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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While taking a ferry ride through the New York harbor, Mike observes a young woman sobbing. He learns that she's been victimized by a carnival con artist who charges steep fees to enter a rigged talent contest. After Mike tries to intervene, the con artist is found murdered and the District Attorney can't decide if Mike or his pretty client makes the best suspect.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A convict on death row confesses to a murder that another man was executed for three years earlier and threatens to supply proof after he dies on the electric chair. Mike doesn't pay much attention to man's story until the gun used in the crime is produced. Captain Chambers is worried that an innocent man lost his life based on shoddy police work, but Hammer is convinced that the grocery store robber had a partner and sets out to prove it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. Mike's chances of springing his client take a turn for the worse when the nurse and the physician are found stabbed to death by a knife that Harris was making to use in a desperate escape attempt
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.
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.
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.
Mike is hired by an ex-con who now runs an amusement park in New Jersey. The former con-artist has received blackmail notes demanding $25,000 or else he reveal that the old man lied about his identity on his business license applications.
When an innocent man is accused of murder, Mike is hired to find the real killer of a photographer who ran a phony modelling school and dabbled in blackmail on the side.
An old friend asks Mike to reason with a young man who refuses to identify the murderers of a drugstore owner in his old neighborhood. Mike is no more successful than his sister or the police in persuading the youth to talk, but when the witness is found murdered the next day, Mike decides to bring in the killers on his own.
A woman hires Mike to find the man who murdered who father, an experienced steeplejack and window-washer who fell 20 floors to his death. Mike's investigation shows that the murdered man lost a $10,000 investment with a crooked stockbroker who seems to have disappeared, leaving a hulking henchman behind to protect his interests.
Hammer is providing security for a jewelry store and catches a woman stealing a piece. Her husband is a gambler deeply in debt and Hammer takes pity and decides to help her. Hammer poses as her cousin and discovers that the poker game her husband plays in is crooked.
Mike helps out an old friend when her husband is accused of murdering a loan shark. His investigation revealed that a number of people were interested in taking over the mobster's racket, but the crucial bit of evidence is the scent of cheap perfume Mike smells in the murdered man's apartment.
Sonya Miles, a pretty secretary, engaged to marry her wealthy boss's son, is threatened with blackmail by her sleazy ex-husband, a rodeo performer. She hires Mike to keep her former spouse in line. Mike reasons with the cowboy - using both of his fists - and thinks the situation is in hand, but the ex-husband forces Sonya to break into the office safe at night. When the cowboy is discovered murdered in the office, the money gone and Sonya's purse is found at the scene of the crime, only Mike believes in her innocence.
Mike's old friend Patricia Tyler calls him for help when neighborhood hoodlums vandalize her father's grocery store. Mike sides with the hoodlums since her father was the vote that hung a jury in the murder trial of Mike's nemesis, Sam Mayo, a gangster who Mike believes killed a friend of his. When the assistant District Attorney decides to drop the case because several witnesses develop amnesia, Mike starts his own investigation - with surprising results.
Vic Fontainee, a blind fish monger, hires Mike to find out if the man claiming to be his long-lost brother is really on the level. Mike discovers that not only is the man an impostor trying to falsely inherit $20,000 from the Fontanee family trust, but the fraud is also having an affair with his wife, Maria. What Mike doesn't discover, until it's too late, is Maria's plan to kill her husband.
Luke Lund is being blackmailed. He is a racketeer now posing as a legitimate land developer in Shale City. He lures Mike Hammer from New York and with the help of a crooked cop frames him for the murder of the blackmailer.
Mike has thirty minutes to solve a murder when his lost gun is used to kill a jealous husband who had beaten him senseless the day before.
Hammer gets involved in political intrigue with a Colonel and two gorgeous women.
Mike receives an anonymous letter with a $300 retainer hiring him to investigate the disappearance of a parking lot attendant. Mike learns that the man was defrauding the owner by marking wrong arrival times on parking tickets and pocketing the proceeds. When the man was found murdered, he traces the killer back to the company's headquarters.
A beautiful Chinese woman asks Mike to find the man who robbed an illegal poker game held in the back of a Chinese restaurant. One of them who lost heavily has threatened her father, the restaurant owner, with bodily harm unless the money is returned within 24 hours. Mike's only clue is the masked gunman had the number "8" tattooed on the back of his left hand.
Mike, vacationing in France, is asked to help a pretty American widow who is traveling on the ocean liner "Isle de France". The woman claims to see her dead husband everywhere, but the ships' officers think she is slowing going insane with grief. Mike agrees with their diagnosis until he sees the "ghost" try to throw the widow overboard; he then races against time to capture the all-to-real spirit before he can finish the job.
Mike is hired to dissuade a pretty blonde from blackmailing his client with a tape recording of his extra-marital indiscretions. Mike finds the woman hanging from the ceiling in her apartment and, after his client is arrested for murder, investigates other parties who had reason to want the young woman dead.
Mike is in Hawaii on a business trip and winds up searching for gold instead.
Mike investigates a $50,000 jewelry heist and double-murder for the insurance company. He gets a tip that the thief and murderer is hiding in a nearby hotel and kills the crook in a gunfight. When Mike learns that the dead man was a known jewel thief who never carried a gun, he suspects that he was tricked into shooting a man by his double-crossing partner and sets out to bring the other gunsel to justice.
When several of Johnny Sixty's juke box machines and his ace mechanic murdered, the police focus on Sixty's business rival, Wallets Mack. Mack insists he's innocent and hires Mike to prove it. Mike's investigation turns up blackmail, an invalid wife and a pretty singer with dreams of the big time.
A homeless man tells Mike that he's the victim of a double cross and a nice old man confesses to a murder.
Mike investigates a murder and confidence game involving a New York theater group.
Mike is hired to discretely investigate a series of attempts on the life of Carl Kunard, a successful building contractor, the most recent of which took place at the man's vacation lodge in upstate New York. Mike's suspects include Kunard's unhappy business partner, his trophy wife and his resentful son. Hammer's efforts are hindered by a fraternity pledge held in the lodge to escape the prying eyes of the university authorities.
Hammer is hired by a gypsy to clear her boyfriend Carl as an accomplice in robbery. Carl's brother Van is a monkey grinder and after Hammer questions him is murdered. The monkey (Banjo) saves Hammer's life as he solves the crime and clears Carl.
Mike's hired by a nightclub owner when thugs bust up his Dixieland joint. He's sure they were sent by the club across the street because he stole their headliner, Dixie Dee. Dixie's a woman who twists men around her finger and uses them for her own gain, so when she's murdered, the list of remorseless male suspects is long.
Showgirl Ruby Duvall is roughed up by her future sister-in-law, arrogant society snob Joyce Conroy, and offered $5000 not to marry Philip and soil the family name. It seems an open-and-shut when Ruby is found dead in her dressing room after a visit from Joyce. It's all too obvious for Mike after learning of another backstage visitor that night: Ruby's violent ex-con ex-boyfriend who refused to let Ruby go.
A college girl comes to Mike saying her mother, an attractive widow, is involved with a man trying to con her out of money. Hammer confirms there are a couple of scams going on. One is being played on him by the daughter; the other involves betting on horses with the seemingly innocent characters doing the cheating.
A young man suddenly turns into a coward at the unexpected appearance of two strangers. Distraught, his wife turns to Mike Hammer for aid.
Mikes hired by a husband and wife to investigate the murder of a family member.
After getting in debt to a couple running an upscale dice game, Paul Redmond is roughed up by their collections thug Murphy before disappearing. Murphy's a renegade private eye who lost his license and is now muscling in on the gambling racket. The wife of the missing Redmond hires Mike to find her husband.
A blackmailing showgirl is found murdered and one of Hammer's friends is the number one suspect.
Mike's vacation at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels is interrupted by a case. Wealthy Wilma Puttnam asks Hammer to investigate the people claiming to have the daughter of her late sister who died in the Nazi concentration camps. Mrs. Puttnam wants to be sure it's really Anna/Derna before paying the $5000 they're asking for.
Tom O'Rough is severely beaten en route to Mike's office. He's concern that Si Loomis, a small-time crook, has won the heart of his employer, Edie Sanford, and she's about to lose her money and her company to the grifter. When Mike can't force the crook to back off and can't convince the Edie that she's fallen for a criminal, he tries to use Loomis' pretty young secretary to get enough evidence to break up the romance.
Mike finally meets the love of his life and proposes to attractive Kathy Dean. They never make it down the aisle; he and Pat Chambers find her shot to death just before the wedding. Learning from Gita that a bookie was offering 100 to 1 odds the wedding would never happen, Hammer goes on a violent rampage until he gets to the man behind the murder.
Am ex-con he'd help send to prison makes a death threat against Mike. Believing its just a sick joke, Hammer decides to meet with the man.
A dying man comes to New York and hires Mike to find the attractive young woman he remembers from 15 years earlier. Mike tracks down Sally Bryant to the fleabag Central Hotel and discovers she's hardly beauty the old man remembers. She's slovenly, hard-edged, and married to a greedy husband with a stripper girlfriend.
A married out-of-towner is set up for a mugging in Central Park by a sexy young woman he'd only met that day. Wanting his stolen briefcase back and his name out of the newspapers, the cheating husband comes to Mike for help. Ellen Robbins, who's still on probation, is running the mugging scam with her boyfriend and another thug. Matters turn deadly when she returns the briefcase for $1000 bucks and doesn't cut her cohorts in on the extra money.
Punch-drunk former boxer Kid Dakota still carries a torch for gold-digging his ex-wife Julie. The Kid got into a fight with Julie's current husband at their restaurant (which used to be his) and vowed to kill him. When the husband turns up dead a few hours later, the police have an open and shut case. Mike, however, thinks Kid's been framed by someone else who wanted the current husband dead.
An Asian nightclub singer is offered $5000 by her boyfriend's snooty society mother to just disappear. She turns it down until her husband, a Merchant Marine she escaped from long ago, shows up demanding cash to go away. She shoots him in self defense, but doesn't kill him. Mike believes her story and works to clear her of a murder charge.
Mike's slippery friend Al Sparks skips town because of a gambling debt. He turns up in Forge River charged with murdering the female owner of the diner where he worked. Hammer discovers everyone fears Todd Stryker, the man who runs his wife's huge lumber company and wields all the power in town. Stryker's relationship with the dead woman is a secret he wants to keep.
