The High Cost of Dying

January 7, 1958

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Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer - S1 - E1

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.

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Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer: Season 1 - 40 Episode s

1x1 - The High Cost of Dying
January 7, 1958
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.
1x2 - Just Around the Corner
February 14, 1958
When an elderly man living in Mike's hotel unexpectedly inherits , Hammer appoints himself the man's guardian to ward off moochers and con artists.
1x3 - Hot Hands, Cold Dice
January 21, 1958
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.
1x4 - Death Gets a Diploma
January 28, 1958
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.
1x5 - So That's Who It Was
February 11, 1958
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.
1x6 - Dead Men Don't Dream
February 18, 1958
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.
1x7 - Letter Edged in Blackmail
February 25, 1958
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.
1x8 - Death Takes an Encore
March 7, 1958
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".
1x9 - Lead Ache
March 14, 1958
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.
1x10 - Overdose of Lead
March 21, 1958
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 ,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.
1x11 - A Grave Undertaking
March 28, 1958
Mike is hired to retrieve incriminating letters from a blackmailer, but soon learns that the package with ,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.
1x12 - A Shot In The Arm
April 4, 1958
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.
1x13 - Stay Out of Town
April 11, 1958
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.
1x14 - Beautiful, Blue and Deadly
April 18, 1958
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.
1x15 - Skinned Deep
April 25, 1958
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.
1x16 - Peace Bond
May 2, 1958
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.
1x17 - Play Belles' Toll
May 9, 1958
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.
1x18 - For Sale: Deathbed--Used
May 16, 1958
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.
1x19 - Music to Die By
May 23, 1958
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.
1x20 - My Fair Deadly
May 30, 1958
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.
1x21 - The New Look
June 7, 1958
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.
1x22 - The Broken Frame
June 14, 1958
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.
1x23 - Look at the Old Man Go
June 21, 1958
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.
1x24 - The Paper Shroud
June 28, 1958
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.
1x25 - My Son And Heir
July 5, 1958
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.
1x26 - Final Curtain
July 12, 1958
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.
1x27 - A Detective Tail
July 19, 1958
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.
1x28 - It's An Art
July 26, 1958
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.
1x29 - Four Blind Mice
August 2, 1958
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.
1x30 - Scar and Garter
October 12, 1958
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.
1x31 - No Pockets In A Shroud
August 9, 1958
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.
1x32 - The Living Dead
August 16, 1958
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.
1x33 - Old Folks At Home Blues
August 23, 1958
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.
1x34 - No Business like...
August 30, 1958
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 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.
1x35 - Crepe Suzette
September 7, 1958
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.
1x36 - Letter of the Weak
September 14, 1958
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.
1x37 - That Schoolgirl Complex
September 21, 1958
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.
1x38 - To Bury a Friend
September 28, 1958
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.
1x39 - Mere Maid
October 5, 1958
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.
1x40 - Scar and Garter
October 12, 1958
Scar and Garter

1x1 - The High Cost of Dying

1x2 - Just Around the Corner

1x3 - Hot Hands, Cold Dice

1x4 - Death Gets a Diploma

1x5 - So That's Who It Was

1x6 - Dead Men Don't Dream

1x7 - Letter Edged in Blackmail

1x8 - Death Takes an Encore

1x9 - Lead Ache

1x10 - Overdose of Lead

1x11 - A Grave Undertaking

1x12 - A Shot In The Arm

1x13 - Stay Out of Town

1x14 - Beautiful, Blue and Deadly

1x15 - Skinned Deep

1x16 - Peace Bond

1x17 - Play Belles' Toll

1x18 - For Sale: Deathbed--Used

1x19 - Music to Die By

1x20 - My Fair Deadly

1x21 - The New Look

1x22 - The Broken Frame

1x23 - Look at the Old Man Go

1x24 - The Paper Shroud

1x25 - My Son And Heir

1x26 - Final Curtain

1x27 - A Detective Tail

1x28 - It's An Art

1x29 - Four Blind Mice

1x30 - Scar and Garter

1x31 - No Pockets In A Shroud

1x32 - The Living Dead

1x33 - Old Folks At Home Blues

1x34 - No Business like...

1x35 - Crepe Suzette

1x36 - Letter of the Weak

1x37 - That Schoolgirl Complex

1x38 - To Bury a Friend

1x39 - Mere Maid

1x40 - Scar and Garter

S1: Season 1

S2: Season 2