, frequently disappear.

Episode 10 - Overdose of Lead

Release Date: 1958-03-21

A nightclub singer asks Mike to get her out of a contract that's held by a mobster. The man claims the rising star who she owes him $50,000 "for expenses" plus 30% of her salary in perpetuity. While Mike is working on the contract, the singer receives a blackmail threat. Mike tries to retrieve the indiscreet photograph, he finds the blackmailers dead and the negative gone.

Episode 11 - A Grave Undertaking

Release Date: 1958-03-28

Mike is hired to retrieve incriminating letters from a blackmailer, but soon learns that the package with $50,000 was really the ransom money to payoff kidnappers. When the woman who collected the ransom from Hammer is double-crossed, she tries to get revenge on her partner but is killed before she can meet with the private detective. Hammer investigates the dead woman's friends and co-workers to mete out his kind of justice upon the kidnapping murderer.

Episode 12 - A Shot In The Arm

Release Date: 1958-04-04

The lawyer for a wealthy couple asks Mike to help their niece kick her heroine habit. Mike works on two fronts: helping the young woman withdraw from the drug and finding the pushers that got her hooked in the first place.

Episode 13 - Stay Out of Town

Release Date: 1958-04-11

Mike is asked to investigate help a young man who has been arrested for murder in a small Pennsylvania town. He thinks the case against his client is pretty good, but when the local district attorney and deputy sheriff try to run him out of town, he decides to investigate further.

Episode 14 - Beautiful, Blue and Deadly

Release Date: 1958-04-18

While waiting for his car to be repaired at a friend's combination garage/used car lot, Mike gets involved with three unsavoury characters who are very interested in a Jaguar sports car that has bullet holes in the back of the driver's seat with blood stains to match.

Episode 15 - Skinned Deep

Release Date: 1958-04-25

Taking a ferry ride in New York harbor, Mike sees a young woman crying. She's been victimized by a carnival con artist who charges steep fees to enter a rigged talent contest.

Episode 16 - Peace Bond

Release Date: 1958-05-02

Mike's quest for peace and quiet is interrupted when he intervenes in a lover's quarrel fought in a swanky restaurant. The next day, Mike is hauled into court and forced to post a peace bond guaranteeing that he'll stay away from the man he fought with the previous evening. When the man turns up dead and his fiancée accuses Mike of the crime, Hammer has to go on the lam to clear himself of the frame-up.

Episode 17 - Play Belles' Toll

Release Date: 1958-05-09

Mike runs into an old acquaintance, the wife of an embezzler he helped send to prison, who asks for her help. When she turns up dead in her apartment, rather than in his office as scheduled, Mike investigates. He's curious why a blue-blooded lady should arrange to bury the wife of a convict and discovers that both women are involved in a shady escort service dabbling in blackmail.

Episode 18 - For Sale: Deathbed--Used

Release Date: 1958-05-16

A serial killer is carving up women in the neighborhood where Sam Earl, one of Mike's part-time assistants lives. The legman wants to help Mike capture the psychopath before he strikes again, but Hammer insists it's a job for the police department, until Sam's brother's fiancée is brutally stabbed.

Episode 19 - Music to Die By

Release Date: 1958-05-23

Mike is asked to help a popular disk jockey who's been threatened by a powerful music producer to play her performers' songs or else. While Mike is trying to persuade the producer to back off, the disk jockey is brutally beaten, and Mike is fired as a result. When the DJ collapses from the injuries he's sustained, Mike decides he's been rehired and takes after the producer and her goons with a vengeance.

Episode 20 - My Fair Deadly

Release Date: 1958-05-30

Mike discovers his girlfriend's roommate has been murdered and launches his own investigation. He discovers that she was killed for a diamond she was trying to fence and tracks the murderer to the Brussels World Fair.

Episode 21 - The New Look

Release Date: 1958-06-07

A psychiatrist fears that his patients are being blackmailed. He hires Mike to find out if his fears are founded, how the privileged information is being leaked and who is preying on his clients.

Episode 22 - The Broken Frame

Release Date: 1958-06-14

A death row convict confesses to a murder that another man was executed for three years earlier and threatens to supply proof after his execution.

Episode 23 - Look at the Old Man Go

Release Date: 1958-06-21

Mike is hired by a beautiful heiress to break up her father's romance with a much younger woman. Mike goes to the woman's apartment and, after interviewing her, decides it really is a May-December romance and determines to give up on the assignment. When a thug claiming to be Mike Hammer threatens the lovely lovebird with bodily harm if she doesn't give up her sugar daddy, Mike gets back on the case and investigates who would really benefit if the romance were scotched.

Episode 24 - The Paper Shroud

Release Date: 1958-06-28

Working for the insurance company, Mike assists the police investigate an armed robbery of an armored car company. His investigation reveals that the sister of a crippled friend who only helped the hold-up gang because of the beatings they had given her brother. Mike can't capture the thieves without implicating the young woman.

Episode 25 - My Son And Heir

Release Date: 1958-07-05

A rich industrialist wants to hire Mike to beat up his son and heir because the young man has become engaged to woman considered beneath the family's standing. Mike turns the job down, but agrees to drive the industrialist to the family's cabin in the Catskills where the son and his fiancée are waiting out a storm. When Mike arrives, he finds the young woman dead, bloodstains on the floor and conflicting stories about how both occurred.

Episode 26 - Final Curtain

Release Date: 1958-07-12

Mike's girlfriend, Jackie, a dancer in a chorus line, panics when a sleazy reporter points out the similarities between a pair of chorus line murders and the Jack the Ripper killings 70 years ago - both of the murdered girls were redheads and Jackie is the only redhead left in the troupe. Mike has two suspects - a doorman who hates actresses and the reporter who may be making the news instead of simply reporting it.

Episode 27 - A Detective Tail

Release Date: 1958-07-19

Mike is hired to track down a man's missing girlfriend. The client tells Hammer that he just returned from South America, but his pasty complexion belies his claim of three years in the tropics. Hammer learns that the man is really an ex-con out on parole. Mike can understand his client hiding his criminal past, but what he really can't understand is why a powerful television anchor like Butler Tilton would hire an inept private eye like Andy Anderson to tail the former bank robber.

Episode 28 - It's An Art

Release Date: 1958-07-26

Mike is hired by an art student's parents who are concerned when she stops writing. The artist's friends and instructor aren't concerned that she's missing, but Mike connects the girl's disappearance with the copies of the Old Masters she'd been making and a forgery that covered the theft of a masterpiece from a major art museum.

Episode 29 - Four Blind Mice

Release Date: 1958-08-02

A man Mike helped get paroled from prison gets an anonymous letter accusing his wife of infidelity. Mike learns he's bought a gun illegally and tries to convince the ex-con's spouse to quit her glitzy job which requires her to be seen socially with a magazine editor known to have a roving eye before there's bloodshed. When the wife is found murdered and his friend's gone on the lam, Mike attempts to prove that the gun his friend bought was a different caliber than the one used to commit the crime.

Episode 30 - Scar and Garter

Release Date: 1958-10-12

A young, recently married woman hires Mike to find her husband, who disappeared after visiting his estranged mother at her Berkshire Mountains mansion. Mike's efforts to visit the man's mother meet resistance from the woman's secretary and groundskeeper, but he manages to confront her in the estate's garden. He discovers that the man's mother is a former Broadway star whose face was disfigured by a knife-wielding thug ten years earlier. When he finds the body of a young man in a shallow grave on the property, he becomes more determined than ever to have the bride meet her mother-in-law and learn the identity of the corpse buried on the grounds.

Episode 31 - No Pockets In A Shroud

Release Date: 1958-08-09

Mike decides to investigate when the darkroom belonging to his girlfriend's brother is destroyed by someone looking for an incriminating photograph. Since the negative and all the copies of the photograph were destroyed Mike doesn't have a leads to go on, until he hires a fingerprint expert to dust the nightclub where the photographer worked. He learns that the man very interested in not having his picture taken was a racketeer who had been declared dead three years earlier when the plane he purportedly was flying in crashed and burned.

Episode 32 - The Living Dead

Release Date: 1958-08-16

Hammer is hired by Susan Barlow but she stands him up. He investigates and runs into her husband Hank Barlow. After a fight, Hank hires Hammer to find his wife who has been missing for several days. Hammer talks to Shelton Dean of the brokerage firm Haskell & Dean, who had called Mrs. Barlow. Haskell is a recluse and Mrs. Barlow is claiming to be his daughter.

Episode 33 - Old Folks At Home Blues

Release Date: 1958-08-23

While getting a shoeshine in the Bowery, Mike spots a beautiful, well-dressed blonde who is as out of place as a field of wildflowers growing out of a crack in the concrete. When the woman is mugged in an alley, Mike comes to her aid and learns that she's searching for her husband, a blues piano player, who hasn't written to her in Wyoming in over a month. Mike traces the missing husband to a penny arcade and then follows the bodies to a fashionable apartment uptown.

Episode 34 - No Business like...

Release Date: 1958-08-30

Doc Fawcett hires Mike to find the person to whom he's paying protection money. He's received letters that threaten his daughter, a high-wire acrobat, will suffer a serious, if not fatal, accident unless $500 is paid every month. When the leading suspect, Lou Lindsay, is shot with Doc's gun, Mike has no shortage of suspects - Doc hated the man because he made unwanted advances towards his daughter; the girl's would-be boyfriend had been severely beaten by the roughneck, Lou had made loved than dumped have the women in Doc's carnival and the cuckolded husband of one of the women ran the carnival's shooting gallery.

Episode 35 - Crepe Suzette

Release Date: 1958-09-07

Mike is hired to locate a young woman who moved to New York, but suddenly stopped writing home to her parents. Mike quickly learns that she was killed in a hit and run automobile accident, but he can't help but wonder how the young woman went from skipping out on an apartment owing two months rent live at a fashionable flat with a wad of money in her purse at the time of her death. His investigation shows that she was making ends more than meet by working as a call girl and setting up clients for a team of muggers operating out of school for actors.

Episode 36 - Letter of the Weak

Release Date: 1958-09-14

Mike receives a desperate letter from Harris Stevens who claims that he's being held against his will in a mental hospital. The physician in charge refuses to allow Mike to see the patient, but Mike learns from a nurse that she suspects the charges are true.

Episode 37 - That Schoolgirl Complex

Release Date: 1958-09-21

Mike is hired to find the culprit behind a series of pranks at an exclusive girls' prep school - students have been poisoned, burned with acid and now shot at. Mike has three suspects: an elderly caretaker who was forced to retire, a middle-aged administrator who was passed over when the new head mistress was hired by the school's Board of Trustees, and lovely student who craves attention.

Episode 38 - To Bury a Friend

Release Date: 1958-09-28

A friend from the old neighborhood asks Mike to travel to Chicago to claim the body of her son. While visiting the Windy City, Mike learns that the young man was murdered and the police don't appear to be interested in investigating the crime. When Mike visits the murdered man's room to pick up his personal effects, he is attacked and brutally beaten by a pair of thugs who want to know where "it" is. Mike has no idea, but he's determined to find out and make the two goons who attacked him which they'd never been born.

Episode 39 - Mere Maid

Release Date: 1958-10-05

A pretty secretary swims across the lake to the cabin Mike has rented for vacation and invites him to a party at her uncle's estate. The party soon loses its appeal when Mike bumps into an old adversary, a lawyer who claims Mike railroaded his client by faking evidence. When the lawyer is accused of murdering his host, Mike shows the value of a fake identification to smoke out the real killer.

Episode 40 - Scar and Garter

Release Date: 1958-10-12

Scar and Garter