Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Day of the Guns | 1964 | Mickey Spillane | Buy |
| 2 | Bloody Sunrise | 1965 | Mickey Spillane | Buy |
| 3 | The Death Dealers | 1966 | Mickey Spillane | Buy |
| 4 | The By-Pass Control | 1966 | Mickey Spillane | Buy |
Tiger Mann was Mickey Spillane’s answer to James Bond. The four Cold War spy thrillers, published between 1964 and 1966, follow a freelance intelligence operative whose methods are as direct as Mike Hammer’s but applied to international espionage.
Day of the Guns (1964) introduces Mann as a former WWII intelligence officer still working outside official channels. Bloody Sunrise (1965) and The Death Dealers (1966) pit him against Soviet operatives, while The By-Pass Control (1966) wraps up the quartet with another Cold War scheme to thwart. Spillane wrote the series during the Bond craze of the mid-1960s, and Tiger Mann shares Bond’s taste for action, though with less glamour and more violence.
The books are short and punchy, typical of Spillane’s style. They have never been as well known as the Mike Hammer novels, but they give a good picture of how Spillane handled the spy genre. All four books were published within just three years.