There are the fans of Raymond Chandler. There are fans of Dashiell Hammett. But Mickey Spillane took the soft-boiled, Hercule Poirot who lives in the US and drinks too much, detective and truly made him a schlub who has to live on his per diem. He’s a vet who saw WAY too much on Guadalcanal to function in regular society.
(Note: I knew many vets who managed to internalize it so they could function in IRL. Except on weekends, which seem to have been PTSD holidays. And the guys who wore socks that were white cotton on the foot side but colored on the ankle side because of some form of foot rot they’d developed on campaign. Because of advances in podiatric medicine I don’t think you can still get them, but foot fungi are nasty so I assume they died, in podiatric relief, of other things. )
The Mick broke many rules. Rule #1 was that you didn’t shoot the frail. He tossed her aside in
and placed the Hard-Boiled ethos on a silver platter, to be admired or refused. He liked it when it was refused.
[spoiler]
I, the Jury ended with
The roar of the .45 shook the room., Charlotte staggered back a step. Her eyes were a symphony of incredulity, an unbelieving witness to the truth. Slowly, she looked down at the ugly swelling in her naked belly where the bullet went in. A thin trickle of blood welled out… Her eyes had pain in them now, the pain preceding death. Pain and unbelief.
“How could you?” she gasped.
I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
“It was easy,” I said."
Brutally cool.
After reading most of Raymond Chandlers work I started reading Mickey Spillane. I would have to say that Marlowe is a well developed character who appears in some interesting stories. Hammer is wish fulfillment on an adolescent level.
He is that, but I wonder how much of it was marketing to an adult audience whose tastes were formed by pre- and wartime pulps who wanted something more aimed at their age group after a war full of virginal cartoon Lois Lanes. I’m guessing all of it.
It is the best route into the works of Mickey Spillane…
…I mean…
During my stretch as an English major I wrote a paper comparing Hammer, Marlowe, and Spade, as they represented three takes on the Hard-Boiled Detective. Note that Freud had not yet been exposed as the worst form of huckster, this having happened 35 years ago, when it was only suggested. Obviously, Hammer was the Id, Marlowe the Ego, and, by default, Spade the Super-Ego.
Considering that I composed much of it riding back from my grandmother’s funeral in a '74 Cougar with so little rear legroom that after only an hour I wondered if my left knee would recover enough to let me walk again I think I got a pretty good grade. Though my knee still hurts on occasion.
I’ve never read Spillane, but I have read that he really played on the 1950s Red-Scare atmosphere – a lot of his villains were Communists. Is that true?
What? No mention for one of the best hard boiled detectives ever?
Michael Shayne was right up there with Hammer, Marlowe, and Spade. Created By Brett Halliday (pseudonym of Davis Dresser), his books started in 1939 and were written into the early 60’s.
Spillane was the master of the ultra-hardboiled closing line.
My Gun Is Quick -[spoiler]He was screaming with all the fury of the gods dethoned, but my laugh was even louder.
He was still screaming when I pulled the trigger.[/spoiler]
The story is told that Spillane bet his publisher he could write a novel with the punchline in the very last word. The result was Vengeance Is Mine - Juno was a man!
aceplace57, I have read a couple of the Michael Shane books, and what strikes me most is how much he drank. I know it is part of the hard-boiled genre, but my golly! His liver must have been charred to ashes!
I think Spillane was great, and he sure knew how to tell a story. Over time, he practically became a cliche of himself, but since no one else was writing the same kind of stuff he did, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing – with Spillane, you knew exactly what you were getting.
The earlier Mike Hammer novels are definitely the best, but the latest ones weren’t bad either from “The Killing Man” onward.
Warning: “Highbrow” you’re not going to get here, folks, and if that’s what you want, stick to Hammett or Chandler, but if you like the genre at it’s most primal and brutal, then Spillane’s your man.
I found an audiobook of Spillane’s Vengeance is Mine, with Stacy Keach reading it. This was an odd choice for recording unless a lot of the other books had been done already, because audiobooks are a relatively new medium, and a modern audience could not possibly be surprised by the dramatic reveal at the end.
Of course, the girl turned out to be evil. But more importantly, she turned out not to be a girl. This much was entirely obvious from her first appearance, but is a big shock to Hammer, making the whole book more comic than hard-boiled
One of his top sellers read by the guy who played Mike Hammer on TV? Sounds like an obvious choice for an early audiobook, with two built-in audiences.
Keach has a pretty solid masculine voice, to be sure. But the show from what I remembered was of a distinctly 80’s sensibility. Not exactly “sex and slaughter for a quarter” as Spillane’s work has been described. Is there really a big crossover in audiences?
Then again, I also can’t imagine that enjoying the Perry Mason TV show is likely to translate into enjoying the books. Or that anyone who sees Philip Marlowe the way that Powers Booth portrayed him will care for the way Chandler wrote him.
Mickey Spillane was a terrible writer of prose; his passages are sometimes incoherent, and characterization and plot were secondary to pure sensationalism. He wrote at about the same level as Don Pendleton or Robert Ludlum, and no doubt appealing to the same audiences. I can’t word my reaction better than Lawrence Block, who once wrote that he’s rather read a chewing gum wrapper over and over rather than read another Spillane novel.
Raymond Chandler, along with David Goodis, Cornell Woolrich, Richard E. Westlake, Robert Bloch, and others, were all competent hacks in the hardboiled genre; craftsmen who could build and tell a good story with compelling characters; worthwhile, if just purely entertaining reading.
Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, and Patricia Highsmith all manage (at least, at their best) to transcend the hardboiled/noir genre. While their works often involve crime as an aspect, the theme of their works is not so much getting away with the crime but what the act of committing or being involved in atavistic and criminal behavior does to the basic humanity of the protagonist and others. Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity, The Glass Key, The Grifters, The Cry of the Owl and The Talented Mr. Ripley should all stand with other works of great literature.
Spillane is bottom of the barrel in terms of literary value, characterization, coherence of plot, or indeed, basic readability.
I pulled Betsy fromt he shoulder rig and lined it up between Stranger’s terrified eyes. I wondered, just before squeezing the trigger, if he could see the tip of the .45 slug there in the barrel, waiting for the falling hammer to release it…
Lumping Chandler in with Woolrich, Westlake, and Bloch while extolling the superior literary value of James Cain and Jim Thompson is curious to me. I fail to grasp how the theme of how criminal behavior affects the basic humanity of both the perpetrator and those in their orbit is not present in Chandler’s work. Is it really just a plotless grab-bag of literary posturing?
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