Posts tagged with "Mickey Spillane"
Thursday, 26. July 2007, 21:36:08
Mickey Spillane, Review, private-eye
Kevin Dobson.
I happened across a movie the other day called Margin for Murder (1981).
The info on the cable tab said that it was a Mike Hammer movie. So I
watched it.
Margin for Murder turned out to be a lot closer to Spillane than
the rather watered-down Hammer series with Stacy Keach. Wrinkled
raincoat and fedora aside, Keach just isn't Mike Hammer. Margin for
Murder gives you the real thing -- a screenplay that almost could
have been written by Spillane himself.
The teleplay was by Calvin Clements Jr., whose prior credits included a
wide range of television shows ranging from Gunsmoke to Wonder
Woman. Not very impressive, really; and so it's very surprising to
find here a script of such high quality and faithfulness to the Spillane
stories. According to an IMDB reviewer, Clements was nominated for an
Edgar Award in 1981 for this teleplay. But I wanted to confirm that, and
a database search at the Mystery Writers of America site (who give out
the Edgar's) didn't get me any result either for Clements or Margin
for Murder. So maybe he was nominated and maybe he wasn't. I hate it
when I run into research problems like this, and I apologize to my
readers.
Whether Clements was nominated or not, he certainly wrote an excellent
teleplay. The movie features Kevin Dobson as Mike and Cindy Pickett as
Velda. The more familiar face of Charles Hallahan plays Det. Pat Chambers.
All of the actors do a good job in this, but given the strength of the
teleplay they have a lot to work with and would have had to have been
pretty crappy actors indeed not to have succeeded with this one. Mike
says exactly the things and does exactly the things in this movie that
you would expect him to say or do in a Spillane novel, as do Velda and Pat.
Cindy Pickett.
It would be difficult putting Margin for Murder and Kiss Me, Deadly
side by side. Kiss Me, Deadly is not only an excellent translation
of Spillane but is an acknowledged noir classic. Margin for Murder
has none of the sophisticated production values of the former. But it does
give a very dead-on Mike Hammer tale, perhaps more so than Kiss Me, Deadly.
The earlier movie was filmed closer to Spillane's own period, a 1955 version
of a 1952 novel. Margin for Murder is Spillane translated forward three
decades. I would perhaps give an edge to Kiss Me, Deadly between the
two, but both are very good and luckily you don't have to pick one or the
other -- you can have the pleasure of watching them both.
Even though Margin for Murder came out in 1981, the producers
seem to have been a little behind the times when it came to filming
this. Most of the clothing and hairstyles are more reflective of 1978
than 1981. Which doesn't affect the story in the slightest, of course.
The set-up is right out of I, The Jury. When a good friend of Hammer's
gets murdered, Hammer swears to find the killer and get revenge. Talking
with his friend's mother, he finds that his friend has left 100K worth of
diamonds, obviously the product of some shady deal. From that point it's
just Hammer interviewing witnesses and making a lot of noise and enemies
until the bad guys jump out of the woodwork. The ending, though, is a bit
more tame than the ending of I, The Jury.
If the movie has one weakness it is in the plot. This was a TV movie,
and like most TV movies back then the plot isn't a very sophisticated
one. It basically just takes you along to the places that you pretty
much expect to go. A real Spillane mystery would have kept you on
the edge a little more.
So taking a little off for the weak plot, I'm going to give this one a
4GU rating. If you like Spillane and want an "authentic" Mike Hammer,
you should definitely check it out.
P.M.P.I. RATING (OUT OF 5)
Monday, 12. March 2007, 02:04:57
Mickey Spillane, Review, private-eye
Velda and Mike in Kiss Me, Deadly.
Take out the background on this cover and look at the
the pose between the two. It's beautiful.
The other night I stretched out on the couch to watch some television.
There being little else on, I watched a double feature -- I think on TCM
but I'm not positive about that -- back-to-back showings of The Big
Sleep (1946) and Kiss Me, Deadly (1955). I had seen the first one
countless times; it was my third viewing of the second.
There are plenty of reviews of Kiss Me, Deadly on the internet.
All you have to do is google the title and you will find at least six of
them real easy. But I wanted to do my own slant on the thing. There's
been a lot of stuff interpreting this movie in various ways. At the very
least it is considered a film noir classic.
Some of the reviews get pretty wild. I think these stem in the main from
early French interpretations. Whereas American audiences had trouble
with this movie when it first came out -- they considered it too violent,
too sexual, too overall dark in tone -- French audiences loved it.
Interpretations about the mysterious box that figures into the plot, for
example, often end up like this:
"But it is the box itself that dominates the movie, growing from an
apparent McGuffin into an icon of menacing future, the object of worship
in an impoverished present which, by implication, yearns for the hard
white light that abolished all shadows." (Citation)
That's quite a big deal being made out of this box. Or at least I think
it is, because to be honest I don't even know what the hell they are talking
about. The trouble with those interpretations, at the very least, is that as
a viewer you don't even know the box exists until about 25 minutes shy of the
end of the movie. Which is a fact they seem to forget about. But far be it
from me to confuse them with the facts.
Anyway, more on the mysterious box later. As the movie opens we see P.I.
Mike Hammer driving down the road in his sports car. He sees a woman
hitch-hiking along the road, and he picks her up. Evidently Hammer never
paid any attention to the warnings about the bad things that can happen
if you pick up hitchhikers. But then, Hammer isn't the type of guy to
listen to anybody about much of anything. The woman he picks up is naked
except for the trench coat she is wearing and after talking with her a
few minutes he finds out that she has escaped from the mental hospital.
She says that she isn't crazy -- that they threw her in to get her out of
the way because of what she knows. She tells him that if they make the
bus stop that she can get away and everything will be okay. But if she
doesn't, she simply tells him -- "Remember me."
Mike and the hitchhiker, Christina.
If there is a strange Pandora's box in this movie, it is those two
simple words, Remember me. Mike and the woman get run off the road
and are drugged and carried off. The woman is tortured and (assumably)
killed. Mike is totally out of it and the only thing he sees about his
captors are the fancy shoes of the guy that is responsible for it all.
They take Mike and put him back in his car and send him caroming down a
hillside. But Mike is thrown clear and survives. When he wakes up, he is
in the hospital with his secretary Velda and his cop friend Pat looking
down on him. As you might suspect, as soon as he gets out of the
hospital he wants to find out what is going on with it all.
But there are a lot of other people who seem to be very curious about
it all, too. Like some pretty serious Feds. Mike begins investigating in
spite of warnings and in spite of having his P.I. license revoked. It is
basic serial-type plotting -- push your way from one informant to another
until you find the truth. And, if you are Mike Hammer, break a few jaws or
fingers along the way. And all along there are the mysterious words --
Remember me.
Velda advises Mike.
"First you find a little thread..."
Mike's secretary Velda (Maxine Cooper) is an important part of this
movie. There is a great scene in which Mike goes over to her apartment
to discuss the case. Velda is working out on the ballet bar and pole to
keep herself slim -- a kind of early fitness thing. "First, you find a
little thread" she says to Mike as she spins around the exercise pole.
"The little thread leads you to a string. And the string leads you to a
rope. And from the rope you hang by the neck." In a later scene, Velda
tells him that he is willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of the
"Great Whats-it." In the Hammer novels, the Great Whats-it is a euphemism
for the elusive and perhaps rather doubtful outcome at the end of the
investigative rainbow. It is hard to describe how important this stuff is
in the history of the hardboiled genre, and it is a tribute to director
Robert Aldrich that he really understood that. Weird and possibly erroneous
deconstructions aside, Aldrich understood the Realism operating here.
There are a good number of great minor characters. Especially good
is the character of Mike's friend Nick, a mechanic at a local garage.
"Va va voom!" Nick has a habit of saying. He is a well drawn, interesting
and likable character. The character of the mysterious Dr. Soberin also
is good, rising above the normal villain stereotype.
Mike and Lily
Best of all is Gaby Rogers as Lily -- it's a shame Rogers didn't make more
movies than she did. She is by turns vulnerable then tough and then possibly
crazy in this movie, with an odd kind of sexiness -- it is really the femme
fatale sexiness at its best, although she doesn't really function in that
precise role. "Kiss me, Mike" she says at the end of the movie, pointing a
gun at the detective's chest. "I want you to...kiss me." It's impossible to
describe just how threatening -- and creepy -- those lines are as delivered
by Rogers. You just have to see it.
There is some interesting background material on Rogers and Aldrich that
you can find here. It doesn't really figure into movie much, but it's there if
you want it.
And now back to the box. Some interpreters have said with regard to the
box that it had an influence in later movies such as Repo Man or Pulp Fiction.
I'm not really sure about those two. But one thing I can say is that Stephen Spielberg
MUST have known the ending of this movie when he did the end of Raiders of
the Lost Ark. I don't know that for a fact, but it seems almost impossible to
believe otherwise, the endings are just so similar. I leave it to the reader
to judge for themselves -- the "ultimate jury" as Mickey Spillane always said.
Incidently, the movie does not match the book. Aldrich and the writer
took off with the movie version, making the central mystery into a fable
of Cold-war paranoia. But it fits well, really.
Lily opens the mysterious box.
I don't even have to think about the rating for this one. Some rather
bogus science put aside, it is simply one of the best P.I. movies
ever made.
(Movie stills courtesty of Alain Silver.)
P.M.P.I. Rating (Out of 5)
Friday, 2. March 2007, 00:25:46
private detective, Mickey Spillane, private-eye, Pat Maginess
[Velda] reached out a hand and ran it over my hair. "Mike, you're too
damn big and tough to give a hang what people say. They're only little
people with little minds, so forget it."
"There's an awful lot of it."
"Forget it."
"Make me," I said.
She came into my arms with a rush and I held her to me to get warm and let
the moist softness of her lips make me forget. I had to push to get her
away and I stood there holding her arms, breathing in a picture of what
a man's woman should look like. It was a long time before I could manage
a grin, but she brought it out of me. There's something a woman does
without words that makes a man feel like a man and forget about the
things he's been told.
-- Mickey Spillane, One Lonely Night
There is a strange attitude that I notice floating around today's
culture. From what you would get from movies and television -- which I
believe are reflective of our cultural attitudes -- it isn't enough for
a woman to have an "ordinary" job anymore. Whereas in the 70s you saw
many women in roles as waitresses, secretaries, or the clerk in your
local grocery, today it seems that such roles are almost considered too
menial. The message that seems to be communicated on television and in
movies these days is that if a woman isn't a doctor or lawyer or other
top-notch professional who also seems to be able to swing a relationship
and kids and be working on that degree in nuclear physics on the side,
well then she just isn't really making enough of herself.
And that's just total crap. I realize that part of this is that we have
tried to break down barriers over the years and give women the
opportunities as professionals that is their right. But I think that the
portrayal of women these days is generating the idea of some Superwoman.
And not everyone is capable of that. In fact, not every woman may even
want that.
There's nothing wrong with being a waitress. Or any of the other service
industry jobs, either. There's nothing inherently unfulfilling about
working at a retail store or driving a bus. Or, for that matter, with
being a secretary.
Early hardboiled fiction didn't have secretaries working for
investigators. The early work of Carroll John Daly or Dashiell Hammett
didn't feature secretaries. The first one that Hammett wrote about,
the one that really started it, was Sam Spade's secretary Effie in
The Maltese Falcon. But that didn't mean that secretaries became
common in hard-boiled fiction. Chandler's detective, Phillip Marlowe,
never had one. And neither did a good number of investigators.
Perhaps the first really great secretary was Velda, Mike Hammer's
secretary in Mickey Spillane's novels. Velda was a true classic. She had
her own P.I. license and owned a revolver. She was responsible for
the background research done while working a case. Most importantly, for
the future of P.I. fiction, she was a part-time love interest who was
always there for Hammer and who always had his back.
This is the primary type of detective secretary that we know today.
There is also another type, what you might call the bimbo type. But
these are very much in the minority, and you will tend to find them
in movies or television series more than in detective fiction.
My own detective, Pat Maginess, didn't have a secretary for the first
six years he had his P.I. business going. It takes a certain amount of
incoming cash flow to be able to afford a secretary. When he finally
gets one, in my second novel, she's just a young, inexperienced girl who
he hires part-time to answer the phone and take messages. But Carmen
quickly becomes more than just a secretary. I suppose that is a nod to
today's world, even though the novel is set in 1951. Carmen becomes his
apprentice of sorts.
There's nothing wrong with being a secretary. The point is that Carmen
has the option, it's there if she wants it. And that's really the important
thing.
Incidentally, my choice for Maginess' secretary Carmen was Lake Bell. I
needed someone to fit the description in the novel -- tall, dark
brunette, fairly young -- and Bell seemed to fit the part better than
anyone else I could find. Brittany Murphy (see below) would really have
been my first choice, but she is too short for Carmen, who is described
as 6'0'' tall.
It's kind of strange the way things work doing a novel. I don't choose
elements for a book, such as characters, out of wish-fulfillment. If I
did that, I would be writing not P.I. fiction but some sort of wild,
James Bond type spy novel in which my hero (which would be me) would be
the coolest guy around and would be driving all sorts of hot cars and would
be having flings with all sorts of hot women. But it doesn't work that way,
at least not for me. My concept of detective fiction is essentially a ground
of 19th century Realism with a thin track of the Romance a la Don Quixote
running through it. My aim is to make a good novel. Not to indulge my
fantasies. If I were to indulge my fantasies, it would be much more in the
line of portraying a world that is a lot better place than it actually is.
Brittany Murphy
Brittany would represent the non-serious type of
secretary, the goofy type who could
make you laugh at the end of a long, tough day.
Madchen Amick
Madchen looks like the girl from the other side
of the tracks who wouldn't have any
problem dealing with any trouble that popped up.
Heather Graham
I think Heather could play it as
tough as she had to.
Sherilyn Fenn
I would find it very difficult to concentrate at
the office with Sherilyn as my secretary.
But I'd be willing to give it a few weeks, just to
see how it worked out.
Michelle Pfeiffer
And she can answer the phone, too.
Julianne Moore
Julianne would be my personal choice for a secretary.
Redhead, 40s, tough enough to
deal with the scumbags and handle a revolver.
I didn't alter the above photo. It was originally B&W
and has a very noir-ish feel to it.
Which is why I chose it over other photos,
say, this one...
This one really is wish-fulfillment.
Or at least the wishing part of it.
Tuesday, 15. August 2006, 22:34:43
Mickey Spillane, detective fiction, I the Jury
Creativity is rarely destructive. With the exception of creating new
weapons of mass destruction or generating the kind of hate-filled
propaganda that the Nazis put out during WWII (and that others have
since put out), creativity usually emerges as a positive or at the very
least neutral force in the world. To put out a new idea in the form of a
story, a painting, a piece of music etc. is usually a positive force in
the world. Where there was nothing, now there is something. Something
new for us to read, look at, listen to. Hopefully, something that will
lift our sprits a bit, or if it doesn't then perhaps the creation makes
us more aware of our world in some way -- the light and the dark.
Creation is the universe itself. Take a look at telescope views of Orion
or other reaches of space and you will see stars without number, and the
ongoing process of creation.
Mickey Spillane died on 18 July 2006. His death was reported, of course.
You could find notices on the internet and in newspapers if you turned
enough pages. I watched the national news as well as The News Hour
with Jim Lehrner to see if they would do a report or maybe even a
little segment on Spillane. If any of them did, I missed it. Amidst the
conflict in Iraq and the new explosions in Lebanon, and North Korea
throwing its tin-can missiles into the Pacific, and a terrorist strike
in India, everything else was just pushed to the background.
And that's probably how it should be. But conflict and terror are
nothing new in the world, they are just that which is billed up as
today's new War or new Terrorism. At the time Mickey Spillane began
writing his Mike Hammer novels in 1946, America was just beginning the
long process of healing after a four-year war that reached into and
effected just about every home in the country. Men returned from the war
having carried ten-pound rifles across their shoulders through the
jungles of the south Pacific or from bombing missions in Europe that
were unparalleled in their attrition rate. Soldiers like these would
never look at the world in the same way again, nor would the nurses who
took care of them or the reporters who reported them or the parents and
brothers and sisters who had to sit and wait and hope for that next
letter from them. And as for the rest of the world, it also had its
share of sorrows after the huge conflict subsided -- economic ruin,
cities in rubble, the emergence of the nightmare of the death camps into
the public view, as well as the new threat posed by the Soviet Union,
which at that point -- or even today -- didn't seem much different than
the fascism that the war had just fought against.
America had changed during the war. Added to this was a huge expansion
in economics and population. The factories during the war that had made
fighters or bombers now turned to commercial aviation, and plants like
Lockheed and Boeing contributed to a new era of transportation in
America. Added to the economic expansion was social and cultural change
and discontent. If Communism was a threat, so was police corruption,
racism, drug use, a new rise in organized crime and, eventually, even a
new war in Korea. The Cold War had begun, with visions of potential
nuclear detruction looming on the horizon. As one critic has said,
society had moved from the Lost Generation to possibly the Last
Generation in the space of a few decades.
This was Mickey Spillane's world during his early career. And it was
the world that he wrote his books for. Spillane, influenced greatly by
the great hard-boiled pioneer Carroll John Daly, decided that he wasn't
going to sweep the grit and the grime under the table and create some
sort of nice, pleasant Disneyland for everybody to walk through. If life
and society weren't that way, why should a novel have blinders on?
Spillane, in peeper-speak, played it tough.
And it got him into one hell of a lot of trouble, at least as far as the
critics and social commentators went. The ending of I, the Jury
was shocking, or at least it was shocking for those who weren't
familiar with earlier hardboiled fiction from the 20s and 30s. The
public, on the other hand, seemed to have no problem with it. They had
been through the war and were looking at things straight-on with no
blinders. There was evil to be fought, and Spillane's Mike Hammer fought
it. They didn't want Mark Twain or Leo Tolstoy. They bought the book --
and for Spillane it was the public and not the critics who were the
ultimate jury -- and they bought it up like crazy. My own 1953 Signet
copy of I, the Jury is from the 33rd printing since the first
edition in 1947. That's a pretty decisive thumbs-up.
He came into a lot of flack in his day and since for his comments on
Communism. But to put him into the camp of McCarthyism would simply
be mistaken. Spillane's attitude was not very much different towards
Communism than the average American of his day, at least as far as I can
determine from anything he actually said or did (and perhaps one scene in
One Lonely Night excepted). Twenty years after Spillane's first
publication streak, Ronald Reagan would be saying much the same things
from the podium of the Oval Office talking about the "Evil Empire."
Spillane was published in paperback form, for the most part. After the
war publishers decided that what people might like were books that were
light-weight and cheap. The paperback novel can be stuck in your pocket,
unlike the hardback editions. It was the dime- or pulp-serial revisited
in a new form (and in fact it was the new paperback novel that is usually
credited as being the downfall of the pulp serials). My 1953 copy cost
25 cents back then -- not exactly dirt-cheap for that time but far less
than a hardback would cost and less than the cost of morning breakfast
at a diner. Hardback novels certainly last a lot longer on library shelves
where they are checked out and read over and over. But from an individual
point of view, as well as a kind of egalitarian point of view, the
paperback is king. All too often you see a writer behind the table of
some bookstore, signing their autograph to hardbacks in front of a long
line of loyal fans. That's okay, if you like that kind of thing. I would
rather find a copy of my work in paperback form on the rack of the airport
gift shop, where it might provide some entertainment for that next
twelve-hour flight to Sydney. That's my idea of success, and I think
that it was probably Spillane's also.
Which is not to say that writers write for the masses -- probably not
any writer does it that way. There is something incredibly emotional and
personal about the act of generating a novel or story, pulp fiction or
not. It isn't as simple as saying that you're looking out in the world
and wondering if people are going to like this or dislike that.
Fundamentally, writer's write for themselves. Sales figures emerge as
simple confirmations that the choices you made have been good ones, that
you have created a plot and characters that appeal to other people and
not just to yourself.
Spillane's prose in I, the Jury is derivative of his model,
Carroll John Daly, but it is much more compressed and smooth. The early
1950s aesthetic of "smooth and fast" was almost certainly derived from
Spillane's novels. Daly's prose is often jumbled and tends to go off on
tangents. Spillane's sentences flow straight through the paragraph like
a bullet out of a gun. James Elroy is the writer today who is usually
associated with that type of writing. But Elroy's prose is often so
terse as to seem expressionistic. Spillane writes with force but also
with a great deal of clarity -- it "flows" as an old poet once said.
Next to other writers of his generation, such as Frank Kane, Spillane's
prose is noticeably superior. He isn't Chandler, of course, he doesn't
go off into those "heavenly lengths" that Chandler could put out on a
page, and he isn't as elegant as later Hammett. Nevertheless, I wouldn't
hesitate to say that in his own right that Spillane was a "master
stylist" as well -- if I didn't think he'd crack me across the jaw for
saying it.
Since this is a review (in spite of its essay-type features) I would be
amiss if I didn't quote a few examples. But before I quote Spillane, let
me set the stage a bit and give examples of two earlier styles.
This first is from The Snarl of the Beast by Carroll John Daly.
"If he had swung with the gun I'd of plugged him for sure. But he
didn't. Just his head was turning, in slow sharp jerks, like the
mechanical store-window figures at Christmas time. Maybe he saw me --
maybe he didn't. It doesn't matter. One look I got of his thick lips,
flat nose, and small, mean little eyes. Then I jumped forward and struck
-- not frantically or hurriedly, with fear of my life if I missed. I
wouldn't miss; I knew that. It was all old stuff to me. Just one
question only. How would he fall, and could I catch him before he and
the can clattered into the stone alley, warning the lurking figure
within who was making so free with my library?"
This prose has an odd, jerky, dream-like quality to it which matches
perfectly the rather paranoid world that Daly creates in his book. But
that's pretty much the style in every Daly story, regardless.
This next one is from Raymond Chandler, the incomparable Farewell, My
Lovely.
"Beyond the electroliers, beyond the beat and toot of the small sidewalk
cars, beyond the smell of hot fat and popcorn and the shrill children
and the barkers in the peep shows, beyond everything but the smell of
the ocean and the suddenly clear line of the shore and the creaming fall
of the waves into the pebbled spume. I walked almost alone now. The
noises died behind me, the hot dishonest light became a fumbling glare.
The lightless finger of a black pier jutted seaward into the dark.
This would be the one. I turned to go out on it."
Drop dead gorgeous. No doubt about it. Passages like that in Chandler
almost make me want to drop the pen in a waste basket, kick it over, put
on my jacket and head down to the nearest bar for about ten good stiff
ones. That being said, and all "heavenly lengths" put aside, you will
notice that not much plot is advanced in all of it. That's about a
hundred words to say that a private-eye approaches a pier at night,
decides that it's the right one, and decides to go out on it.
Now let's take an example from Spillane and I, the Jury:
"It was a fine day. The sun was warm and the streets full of kids making
a racket like a pack of squirrels. I drove to the corner and stopped in
a cigar store where I put in a call to Charlotte's office. She wasn't
there, but her secretary had been told to tell me that if I called,
I could find her in Central Park on the Fifth Avenue side near 68th
Street. ....I drove in from the cutoff on Central Park West and drove
all around the place, circling toward Fifth. When I came out I parked on
67th and walked back to the park. She wasn't on any of the benches, so
I hopped the fence and cut across the grass to the inside walk. The day
had brought out a million strollers, it seemed like. Private nurses in
tricky rigs went by with a toddler at their heels, and more than once
I got the eye."
The sun and the kids and the nurses checking out Mike's handsome mug
aside, this is pretty much pure narrative at the service of the story.
Nevertheless there are squirrels and there are nurses; Spillane doesn't
avoid that kind of thing. He just doesn't make it too long or too
complicated. The entire passage (the above constitutes two complete
paragraphs) has a very clean flow to it and is totally seamless. The
prose flows and the plot develops simultaneously. No big deal. Except
that it is a big deal. That kind of thing isn't easy, especially when
you consider that Spillane claimed (and you have to wonder about this,
really) that he didn't make any revisions to his text. This is in fact
"bullet straight" prose, and Spillane was a guy who hit what he aimed
at. And if you do like and want the more introspective kind of thing
Spillane can do that kind of thing too, and in the last chapter he does
it almost as good as anybody.
This fiction follows the "serial-type" plotting developed earlier by
Daly and Hammett and others. Elmore Leonard commented that Spillane was
"perhaps the best plotter of them all." It must be remembered, though,
that in context the hardboiled detective novel in America is not the
Golden Age plots of Agatha Christie. These are primarily detective
stories, not mystery stories. The emphasis is on the action, with the
private-eye pushing himself through situations and various people until
the whole thing get's worked out. Hardboiled fiction is generally
criticised in a negative aspect when put beside Golden Age or other
types of plotting. Even Raymond Chandler was criticised by some for
"weak" plots. Just say to yourself "this is a detective story, not a
mystery story" about fifty times and you'll soon get the idea.
Nevertheless the novel does have a variant of the classic "locked room"
mystery come in toward the end of the novel, which was a pretty gutsy
thing for a first-time writer to attempt.
It was the "non-legal" aspect of the plot that caused the biggest buzz
when I, the Jury was first published, and it continues to be
debated not only about that particular book but with regard to the
entire Mike Hammer series. As was mentioned above, this is primarily due
to the influence of earlier hardboiled fiction such as Daly or even
early Hammett. The only difference being perhaps that earlier audiences
who were reading hardboiled fiction in the twenties and early thirties
were much more used to the idea of some sort of mid-way line between the
law and criminals due to prohibition and the presence of organized
crime, a time in which even the FBI most always had to take the middle
road between criminals and corrupt police departments. But there was
plenty of that still around in Spillane's day as well, a fact that the
public recognized. Spillane continued a tradition in the hardboiled
field. He simply extended it to his own day, with no apologies. Thus
I think that much of the stir is due to lack of context. The characters
of The Lord of the Rings didn't have a judge and jury sitting off
to the side either, not to mention most of Steven Segal's movies today
(which, strangely, most of the public seems to have no problem with).
There are also a few other things about the novel which we could consider
politically incorrect today. There's a bit of racism and a lot of homophobia.
Spillane was about as evolved on these issues as the average person of his
time. That isn't an excuse. I'm merely putting the book in context.
There is some humor in the book, but it tends to be of the high-school
locker room or prank phone-call variety. At one point Hammer drops a
pitcher of water onto "a couple of pansies" fighting below his window,
claiming "it was a pretty good gag" and got a howl from the onlookers.
I didn't exactly howl. Not my type of humor, I guess. Nevertheless I get
the feeling that if I had attended a party and ran into Mickey Spillane
and we stood there and talked, that he would be a lot more liberal with
the humor, and that I would have enjoyed talking with him -- certain
topics avoided, of course.
Since we're in the general neighborhood, and since this is proving to be
a rather long essay anyway ("What the hell, might as well"), I would
like to broach the topic of humor in hard-boiled detective fiction. Or
more precisely, of how little of it there is in the genre. Chandler is
of course known for his dry wit, a humor that often reflects a kind of
tragic irony. But other than Chandler, humor in hard-boiled fiction
seems to be purposely avoided. Perhaps the idea was that humor had no
place in the mean-streets world of the private-eye novel. My personal
view is that humor and toughness (or you might say tragedy) are not only
not incompatible, but often emerge as the Janus-head of life. As my own
private-eye says at one point, "The world is nuts. You gotta laugh at it
sometimes or you'll go crazy." I would also say here that there is a lot
of post-1955 hard-boiled fiction that is unknown to me, and that the
humor situation may have changed a bit recently.
There is a duality with regard to sex and love in the book that was
reflective of the time as well. Hammer has no real trouble having sex
with Mary Bellemy, a rich socialite and so-called "nymphomaniac." And in
fact he has sex with her for the second time off in a woods and only
about a hundred yards from where Charlotte Manning is sitting, Charlotte
being his real love interest in the book. "I couldn't push her away" he
says. But with regard to Charlotte, he repeatedly pushes off her
advances once they become serious, wanting to wait for marriage. This is
a variant on the "bad girls do, good girls don't" sexual attitude common
then, but the interesting thing here is that it is Mike Hammer who has
the attitude, not Charlotte. For Hammer, if you care about a girl you
treat her right, and treating a woman right means taking her to the
altar first. Which brings us back to the duality I spoke of, and we come
full circle. This exasperating duality wouldn't last much longer. The seeds
were in a sense already sown by the 1950s, and the 1970s sexual revolution
would make the duality disappear for a while.
Somebody recently asked me about Spillane and this book, about what the
writing was like and how long the book was and of whether it was any
good or not. Not everybody these days has time to read War and
Peace or the complete Remembrance of Things Past by Proust.
Which I find kind of sad in a way, but that's the nature of our times.
What I can say is that this novel is 160 pages long in 9-point type.
Which from what I've seen is about 30 pages or so shorter than an
average peeper novel of that time period. In any case, you could read
four entire Spillane novels for only one massive new Steven King
novel. Now that's a 4:1 reading-pleasure ratio. I might be a
little bit prejudiced, but I would have to go with the odds. (I hope
that you are laughing at this, Mickey.) For if nothing else the Spillane
novels are entertainment. They're a fun read, even if you do sometimes
find yourself grimacing through certain passages. As for how good
it is, my own view is that it is good, very good, five guns out of five
on the P.M.P.I. rating system. It's a classic, plain and simple. The
opening will grab you by the collar and pull you through all the
following pages all the way up to its notorious finale.
Getting back to that, Spillane pretty much gives you an idea of what
Mike Hammer is going to do from the get-go. But let's put it this way,
given the set-up, the vicious killing of an old army pal, you'd pretty
much have to be Jesus Christ himself not to at least take a slug at the
scum who killed your friend. Nevertheless there are some additional
motivational aspects at work by the end of the novel that kind of put a
little kink in things (much like the ending of The Maltese Falcon,
in fact). Nothing is ever as easy as it seems -- not even revenge.
As far as going beyond that, the notorious "judge and jury" aspect at
the end of the novel is not quite as straight forward as it seems, either.
It's easy for a writer to design some sort of confrontational situation
where the culprit gets what they deserve anyway, all perfectly legit. In
fact we've seen it a million times in novels and movies: The hero gets the
drop on the bad guy, but the bad guy is stupid enough to go for the gun
anyway and the hero is forced to shoot -- "Self-defense." What is usually
missed in commentary about this book is that Spillane really does use that
kind of convention at the end, sworn revenge or not. The culprit is shot
just as they are about to go for a gun. Of course, the key phrase in that
is "just about to", and Hammer could have pistol-whipped the culprit with
his .45 and called the police if he had wanted to. But he doesn't, of
course. Because he's getting even for a friend. Because the culprit has
already killed a half dozen people. Because he's Mike Hammer and in Mike
Hammer's world bad people don't get off easy.
Plot aside, the last chapter has some simply excellent writing --
meditative, forceful, and ultimately surprising: The slow disrobing of
the truth.
Spillane created something. I believe he created something lasting and
fundamentally positive in the world. He wasn't Ghandi and he wasn't
Martin Luther King. But if nothing else he entertained one hell of a lot
of people. And he seems to have given us a lot to think about as well --
what justice is and how it may or may not be served or of how the law
may or may not always reflect what we believe on a personal level to be
just. And those are questions that can never be answered finally, but
should be asked continually.
In any case, I think that Mickey is probably out flying somewhere in
that Orion nebulae right now. Maybe he'll think about us, now and then.
But I hope not too often -- he deserves a nice vacation.
P.M.P.I. RATING (OUT OF FIVE)
Tuesday, 18. July 2006, 14:17:07
Mickey Spillane, private-eye novels
Mickey Spillane
Spillane's first novel, I, the Jury (1947).
He wrote the book in six days.
WIDGETIZE