I'm not the most knowledgable film fan when it comes to the movement that gave us titles like Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, Sunset Boulevard and which was so perfectly homaged in Chinatown.

But I remember watching and quite liking the Mike Hammer TV series they did in the 80s with Stacy Keach in the lead role (before he went to jail on a coke rap) – mostly because of the delectable Tanya Roberts as his secretary Velda in the pilot, even though she was replaced by Lindsay Bloom for the rest of the show.

Which means I got a wryly pleasant surprise to realise this was about the same character and premise – Mickey Spillane's hard boiled private dick, played here by Ralph Meeker.

Driving along a coastal California highway one lonely night, Hammer is flagged down by a desperate hitchhiker, Christina (Cloris Leachman). Though she won't say much about what she's running in terror from, Christina implores Mike only to remember her.

The hoods following her catch up, run Mike's car off the road and take them both captive, leaving him strapped to a bed while they torture her to death (only slightly offscreen in what must be one of the darkest moments in 50s cinema).

They push his car off a cliff with him in it, and when Hammer comes to, with his secretary and lover Velda (Maxine Cooper) anxiously awaiting his return to consciousness, he decides to look into the mysterious woman's murder.

It's a world away from the stitch-up divorce cases they usually work – where Velda goes in to seduce the husband so they can clean up when the divorce comes through.

The trail leads him from a book of poetry in Christina's apartment to her former roommate Lily, his close confidante Nick the mechanic, his informant and friend at the cops and the LA mansion owned by the fearsome mob boss who tried to do him in.

It's all in pursuit of a mysterious box Lily says everyone wants, and Hammer knows if he can get his hands on it first it'll be his ticket out of the quagmire he's put himself and Velda into.

I recognised a few tropes from the later series, like how at least half the people Hammer comes into contact with in his quest are lascivious and attractive women who all express their willingness to go to bed with him – a character device that was always kind of unbelievable about Stacy Keach, and also probably worked a lot better in the novel than it does here with Meeker.

The novel also apparently didn't contain the mysterious box, with screenwriter AI Bezzerides and director Robert Aldrich including it to refer to the Cold War paranoia of the times.

The allusion was that it contained some highly radioactive material descended from atomic power, but to me the movie didn't really communicate that very well – when it's finally opened and claims a victim it looked like there was something supernatural happening, like when they turned the containment grid off in Ghostbusters and all the spirits wheeled out across the New York skyline.

When I read a bit more about what it was supposed to be after the fact, I also wondered how directly it had inspired Tarantino and Avary when they came up with the suitcase in Pulp Fiction.

Other than that it has the swagger of the genre and it's great fun to see a city I love the way it was three quarters of a century ago.