Evan Hunter’s short story ”The Last Spin” takes place in a small basement. Tigo and Danny, the two members of opposing gangs, are forced to play a game of Russian roulette to settle disagreements between their gangs. The dramatic story is about how easily enemies with no personal hatred against each other can become friends when they talk about their lives and start to see each other in a different light.
At the beginning it seems that Danny is the protagonist and Tigo is the antagonist but as the story progresses it turns out that Danny and Tigo are both the protagonists of the story and the antagonists of the story are the gangs which forced the boys to play against each other in a lethal game.
The story revolves around the game of life and death and the character development between Danny and Tigo during the thrilling game. In the beginning they only know each other by the gangs’s jackets and maintain hatred against each other as natural enemies. Slowly they begin to familiarize with each other and start talking and laughing together to the same things. At the same time they are playing the game with their lives at stake. After they have become friends, built trust towards each other and promised to go rowing next Sunday, Danny goes for the fateful last spin which ends the story tragically resulting in Danny’s death and Tigo’s weeping over the sorrowful loss of his newly acquainted best friend.
The story consists mostly of dialogue between the protagonists, but the short narrator parts are from a third person omniscient point of view. The narrator sees inside the heads of Tigo and Danny and tells about their feelings at the precise moments.
The themes of the story are about how belonging in a group that is enemies with another group doesn’t mean that the individual members of the enemy group are necessarily your enemies, how life can end when you the least expect it and how a deep trust and friendship can be formed in a really short time, even in weird situations.