He's been slated for his use of sex and violence, condemned for
his right-wing politics... What is it about this guy that critics
so loath and Joe Q. Citizen loves? Judge Steve Holland presides
over the case of the most vilified author ever to sell 200 million
copies of his books around God's green earth. Would the clerk
of the court please read out the charges...
MICKEY SPILLANE
Hard-boiled's most extreme stylist or cynical exploiter of
Machismo?
Frank Spillane has the unusual distinction of being named twice.
His father, bartender John Joseph Spillane was a Catholic and
his son was baptised with the middle name Michael; at the Protestant
church of his mother Catherine Anne he was christened Frank Morrison
Spillane. To his father he was always 'Mickey', and that's the
name that stuck and the way his fans have always known him.[1]
Growing up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, young Mickey showed a flair
for sports and telling stories; the latter earned him a little
extra money when he began selling yarns soon after graduating
high school while the former got him a place at Kansas State Teachers
College, albeit briefly. He was soon back in New York, and in
1939 found work with Funnies, Inc., a comic strip production-line
run by Lloyd V. Jacquet who supplied strips, written and drawn
in-house, to the majority of the leading comic publishers of the
time; Spillane found himself working on characters such as The
Human Torch, Sub-Mariner, Captain America, Blue Bolt, Batman,
Captain Marvel and Plastic Man for the next few years before seeing
war service with the Air Force, training pilots at Greenwood,
Mississippi. He returned to New York in 1946 where he supported
himself and new bride Mary Ann Spillane by writing back-up strips
like "Jackie the Slick Chick" and "Smarty Pants".
Using what money he had, Spillane bought a few acres of land near
Newburgh, an hour's drive out of New York City, but needed to
raise $1000 for materials to build his new home. He'd been touting
around a new comic strip character to publishers: Mike Danger
was a tougher version of the "Mike Lancer" detective strip he
had penned for Harvey back in 1942. No-one was biting -- this
was post-war and the heroes who had seen the country through the
bad times had no more campaigns to fight and were on the slide.
Rather than waste the concept, Spillane turned Danger into Mike
Hammer (named after the local Hammer's Bar and Grill), and pounded
out a novel in a matter of days[2].
Spillane passed the pages around a few close buddies like Ray
and Joe Gill, friends from the Jacquet shop, and Dave Gerrity
who lived nearby; the consensus was that it would never sell.
But another friend, Jack McKenna, took the manuscript to publishers
E.P. Dutton. It's said that at Dutton, vice-president John Edmondson
took the book to pay back a favour to McKenna, believing that
if it bombed, they'd make their money back selling reprint rights
to the (then new) paperback reprint market.
I, the Jury was published in July 1947.
Witnesses for the Prosecution
"I shook the rain from my hat and walked into the room."
- Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury.
"The dialogue and action leave little to be imagined." -
New York Times, 3 August 1947.
"Able, if painfully derivative, writing and plotting, in
so vicious a glorification of force, cruelty and extra-legal methods
that the novel might be made required reading in a Gestapo training
school." - Anthony Boucher, San Francisco Chronicle, 3
August 1947.
"Lurid action, lurid characters, lurid writing, lurid plot,
lurid finish. Verdict: Lurid" - Saturday Review of Literature,
9 August 1947.
"His novel is a shabby and rather nasty little venture from
the indefensible logic of its opening scene to the drooling titillation
of its final striptease." - James Sandoe, Chicago Sun Book
Week, 17 August 1947.
Cross-examination by the Defence
"I said [to John Edmondson at Dutton] 'I'd like to reprint
I, the Jury.' He said, 'Two thousand dollars; send along a contract.'
I said, 'Who the hell has ever heard of Mickey Spillane -- let's
take a chance. Five hundred dollars.' He said, 'A thousand.' I
said, 'Seven-fifty.' He said, 'Boy, you've got a book."'
- Victor Weybright, editor, New American Library, 1958.
To fans, hard-boiled meant the two-fisted tales of gumshoes and
G-Men that had appeared in pulps like Dime Detective since
the 1920s; to the critics it was still a slowly emerging literature
led by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, both ex-Black
Mask writers who had surfaced in hardcover. The Private Eye
was Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, portrayed on the screen by Humphrey
Bogart; film noir had yet to be recognised in America as
a style and had only just been thus named in France. The critics
ripped into Spillane's novel, and only a little over half the
7,000 print run sold.
Mike Hammer was not the wisecracking Bogart. He did not wisecrack.
He got angry and threatened. Chandler's novels were relatively
bloodless; although he started slowly, Hammer was to average ten
killings per novel. Spillane wasn't a new Chandler. I, the
Jury had echoes of The Maltese Falcon, especially the
down-beat ending of the latter where Spade hands Brigid O'Shaughnessy
over to the cops, but Spillane wasn't even a new Hammett. He was
a new Carroll John Daly, and Mike Hammer was Race Williams for
the post-war audience.
Williams, like Hammer, laid his cards on the table: "People -
especially the police - don't understand me. And what we don't
understand we don't appreciate. The police look upon me as being
so close to the criminal that you can't tell the difference...
Every cop in the great city has my reputation hammered into him
as a gun and a killer. No use to go into detail on that point.
I carry a gun - two of them, for that matter. As to being a killer,
well - I'm not a target, if you get what I mean. I've killed in
my time, and I daresay I'll kill again. There - let the critics
of my methods paste that in their hats."[3]
"I'm a Private Investigator who doesn't believe in red tape.
I never did object to a little gun play. I shoot fast and I hit
what I shoot at."[4]
"That's my racket, Meet lead with lead, violence with violence,
and death with death. This working on the side of the law may
have its advantages, but it has its disadvantages, too. The law
is always looking for evidence; legal evidence, when a few corpses
decorating the scenery would be much more effective and certainly
quicker."[5]
It's the same personal code Spillane gave to Mike Hammer. But
ten years had gone by since Daly's hey-day when a Race Williams
story could raise the circulation of a magazine by 20-25%. The
War had acclimatised the American public to brutality and, whilst
critic Christopher La Farge argues[6] that "Some men were toughened
by combat but the huge majority of them came off from the experience
with a desire to put that side of war -- and the brutal methods
self-preservation taught them -- as far back in their minds as
possible," the notion that danger could be faced and won by force
was ingrained, not only in GIs who had fought through hell and
survived, but in the wider population who had waited back home,
imagining the worst.
Awareness of widespread crime in America was growing and it had
none of the glamour of Prohibition era gangsters: the Senate Investigation
headed by Estes Kefauver broadcast on television in 1950-51 revealed
that organised crime formed a shadow government with its own laws,
business practises and law enforcement (Murder, Inc.) that would
require new legislation to combat.
Juvenile delinquency was on the rise; one spark that really lit
a flame was the invasion of Hollister, California, on July 4th,
1947, by 4,000 motorcyclists: a small number of arrests led to
a riot in which the police station was attacked, the main thoroughfare
was blocked off and turned into a dragstrip, and it took State
Police intervention to diffuse the situation. It made headline
news nationwide and it showed America how powerless the legal
system was against these thuggish outlaws, a large mobile force
who could descend on any town they chose. Maybe your town was
next.
Mickey Spillane gave readers a hero for those troubled times when
the law seemed unable to cope, one who did not act with frustrating
slowness or sit around simply debating the problem: meet violence
with violence, and when the bad guy is down, kick him in the teeth.
If Hammett (in Chandler's words) gave murder back to the people
who committed it, Spillane offered a sword of justice to people
who dreamed of vengeance but felt powerless. Hammer was a fantasy.
Nowhere else in fiction will you find a character who so openly
reveals his hand as Mike Hammer: in the opening two pages of I,
the Jury, Hammer is confronted with the body of his closest
friend and, looking down at the corpse, knowing that the killer
had cold-bloodedly tormented his friend as he lay dying, he swears
an oath that he will find and wipe out his murderer. "He won't
sit on the chair. He won't hang. He will die exactly as you died,
with a .45 slug in the gut, just a little below the belly button.
No matter who it is, Jack, I'll get the one. Remember, no matter
who it is, I promise."
As he makes this vow, Mike Hammer is still a cipher to his readers,
the "I" of the title -- he is his readers. We have no
idea who this first person narrator is, only that he seems to
command respect from the police the moment he walks in the room;
he is kind, thinking first to offer some words of comfort to the
girl crying her heart out on the studio couch, but focused. Pat
Chambers tells us its a nasty wound but we look anyway without
feeling nauseous; we calmly examine the room, smartly summarise
what has happened, and coldly tell the police that their system
will not serve our needs, that we will take the law into our own
hands:
"You're a cop, Pat. You're tied down by rules and regulations.
There's someone over you. I'm alone. I can slap someone in the
puss and they can't do a damn thing. No one can kick me out of
my job. Maybe there's nobody to put up a huge fuss if I get gunned
down, but then I still have a private cop's licence with the privilege
to pack a rod, and they're afraid of me. I hate hard, Pat. When
I latch on to the one behind this they're going to wish they hadn't
started it. Some day, before long, I'm going to have my rod in
my mitt and the killer in front of me. I'm going to watch the
killer's face. I'm going to plunk one right in his gut, and when
he's dying on the floor I may kick his teeth out."[7]
Hammer speaks with control over his emotions, directly and forcibly,
as we would all like to. And what makes Mickey Spillane a page-turner
is not whether Mike Hammer will shoot the killer in the guts --
that was his mission statement and even in those few pages you
know he'll do it -- but will he follow through? Will he really
kick the killer's teeth out as he lays there, dying?
Witnesses for the Prosecution
"I picked a paperback off the table and made a pretence of
reading it. It was about some private eye whose idea of a hot
scene was a dead, naked woman hanging from the shower rail with
the marks of torture on her...I threw the paperback into the wastebasket,
not having a garbage can handy at the moment." - Raymond
Chandler, Playback.
In one novel alone -- Vengeance is Mine -- Spillane is
guilty of:
Blasphemy - the title.
Racism - "If we had both been in the jungle and some
slimy Jap had picked him off I would have rammed the butt of a
rifle down the brown bastard's throat for it." (p28)
Violence - "I leaned back against the wall and kicked
out and up with a slashing toe that nearly tore him in half. He
tried to scream. All I heard was a bubbling sound. The billy hit
the floor and he doubled over, hands clawing at his groin. This
time I measured it right. I took a short half-step and kicked
his face in." (p60)
Casual violence to women - "I reached up and smacked
her across the mouth as hard as I could. Her head rocked, but
she still stood there, and now her eyes were more vicious than
ever. "Still want me to make you?"
"Make me," she said. (p50)
Homophobia - "There was a pansy down at the end of
the bar trying to make a guy who was too drunk to notice and was
about to give it up as a bad job. I got a smile from the guy and
he came close to getting knocked on his neck. The bartender was
one of them, too, and he looked put out because I came in with
a dame." (p86)
Sexism - All women want Mike Hammer: Juno Reeves ("Make
it up to me now"), Connie Wales ("Make me"), the secretary/mistress
of a businessman ("She danced close enough to almost get behind
me and had a hell of an annoying habit of sticking her tongue
out to touch the tip of my ear"), Marion Lester ("I hope next
time it's under more pleasant circumstances").
Cross-examination by the Defence
"There was a time when wild, gory scenes of violence were
stock items in a story or script. I certainly went all out myself
when that was the trend." - Mickey Spillane, TV Guide,
1961.
Individual scenes are difficult to defend, if indeed they are
defendable. The violence and sexual magnetism are part of the
Mike Hammer power fantasy. Hammer's racism (especially against
the then recently defeated Japanese) and homophobia simply reflected
American society of the time; and since Hammer is, in the eyes
of his critics, a testosterone-driven he man, his rejection of
homosexual advances is at least in character.
Physically, Mike Hammer is a six-foot New Yorker, 190 pounds,
not especially good-looking. He can rough house it with the best,
take a licking and hand one out. If he needs it, his .45 can be
in his hand faster than you can blink. He fights for the underdog,
and sometimes that's himself. He makes promises and he keeps them.
He is a loyal friend.
Hammer is, however, the archetypal homme fatale. Women
fall for him in a moment, attracted to, and turned on by, his
toughness. Hammer, in his own way, places them on pedestals: Charlotte
Manning in I, the Jury, Juno Reeves in Vengeance is
Mine, and others, have lit Hammer's heart and soul. The women
he feels he has fallen in love with, he rejects sexually, asking
them to wait: he tends to have opportunistic sex with call girls
and nymphomaniacs who plead with him to stay overnight. Ultimately,
Hammer is in love with his secretary, the curvaceous Velda with
her long dark hair kept in a page-boy cut, but "I never made
a pass at her. Not that I didn't want to, but it would be striking
too close to home."[8] She is Hammer's equal -- she holds a private
investigator's license and isn't afraid to use the .32 automatic
she carries.
Being a friend to Mike Hammer is a dangerous business: we tend
to meet his best friends over their corpses, and even police officer
Pat Chambers was put on Spillane's earth to occasionally pull
his pal out of the fire, but mostly to do his legwork and remind
him (and the reader) why Mike has to operate outside the law.
Hammer is only able to forge lasting relationships with ex-Army
veterans, those he fought alongside, like Jury's Jack Williams,
or casual acquaintances like Vengeance's Chester Wheeler.
The only thing we learn about Hammer's past is that he fought
"in the muck and the slime of the jungle, there in the stink
that hung over the beaches rising from the bodies of the dead,
there in the half-light of too many dusks and dawns laced together
with the criss-crossed patterns of bullets," and it has so traumatised
him that "I had gotten a taste of death and found it palatable
to the extent that I could never again eat the fruits of normal
civilisation." [9]
This is Hammer's dilemma and the cause of much interior monologue:
although he fights for the forces of right, he has to keep himself
a man apart because he does not want to taint the few good things
in his life. This is especially noticeable in One Lonely Night
where Hammer becomes almost suicidal: "I was looking at myself
the same way those people did back there. I was looking at a big
guy with an ugly reputation, a guy who had no earthly reason for
existing in a decent, normal society." [10]
At the end of the book, Hammer finds his answer: "I lived to
kill because my soul was a hardened thing that revelled in the
thought of taking the blood of the bastards who made murder their
business. I lived because I could laugh it off and others couldn't.
I was the evil that opposed other evil, leaving the good and the
meek in the middle to live and inherit the earth!" [11]
The biblical imagery, which peaks in the line "I lived to kill
so that others could live," infuriated Spillane's critics even
more; this was his answer to their constant sniping at Hammer's
sadistic motives. Mike is, literally, the Hammer of God.
Witnesses for the Prosecution
"They can't kill me. I still got potential." - Mickey
Spillane, 1984.
"As ammunition for the various bodies crying for the suppression
or control of crime writing, this new Spillane novel could hardly
be surpassed; as a detective story, it is in inferior to his I
THE JURY in plot (which is both strained and obvious) and writing
(which often approaches parody), but fully equal to it in its
attempt to see how far uncensored publishing can go." - Anthony
Boucher, New York Times, 12 February 1950, reviewing My
Gun is Quick.
"The mixture even more repellent than before... As rife with
sexuality and sadism as any of his novels, based on a complete
misunderstanding of law and on the wildest coincidence in detective
fiction, it still can boast the absence of the hypocritical 'crusading'
sentiments of Mike Hammer. For that reason, and for some slight
ingenuity in its denouement, it may rank as the best Spillane--which
is the faintest praise this department has ever bestowed." -
Anthony Boucher, New York Times, 5 August 1951, reviewing
The Big Kill.
Cross-examination by the Defence
"I don't care what they say about me, as long as they don't
rip up my dollar bills." - Mickey Spillane.
Critics were given a voice in both the D.A. in Vengeance is
Mine ("You let yourself get out of hand once too often...it's
my opinion that the city is better off without you") and the
Judge in One Lonely Night ("Goddamn, he wouldn't let me
alone! He went on and on cutting me down until I was nothing but
scum in the gutter"). Neither were sympathetically drawn characters.
Spillane's style was often the target of critics, who typically
found his writing painfully bad. Certainly he had none of the
eloquence of Raymond Chandler, but who did? "I'm not an author,
I'm a writer," Spillane told Julie Baumgold in an Esquire
interview[12]. "I can write a book in a few weeks, never rewrite,
never read galleys. Bad reviews don't matter." Elsewhere, he
has said, "I'm writing for the public. An author would never
do that. They write one book, they think they're set. I'll tell
you when you're a good writer. When you're successful. I'd write
like Thomas Wolfe if I thought it would sell."[13]
His writing was stylish enough for Anthony Boucher, one of Spillane's
harshest critics, to comment that the release of Kiss Me, Deadly
"Comes almost as a relief after the interim flood of Spillane
imitators. Chief difference, I think, is that Spillane really
believes (God help him) in what he's writing, while the imitators
are just trying to turn a fast buck."[14]
Spillane's writing style is best described as hard-boiled easy
reading in which the text was written to make the reader want
to turn the pages; Spillane drops in the very occasional literary
or mythological allusion, but for the most part sticks to driving
the plot along efficiently from problem to solution, occasionally
having Mike reflect on the case so that nobody forgets the plot.
He sticks to the well-rehearsed puzzle formula: the murder in
the opening chapter is solved in the final chapter, but rather
than gathering the suspects, it's a one-on-one meeting between
Mike and the villain he needs to smite.
It has always been presumed that Spillane's audience was mostly
male since there are no statistics available to say who was buying
his books, but to say they only sold to "horny ex-GIs looking
for a hot read"[15] is a simplification: he was, for instance,
Ayn Rand's favourite novelist because Hammer "meets out justice
immediately, lethally and illegally"; Janis Joplin read his novels;
his fan base ranged from school campuses to the Supreme Court.
It was the paperback buying audience that put Spillane on the
map. In hardcover, he made a reasonable impact, selling 25,000
copies of his first six novels; Kiss Me, Deadly, released
in 1952, sold an astonishing 75,000 copies and found its way onto
the best-seller lists of the New York Herald Tribune and
the New York Times. In paperback, Signet Books (a division
of New American Library) had already sold 15 million copies by
then, doubled that figure by 1958 (during which time no new Spillane
titles had appeared) and were piling on two million sales a year.
The substantial printings produced by Corgi in the UK in the early
1960s helped worldwide sales leap to 70 million (half of them
in the USA). By 1988 that figure had nearly doubled again at 130
million; nowadays the quoted figure tends to be around the 200
million mark.
Statistically, Spillane was a phenomenon in a class of his own:
his first seven novels still rank in the top fifteen sellers of
the past fifty years. At one point, when they were all in the
top ten, Spillane joked that it was a good thing he hadn't written
three more.
He is the fifth most translated author in the world behind Lenin,
Tolstoy, Gorky and Jules Verne. "I have no fans," he told Art
Harris of the Washington Post[16]. "You know what I got?
Customers."
His ability to draw his customers back book-after-book speaks
volumes about his abilities, proving that he has a natural talent
for writing to a market. But, more than that, his work is translated
all over the world and audiences other than "horny GIs" lap
up his novels: his influence can be seen in the work of Dutch
author Jan Cremer, Swedish novelist Lars Goerling and even Kenyan
Meja Mwangi. The "Sons of Spillane" are a recognisable breed
who followed in Hammer's heavy-treading, gut-kicking footsteps.
Even the critics started to soften to Spillane's smack-in-the-face
style when he returned to writing novels in the 1960s, and even
more-so in the 1990s when he was welcomed back like an old friend
who had been away too long. His 1979 children's novel The Day
the Sea Rolled Back won a Junior Literary Guild Award. The
notion that he wrote tough because that's all he was capable of,
that he lacks intelligence and cynically exploits his audience
(ignore the contradiction) are unproven. His only tip of the hat
to marketing has been to give the audience what they want.
Witness for the Prosecution
"I had one good, efficient, enjoyable way of getting rid of
cancerous Commies. I killed them." - Mickey Spillane, One
Lonely Night.
"Mike Hammer is the logical conclusion, almost a sort of brutal
apotheosis, of McCarthyism; when things seem wrong, let one man
cure the wrong by whatever means he, as a privileged saviour,
chooses... he operates, as has Senator McCarthy, on the final
philosophy that the end can justify the means; in this Hammerism
and McCarthyism are similar." - Christopher La Farge, "Mickey
Spillane and His Bloody Hammer", The Saturday Review,
1954.
Cross-examination by the Defence
"There is no shame in killing a killer. David did it when
he knocked off Goliath. Saul did it when he slew his tens of thousands.
There's no shame to killing an evil thing." - Mickey Spillane,
One Lonely Night.
Hammer is a more complex character than many give him credit for
and the notion that Hammer is Spillane and Spillane is Hammer
has been given credence because Spillane has so often played the
role of his creation, on book covers, in films, on adverts and
in interviews.
Spillane himself has been described as "a moral, quietly religious
person,"[17] who became a Jehovah's Witness in 1951; it was rumoured
that he quit writing in 1952 because his religious beliefs no
longer allowed him to pen the sex and violence he was famous for.
His editor, Victor Weybright, believed he had a psychological
block; he and others felt that the criticism of his work had finally
taken its toll.
In fact, Spillane had not quit writing at all, providing magazines
and comics with a slow but steady output of stories and articles,
acting on a record and working on film scripts over the next few
years. The enormous success of Kiss Me, Deadly allowed
him to sit back and take a break from the character who had taken
over his life. During his break, he moved from Newburgh to a beach
home on Murrells Inlet in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where
he indulged himself stock car racing, diving and generally enjoying
the comforts of wealth.
But before that, Spillane had penned two of his most famous books,
One Lonely Night and Kiss Me, Deadly, which rounded
out the first phase of Mike Hammer's life. The Big Kill
(the fifth Hammer novel) was a more atypical revenge story, and
Spillane had even experimented with a second character in The
Long Wait, which featured Johnny McBride in a yarn about amnesia
and vengeance, although McBride was summarily dismissed by critics
as Hammer under another name.
One Lonely Night was the novel that earned -- or confirmed
in many eyes -- Spillane his reputation as a right-wing fanatic.
The character of Mike Hammer raised the notion from his very first
appearance: Would a nation give its problems over to one man to
be solved? Part of Hammer's attraction was, after all, that one
man could -- by force and determination -- make a difference and
this one-man army was more effective than the combined strength
of the police force at solving crime.
Perhaps the concept of Hammer as God's Tool was too uncomfortable.
Instead, critics turned him into a witch-hunting McCarthyite,
out to destroy godless Commies by any means possible, burning
to death those he can't machine gun down. The book seems an implicit
political statement from Spillane... except that Hammer's actions
are so over the top that they read like a parody, and the fanatical
anti-Communist Joe McCarthy figure, here named Lee Deamer, turns
out to be the real Russian agent sent to steal government plans.
The snake in the grass. The danger that lurks within.
People who are not what they seem is a favourite theme for Hammer
novels: Charlotte Manning, the psychiatrist, turns out to be the
psycho; businessman Arthur Berin-Grotin's business turns out to
be prostitution; Juno Reeves turns out to be a man!; actress Marsha
Lee is not who she seems; nor is Lily Carver. Even the straightforward
murder-revenge motivation that draws Mike Hammer into a situation
masks a bigger plot, be it blackmail, destroying Communist cells,
or chasing Mafia heroine.
Hammer is always working to a deadline (an apt phrase remembering
his regular shoot out finales) and under duress, usually from
authority who have taken away his license or have an APB out for
his arrest for murder. If Mike wasn't in immediate danger, Velda
would be. This simplifies motivation but does not remove all complexities.
Hammer is eternally tortured by his memories of shooting Charlotte
Manning that resurface in dreams and sometimes in the faces of
those he finds intimacy with. The ongoing almost-romance between
Hammer and Velda develops slowly over a number of titles until,
in The Girl Hunters, it seems that he has left it too late.
After a ten year hiatus, Spillane returned to Mike Hammer and,
as Collins and Taylor put it, "the themes of the first six Hammer
stories are resolved in a satisfying manner rare to series fiction."[18]
Even Anthony Boucher now recognised the "genuine vigour and conviction
lacking in his imitators."[19] "For almost twenty years I have
been one of the leaders in the attacks on Spillane; but of late
I begin to wonder whether we reviewers, understandably offended
by Spillane's excesses of brutality and his outrageously antidemocratic
doctrines, may not have underestimated his virtues."[20]
Judge's Summing Up
The majority of Mickey Spillane's novels were produced in two
distinct periods: 1947-52 and 1961-73, with the occasional brief
resurgence; the latest two Hammer novels were published in 1989
and 1996. Although his later books have sold nowhere near as many
copies as the first seven, they have been more welcomed by reviewers,
who -- late in the day -- have noticed the narrative grip Spillane
can hold and saw him prove his ability to alter his style for
a different market in his two children's novels.
That said, his latest Hammer yarns have been described as limp,
"softened with time" and the stories tread familiar territory,
especially Black Alley which even begins with the murder
of another army buddy.
Does this imply an inability to dream up new plots for an outmoded
hero past his sell-by date, or a continuing tradition to give
his readers what they want? Has Hammer's machismo grown tired
through Spillane's own writings or have his followers dulled the
readers to tough-guy heroics? In retrospect, should we consider
Spillane a unique stylist in the hard-boiled genre or a cynical
exploiter of sex and violence to market his novels?
That, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is for you to decide.
You may now retire to consider your verdict.
NOTES
With thanks to expert witness Denny Lien.
[1] Biographical details are mostly derived from One Lonely
Knight: Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer by Max Allan Collins
& James L. Taylor, Bowling Green, OH, Popular Press, 1984,
"Night of the Guns" by Lynn F. Meyers Jr., Paperback Parade
#46, Aug 1996, and Contemporary Authors. Since the
publication of the former, all biographical features about Spillane
must begin with the 'named twice' sequence or the writer
will have his authors license revoked.
[2] A feature in Life magazine in 1952 said he'd taken
19 days to write his first novel, although in his article "Night
of the Guns", op cit, p68) Lynn Myers relates that Spillane
later claimed it took only nine days.
[3] Carroll John Daly, The Hidden Hand (serialised in Black
Mask, Jun-Oct 1928), New York, Clode, 1929 (HarperCollins,
1992, p[1]-2).
[4] Carroll John Daly, Murder From the East (serialised
in Black Mask, May-Jun, Aug 1934), New York, Clode, Stokes,
1935 (International Polygonics, 1978, p8).
[5] Carroll John Daly, "The Death Drop", in Black Mask,
May 1933 (quoted in Yesterday's Faces Volume 4: The Solvers
by Robert Sampson, Ohio, Bowling Green State University Popular
Press, 1987, p201).
[6] Christopher La Farge, "Mickey Spillane and His Bloody Hammer",
The Saturday Review, 6 November 1954.
[7] Spillane, I, the Jury (Corgi, 1967 printing, p9-10).
