I guess the editors decided that noir sells, the problem is there's not much noir here. Of the 30 some odd stories in this book, maybe a third of them could be considered noir. I guess the editors expanded the definition to any crime story. There are some good stories here, particularly by Carroll John Daly, Mickey Spillane, David Goodis, Max Allan Collins and Norbert Davis, but there's also a lot of mediocre stuff (most of the stories in the second half of the book range from fair to awful). Even terrific writers like Lawrence Block are represented by pretty bad stories (and as bad a Block's story is it's not even remotely noirish). I don't know, I have to think that if Spillane and Collins took this book more seriously they could have come up with a better representation of noir fiction. Even a noir master like James M. Cain is represented by a mediocre story that doesn't even classify as noir.

I should preface this review by owning that I'm not a fan of Mickey Spillane. I understand his importance to the genre, and when he's at what I think of at his best, then I can enjoy his novels. But he isn't really to my taste, so consider that a fair disclosure of bias.

_One Lonely Night_ tells the story of Hammer, returning angry and bitter from a trial where he is excoriated for "knocking off somebody who needed knocking off bad". Hammer is shaken and wonders if the judge's view of him is really true and accurate, whether he really is such a bad guy. While in the midst of this reverie, Hammer runs across a girl being chased by a bad man. He kills the bad man, but fails to save the girl as she jumps to her death rather than be part of whatever it was she was involved in. Naturally, Spillane gets involved, and as the plot expands to threaten his beautiful Vera, he gets very involved indeed.

The book seems like it's thumbing its nose at critics who accuse Hammer of being too violent. He has to be violent, it seems to say, the world is a dangerous place and violence and vigilence go hand-in-hand.

This book contains much of what I dislike most about Spillane's writing-- the simple black and white approach to good and evil, the obsession with the communist conspiracy, and stupid society dames who get messed up in the wrong element and don't deserve to live.

To be fair, many people find this one of Spillane's best works, but I really prefer the more crime-oriented Hammer books such as _Kiss Me, Deadly_.