After having been berated by a little judge because of killing somebody who needed knocking off bad, licensed investigator Mike Hammer[1] goes for a walk to contemplate this humiliation on a rainy night in Manhattan and comes across a terrified woman and her pursuer on a bridge.

[2] Hammer's friend in the police department, Captain of Homicide[3] Pat Chambers, identifies them as membership cards[4] for the local Communist Party.

In the book's opening scene, Hammer walks on a rainy night and reviews the ways in which mainstream society labels him a killer, and he questions whether there is some truth to a judge's denunciation of his actions.

In hard-boiled crime fiction, commonly the cynical detective narrates in first-person his attempts to deal with a criminal element that the police are ill-equipped to handle, often because the legal system is not up to the task.

[5] But his strong anti-communist stance, as opposed to the conciliatory approach Wallace championed, suggests that Joseph McCarthy may have been a model.

The novel makes the case, without explicitly saying so, that "the Soviets were stupid and weak, and the seductive power of Communism could easily be exposed as fraudulent."