In this most unconventional mystery, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer is a private detective investigating the odd warning of a frantic hitchhiker: "Remember me." What follows is a virtual upending of the conventions of film noir, from the story’s unredeemable, often brutish anti-hero to its doomed femme fatale. The atomic anxiety of the period is expressed through Hammer’s pursuit of a mysterious, apocalyptic object—a "Pandora’s box" that is never specifically identified as nuclear but which has decidedly catastrophic results.