"I'm going to get the louse that killed you. He won't sit in the chair. He won't hang. He will die exactly as you died, with a .45 slug in the gut, just below the belly button. No matter who it is, Jack, I'll get the one. Remember, no matter who it is, I promise."
With these words Mike Hammer, P.I. accepts the case and goes head first into a mystery story the likes of which had never before been seen. Writing a story filled with violence, sex, drugs, prostitution, beer, and guns, Mickey Spillane had created in I, the Jury a literary revolution in the world of the hard-boiled detective novel. Forget about Hammett and Chandler, Spillane became the new household name for the square-shouldered hero in a trench coat and slouch hat.
And why has Spillane's book been so successful while other hard-boiled detective stories have failed on the market? I, the Jury presents a world where things are what they are, and any mystery, no matter how complex and shrouded, and any enemy, no matter how powerful or many, is capable of being conquered and brought to justice. All that is needed to make this happen is that a good man, a man like Mike Hammer, stands up and fights the evil any way that he can. That is the way America does it, that is the way Mickey Spillane does it, and that is what his readers want when they pick up a copy of I, the Jury.
In this paper I will explore how Mickey Spillane's best-selling novel, I, the Jury gained such success by expressing a wholly American worldview of objective reality, individualism, and most of all, justice. These themes both were and are readily identifiable and embraced by his audience, who span the spectrum from rich to poor. The widespread fan following that Spillane has garnered means that despite slurs brought on by his detractors, Spillane's writing has narrative fidelity with a large portion of America and has led to his book, I, the Jury, being one of the most successful pieces of twentieth century literature.
Background
Frank Morrison Spillane was born in Brooklyn on March 9, 1918 and went on to grow up in New Jersey. He was raised the son of a loving mother and a personable father, who first coined the nickname Mickey. Aside from his famous name, Mickey also received his father's affable nature, being able to get along with most people and in most situations. Being an outgoing kid, Mickey was also a lover of fiction, pulp fiction, that is. He devoured the slam-bang action of the cheap and sometimes lurid stories of heroes with his greatest inspiration being found in the stories of tough private eye Race Williams, written by Carroll John Daly. (Collins, 1996)
By the time he had reached adulthood, a new type of popular fiction was quickly replacing the pulp novel in the form of the comic book. Mickey Spillane started working for Funnies Inc. writing short one or two page stories that would be included among the paneled pages of the magazines. He wrote stories for classic 40's characters such as The Submariner, Target and the Targeteers, and Blue Bolt. He also created a comic character of his own, Mike Danger, a tough private dick who operated in the same manner of Spillane's own hero, Race Williams. Sadly, Mike Danger never got the OK from Funnies Inc., and he never saw publication through their company. (Kimball, 2000)
Spillane had become a fairly affluent individual in the world of comics by the time the United States joined the Allied Powers in World War II. Seeing it as his patriotic duty, Spillane signed up for the Air Force where he served as a fighter pilot and a flight instructor until the end of the war. (Kimball, 2000)
After both the "Krauts" and "Japs" had both been thoroughly pummeled into submission, Spillane came home, settled down in South Carolina and started musing about restarting his career as a writer. Needing a solid thousand dollars as a down payment to build his dream house, Spillane was suddenly struck with inspiration. He sat down and in nine days he had written a story that he knew would sell: I, the Jury.
The story is about the private eye, Mike Hammer, a rework of Spillane's old comic character Mike Danger with the name changed in honor of Hammer's Bar and Grill. (Holland, 1999) Mike's old war buddy, Jack, was shot in the belly with a .45, sawed off at the nose, and died in agony at the feet of his laughing killer. Swearing that he will bring justice to the killer, Mike becomes judge, jury, and executioner as he searches for clues among a sultry mess of suspects ranging from a leggy blonde psychiatrist to a bootlegger turned drug pusher to a racketeer to a pair of twin socialites.
Mike slugs his way through 246 pages of intrigue with nothing but his wits, fists, .45 semi-automatic, and his trusty secretary, Velda at his side. The story ends, just like most Mike Hammer novels, with Mike finally tracking down the killer and pulling the trigger with a smile on his face, no matter how hard it is to do so.
The world that Mike Hammer occupies is one that people do not like to talk about, especially not now. After World War II, the United States had entered a period of emotions ranging from cynicism to stark realism. Servicemen had come face to face with death on the hills of Normandy and on the islands of the pacific. No matter how hard some one tried, it was impossible to walk away from the hell of war unaffected, and maybe you were not supposed to.
Back at home, ex-soldiers and civilians alike shuddered to see that a crime wave was rising and showed no sign of stopping, with the police seemingly unable or unwilling to do what was needed to deal with it. At the heart of this new onslaught of crime was the new wave of criminology that still haunts the halls of law. This criminology blatantly denied human volition and the potency of the mind, instead it presented humans as mere automatons who simply responded to different stimuli or were interchangeable parts of a larger "collective organism." This new criminology, then, presented criminals not as evil humans who chose to commit evil acts, but as victims of society who had no power over their actions. This twisted philosophy, since one cannot have compassion for a criminal and his victim, totally ignored the victim and worked to subjugate justice. Under this philosophy, of course, crime skyrocketed over the next several decades.
Overseas, things were not much better. The red monster of Communism was gaining power and enslaving countless individuals to the State. Just as the threat of Nazism subsided, the Soviet threat had arisen to destroy the free world.
In this background of nihilism, tyranny, and indifference to the suffering of the innocent, Mickey Spillane had created a hero who treated people with justice and defended the good no matter what was at stake.
Mike Hammer was despised and panned by the "enlightened" intellectuals that he had arisen as a reaction to, but with everyone else Mike Hammer was number one. Having seen evil first hand and understanding that the only way to deal with it was through retaliatory force, servicemen and their kid brothers flocked to read Mike Hammer, who stood as a symbol of all that they believed in
On the ground of style, Mickey Spillane wrote at a lightning quick pace that he had probably developed from his time working at Funnies Inc. This style made his work immensely attractive to kids who had grown up reading comics and demanded the almost panel-to-panel action that Spillane provided them. (Kimball, 2000)
Overall, though, Mickey Spillane did not appeal to just one demographic, he appealed to them all. The American Demographic. The Human Demographic. His books were read by the everyday, All-American men and women who saw the world around them crumbling thanks to the very intellectuals who damned Spillane. Because of this, they flocked to the All-American heroism, individualism, and justice of Mike Hammer.
Certainly there is an ideology that lies behind I, the Jury and though its ideology may be a large part of its appeal, it is not the only purpose for which the novel was written. The primary reason Spillane wrote I, the Jury was, as mentioned earlier, to make money. In fact, Mickey Spillane only ever wrote in order to pay the bills. And he paid those bills in spades, having tapped into the fledgling paperback market that produced books at a cheaper price, adding an extra appeal to economically minded customers.
The second purpose of the story is connected to Spillane's desire to make money, but is in a way a precondition to doing so. Mickey Spillane wrote I, the Jury to provide a well-crafted and entertaining story for people to read.
The final reason that Spillane wrote I, the Jury is an ideological one, and the main focus of this essay. Mickey Spillane presents the reader with an objective world view that includes a black and white view of morality and stresses the importance and superiority of both individualism and justice.
Character
I, the Jury is primarily a character driven story, going back to Spillane's belief in individualism. The story explores the world through the life and eyes of the narrator, Mike Hammer. In this section I will study the characters, both good and evil, that Mike Hammer interacts with in the novel.
Aside from Mike Hammer, the most important character is that of his secretary, Velda. Though she starts off looking like a simple "Effie Perrine to Mike's Sam Spade, it quickly becomes clear that she is more the Jane to his Tarzan." (Collins, 1996) Leggy, voluptuous, and tall, Velda keeps her long black hair in a trademark paige boy cut. Though she could have certainly amounted to little more than an image to leer at, Velda is shaped by Spillane to be the perfect woman, one that both he and his readers would die for. Along with her gorgeous body, Velda is every bit Mike Hammer's mental and physical equal, with perhaps the exception of her slight inexperience compared to Mike.
Velda sports a mean little .38 in her purse and could just as easily slip off a heel to smash someone's head in. In this aspect, Velda fits into the standard Femme Fatale archetype, though she is not a figure who threatens the hero, but is presented as the ideal. In the same way that Mike Hammer is all man, Velda is all woman. They are a pair of gods that love each other, and in later novels will finally hook up.
After Velda, the other most important reoccurring side character is that of Police Captain Pat Chambers. Pat serves as one of Mike Hammer's closest and most trusted friends, but also as a sort of antagonist. Since Mike is hell-bent on bringing all important justice to evil men, and since the law, being continuously corrupted by the above mention new wave of criminology, often serves to hamper, not encourage justice, Mike finds that many times it is the law, not the dangerous criminals, that is his biggest enemy. On this ground Pat Chambers serves as the
de facto face of Mike's most useless foe.
Of course, Mickey Spillane knows just as well as his readers that the law and the police are important factors for order and justice to survive in any civilized society. Because of this, Pat is anything but the roadblock that he is often forced to be. Instead Pat, just like most other police officers in I, the Jury, is shown as a good and noble figure who craves for the justice that Mike Hammer provides but is hamstrung by the higher-up criminologist, just like real law enforcement agents are. As Mike Hammer points out, "You're a cop, Pat. You're tied down by rules and regulations. There's someone over you. I'm alone . . . I still have a private cop's license with the privilege to pack a rod, and (criminals are) afraid of me." (Spillane, 1947)
Pat Chambers, then serves not just as Mike Hammer's friend, but as the sympathetic face of law enforcement and shows readers that Spillane is not anti- law or police, but is simply anti-crime, just like his readers.
Another good character, if anywhere from heroic, can be found in the simple-minded man-child Bobo Harper. Though an important plot device, Bobo also serves to represent a product of New Deal collectivism in the slums of a city. Undereducated possibly to the point of situational retardation, Bobo is a gentle shadow of a human intellect that would not harm any creature and wants only to raise bees. Bobo works the simpleminded job of running packages for gang leader George Kalecki, though it might be suspect if Bobo is actually aware of what he is doing.
The pain that the reader feels when he witnesses Bobo being gunned down by the same killer who Mike Hammer is hunting for serves to bring up emotions in the reader of frustration with a system that encourages and pushes individuals down the path of becoming a simpleminded, innocent stooge like Bobo, but also further reinforces the reader's disdain for the evil of a killer who would strike down so many valuable lives, along with such a pitiable shadow of one.
This review would not be complete without studying the most heinous of characters in I, the Jury, that of Charlotte Manning, the woman that Mike Hammer almost fell in love with before the mystery was completely unraveled.
Putting aside the façade, red herrings, and trickery that Manning built up to disguise her true intentions and make Mike Hammer almost fall in love with her, she is the prime example of the puny, power lusting murderers that flooded the streets. Willing to kill whoever stands in her way, she is not content with simply pumping a slug into the gut of an adversary, but will further prolong the torture by taunting the victim until he dies. If Velda is a femme fatale in a heroic sense, then Charlotte Manning is a femme fatale in the manner of a thespian Satan, ready at any minute to drop the mask of beauty to reveal her ugly soul.
Charlotte does not only represent most purely the face of evil, but also that of the new social scientists responsible for the hell of the New Deal and the out of control crime and tyranny that was gripping the world. Manning "represents the social-scientific elite, professionally skilled at exploiting the 'frailty of men'; she is thus one of the many intellectual charlatans whose authority is easily vanquished by Mike Hammer's...righteousness" (McCann, 2000) So aside from the obvious evils that she serves to represent, Charlotte Manning also serves to bring the elitists down from their ivory towers and in front of Mike Hammer's, and the audience's, righteous fury.
Mike Hammer
The most important and influential character ever created by Mickey Spillane, who revitalized the hard-boiled detective genre, who is aspired to by many writers but never matched, the hero of I, the Jury is of course Mike Hammer. Mike is the symbol of what all his readers want to be: tough, powerful, brilliant, ruggedly individualistic, craved by the ladies, unswervingly righteous. Mike "can 'make life obey the rules he set[s] down.' His 'body is huge...[his] mind is the same. No repressions.' (If Charlotte Manning) is all manipulative intelligence, then (Mike Hammer) is all corporal energy. Only one of the two... can survive." (McCann, 2000) In this battle, parallel to the real life battle of ideas still going on in the world, the concretized mentality of Mike Hammer defeats Manning's evil, which is based merely in floating abstractions.
In the final pages of I, the Jury Charlotte Manning is confronted by Mike in her apartment. As Mike recounts the entirety of her evil plot, she does not give up. Attempting to seduce Mike and then blow his brains out, she slowly strips off her clothes and leans her quivering, naked body over Mike to deliver a kiss.
Mike almost loved Charlotte, but after finally seeing what she was, his righteousness would not be able to stand the stench. He pulls the trigger of his .45, completing the promise he made to his dead friend and sending the incredulous beauty to hell with the single roar of a gunshot. When asked how he could kill the sexy creature he simply replies, "It was easy." (Spillane, 1947)
Sure, the sexiness of this scene may well have clicked with many in the audience, but the most powerful appeal to the audience can be found in the fact that no matter how attractive the evil Charlotte was, Mike Hammer did the right thing. This was the type of hero that people had been clamoring for, and Mickey Spillane had finally provided.
Like pulp heroes before him, Mike Hammer serves as an inspiration for his readers to aspire to and shows them exactly how to reach his level of righteous manliness. His treatment of moral figures such as Velda or Pat Chambers is attractive to the audience, as is the way he vanquishes criminals and louses.
In fact, Mike Hammer's often lethal judgment almost elevates him from the realm of a mere mortal and makes him an instrument, a Hammer of God (Holland, 1999) In the book, One Lonely Night Mike Hammer best details the motivations for his actions by declaring, "I lived only to kill the scum and lice that want to kill themselves. I lived to kill so that others could live. I lived to kill because my soul was a hardened thing that reveled 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." (Spillane, 2001)
Mike Hammer is the very symbol of the narrative fidelity that Mickey Spillane has with his audience. He believes what they believe. He does what they know needs to be done but they cannot do. He serves as a source to inspire greatness in his audience and lets them live vicariously through his heroic actions until they can rise to their own, though in all likelihood less violent, forms of heroism.
Structure
Mick Spillane was often panned by critics as writing in a plain, guttural style (Holland, 1999), but upon closer examination he actually has a Romantic writing style akin to such acclaimed writers as O. Henry or Victor Hugo. (Rand, 1969)
In his descriptions "there is not a single emotional word or adjective... he presents nothing save visual facts; but he selects only those facts, only those eloquent details, which convey the visual reality of the scene and create(s) a (certain) mood." (Rand, 1969) His writing follows a simply running style that states only the bare essentials of a situation and leaves the summations of these concretes up to the reader to judge.
Another classic hallmark of Spillane's writing is that I, the Jury, like most other of his works, is told in an everyday conversational tone that shows emotion not just in dialogue with other characters but in the internal dialogue of Mike Hammer's narration. The words are plain and to the point. You will find no pretentious wording here. (Farmer, 1993)
Continuing from the ground of Spillane's use of language, the dialogue of the characters does not come from some tilted, grandiosely annoying street theater, but from the actual theatre of the street. The argot that the characters use is the very slang of real people (Farmer, 1993), this adds not just to the realism of the writing, but also to the work's fidelity with its readers. The characters in I, the Jury talk just like the members of its audience talked.
Spillane's writing may lack embellishment, but that is just because embellishment was never necessary. Just the facts, that is all that Spillane's audience ever wanted or needed. This writing style is anything but the slap-dash scrawling of an armature, then, but the tight, reality based writing of a talented Romantic-style writer.
The Jury Declares Its Sentence
Mickey Spillane once said, "If the public likes you, you're good." If this is true, then Mickey Spillane was the best. His worldview is the same as that of the majority of Americans from his black and white view of morality, to his strong belief in the potency of the individual, to his unwavering dedication the ideal of justice. One only needs to look at Spillane's fan base, which numbers in the millions, to see that I, the Jury and his other works have a narrative fidelity with a significant number of Americans, and people from all over the world.
The problems that challenged people back in 1947 still loom large today, so I, the Jury and the other Mike Hammer books still has fidelity with an audience who understands the importance and utter righteousness of Mickey Spillane's ideals and craves for heroes like Mike Hammer to help strengthen their spirits for the battles they will have to fight.
In the end it is not the sex, booze, or violence that keeps me or anyone else coming back to Mike Hammer. We come back to see justice served by a hero who does not live as some unrealistic abstraction or as some naturalistic idea of the "folks next door," but who is every bit as real and possible and noble as the American Dream.
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Holland, S. (1999, December). You the jury. Crime Time, 2(6).
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McCann, S. (2000). Gumshoe america: Hard-boiled crime fiction and the rise and fall of new
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Rand, A. (1969). The romantic manifesto: A philosophy of literature. New York, NY: Signet
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