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Mickey Spillane (1918-2006) - pseudonym of Frank Morrison Spillane |
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American thriller writer, master of "hard boiled" style peppered with sex and sadism. Mickey Spillane is best-known for his private detective Mike Hammer, who appeared in his first published book I, the Jury (1947). The hardback edition did not sell well, but the paperback became a world-wide phenomenon. In the character of Hammer, the most chauvinist avenger among classical private eyes, Spillane created a dark counterpart to the knightly Philip Marlowe. "The biggest part of the joke is the punch line, so the biggest part of a book should be the punch line, the ending. People don't read a book to get to the middle, they read a book to get to the end and hope that the ending justifies all the time they spent reading it. So what I do is, I get my ending and, knowing what my ending is going to be, then I write to the end and have the fun of knowing where I'm going but not how I'm going to get there." (Mickey Spillane, interview by Charles L. P. Silet, in Speaking of Murder: Interviews with the Masters of Mystery and Suspense, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, Berkley Prime Crime, 1998, p. 124) Frank Morrison Spillane was born in Brooklyn, New York, the
only child of John Joseph Spillane, a bartender, and Catherine Anne
Spillane.
Noteworthy, in The Twisted Thing
(1966) Mike Hammer mentions his father; he was the one who comforted
him when he hurt himself. Catherine taught her son to read and write a
little before he went to school. In his youth Spillane read such writers as
Alexandre Dumas (Sr.) and Anthony Hope, but disliked Charles Dickens,
with the exception of A Christman
Carol. He was also fascinated by pulp fiction, Western, horror,
science fiction, anventure, all genres. A natural athlete, Spillane excelled in American football and swimming. In 1935 he graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. Spillane then attended briefly Fort Hays State College in Kansas, but dropped out, and moved back to New York. To earn his living, Spillane worked as a lifegueard at Breezt Point, Queens, and in the 1940s he sold ties at Gimbles department stores. Spillane's early
stories were published mostly in comic books and pulp magazines. At
Lloyd Jacquets Funnies, Inc., at West Forty-Street in Manhattan, he
developed Mike Danger, a prototype for the private eye Mike Hammer.
Harry Sahle, a veteran artist, changed "Danger" into "Lancer," so the
first story appeared under the title 'Mike Lancer and the Syndicate of
Death' in Green Hornet #10,
December 1942. In addition, Spillane wrote among others for Captain
America, Captain Marvel, and The Human Torch, but
he never wrote Batman. Commercially, Mike Danger was a failure; the
character did not find his way into
newspapers. During WW II Spillane served as a flying instructor for the U.S. Army Air Force in Mississippi and Florida; he never got overseas. In 1945 he married his first wife, Mary Ann Pierce, in Greenwood, Mississippi. They had four children. Achieving the rank of captain by the time, he left the service, and returned in 1946 to New York. "Spillane was not a more realistic writer than his hadr-boiled precursors. His novels, on the whole, are less grounded in reality than Hammett's certainly and Chandler's probebly. Spillane writes with speed, and the rough-hewn poetry of his narrator creates a fantasy city, a NewYork of myth and dream, populated by the same character types as those found in the work of Daly, Hammett, and Chandler—good girls, black widows, thugs, frustrated cops, gang lords, corrupt society leaders—but delivered with a unique fever-dream fervor." ('Mickey Spillane' by Max Allan Collins, in Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage: Volume 2, edited by Robin W. Winks, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998, p. 872) I, the Jury was written in only nine days. When the
manuscript was passed to Editor in Chief Nicholaus Wreden at E.P.
Dutton & Co., he said: "It isn't in the best of taste, but it will
sell." Spillane told that he wanted an advance of $1,000 so he could
build a four-room cinderblock house in Newburgh, New York for himself
and
his young wife. The house was later named Little Bohenia. As a romantic hero who has taken the law in his own hand, Mike
Hammer comes from the same literary tradition as Leslie
Charteris'
Simon Templar alias The Saint. Spillane's own model was Carroll John
Daly, who started the hard-boiled school on mystery. HIs tough
detective was named Race Williams. Daly was innovative writer and his
use of the first-person style influenced Spillane. As a Signet paperback, I, the Jury became such success that Spillane quickly produced six more Hammer novels, five of them published between 1950 and 1952. The Long Wait (1951) sold 3 million copies in a single week in 1952. Spillane himself posed for the dust wrapper photographs of Hammer novels and starred in the film version of The Girl Hunters (1962). At home he usually wore T-shirts or tight wool sweaters and close-fitting blue jeans. He also refused to wear a necktie and boasted in the 1950s, that he still owns only one suit. When the British producer/director Victor Saville wanted to bring I, the Jury to the screen, Spillane insisted that they meet under the clock at the Pennsylvania Railway Station, not in some office. From there they continued to a bar on Third Avenue to make a deal. "Crime novels are a good way to make money," Spillane once
stated. However, the sixth Hammer novel, The Twisted Thing,
did not appear until 1966. The friends of this ferocious detective
included his secretary Velda, a dark-haired beauty, who is the tough
soul mate of Mike, and Captain Pat Chambers of the New York Police
Department. In the first novel Hammer investigates the brutal murder of his best friend. Eventually he discovers that his girl friend, the beautiful but bad Charlotte Manning, a lady psychiatrist, is the murderer. At the end of the story, she performs a strip tease in order to dissuade the angry Hammer from killing her. He shoots her in the naked belly. ""How c-could you?" she gasped. I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in. "It was easy." I said." (I, the Jury, Signet, 1975, p. 246) It is one of the most famous last lines in popular fiction. In Vengeance is Mine!
(1950) Hammer is tormented by the memory of Charlotte and vows never to
kill another woman, until a murderous doppelgänger of her is revealed
to be a transvestite. The theme of crime and punishment - Hammer acting as the tool of some ancient God -
continued in the following novels. Hammer often hears noises in his
head, sometimes like the plunging pistons in a gasolinen engine, or
kettledrums, or bells. In One Lonely
Night (1951)
a Judge argues that Hammer enjoys killing, which makes him as bad as
those he kills. In an unsparing act of self-scrutiny, Hammer
summarizes: "I
lived to kill so that others could live. I lived to kill
because my soul was a hardened thing that revealed in the thought of
taking the blood of the bastards who made murder their business."
(One Lonely
Night and The Twisted Thing,
Signet Double Mysteries, 1979, p. 165) A beautiful woman, Berga Torn, clad only in a trenchcoat,
stops Hammer's sportscar on a lonely road in Kiss Me Deadly
(1952).
She has escaped from a sanitarium, where she was referred by Dr.
Soberin. However, her chasers beat Hammer, torture and kill her. Hammer
starts to investigate the case, Velda is kidnapped by the Mob but
Hammer rescues her. He finds out that Lily Carver is Soberin's mistress
and has used him to get a metal box containing $2 million in heroin.
Hammer gets his revenge – he kills her – but is left in the end in a
burning house, trying to get away from the flames. Following this novel
Spillane began his nine-year silence as a novelist. The hiatus ended
with The Deep, a story of a
tough guy,
who returns to his old neighborhood – revealing in the end of the story
that he is a cop now. It has been regarded as his best book. In
Turkey the work was filmed in 1967 under the title Aslan yürekli kabadayi. "Why should one of the most popular authors of the twentieth century need defending? Easy, as Mike Hammer might say: his subject matter and his approach were so hard-hitting, so individual, that Spillane repelled the more proper and staid among the Literary Establishment (and the Establishment in general, including Dr. Frederic Wertham and Parents Magazine and other unpointed arbiters of public morality). And it has taken time, and changing mores – plus the natural PR knack of Spillane himself, with such disarming tactics as funny self-parody beer commercials and the writing of award-winning children's books – to give him his rightful place as the living giant among mystery writers." ('Mecca Spillane' by Max Allan Collins, in The Big Book of Noir, edited by Ed Gorman, Lee Server and Martin H. Greenberg, Carroll & Graf Publishers,1998, p. 232) Spillane told once that he finishes his text in two weeks and
do not
revise anything he has written. He used a standard typewriter, and
often, typing with two fingers, he could go on for five or six pages
without changing a single
word. "Hell, I'm not an author, I'm a writer," he said. "I've got to
make a living, somehow. I'm not writing just for fun. I'm not trying to
educate the people. I'm just trying to entertain. If they put their
money in the hat, that's all I want." ('Death's
Fair-haired Boy: Sex and Fury Sell 13 Million Gory Books for Mickey
Spillane' by Richard W. Johnston, Life,
June 23, 1952, p. 9) During
the decades, Hammer's drinking habits never changed, but Spillane
himself stated in 1981, that he never drank while working. In his
longest and most ambitious novel, The
Erection Set, Spillane followed
in the footsteps of Harold Robbins, Irving Wallace, and Jacqueline
Susann. He also experimented with multiple first-person narrators. The
central
character, Dog Kelly, is not a private detective or secret agent, but a
former Army man. Although critics tried to
belittle the author's achievements from the beginning, Spillane had
such defenders as Ayn Rand, who has said: "I like the early novels of
Mickey Spillane, for his plot ingenuity and moralistic style, even
though his sense of life clashes with mine, and no explicit
philosophical element is involved in his work . . . Spillane gives me
the
feeling of hearing a military band in a public park—Tolstoy gives me
the feeling of an unsanitary backyard which I do not care to enter." (The Romantic Manifesto: A
Philosophy of Literature by Ayn Rand, Signet, 1975, pp. 33-34) To
his critics
Spillane answered, "but it's good garbage." On a list complied in 1967
of all the best-selling books published in America between 1895 and
1965, seven of the top twenty-nine were written by Spillane. Especially
during the height of anti-Communist paranoia, Hammer's unyielding,
patriotic character comforted many American readers. Also
parodies were seen in print and on film. Spillane's world inspired even
Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in 'The Girl Hunt' sequence of The Band Wagon (1953), directed by
Vincente Minnelli. Noteworthy, Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies were the author's cinema of choice. Spillane
stopped writing full-length novels for many years
after
conversion in 1952 to the Jehovah's Witnesses, the conservartive
religious sect, and between 1973 and
1989, when he advertised Miller Lite beer. However, he produced short
stories and 100 pages long serials. A few of his stories appeared in Manhunt, and such men's magazines
as Cavalier and Male. The Hammer short story 'The
Screen Test of Mike Hammer,' which was published in Male in July 1955, was produced in
the form of a screenplay. Spillane said that he was
first attracted to the Witnesses by a member who proved him that
Darwin's theory of the Evolution was in error. In the early 1950s,
Spillane became involved with a circus and did some trampoline work as
well as being shot out of a cannon. Mike Hammer was brought back with The Girl Hunters,
in which the hero is still haunted by the memory of Charlotte. The book
was followed by four more titles. Spillane's second wife, the actress
Sherri Malinou, served as the model for several of the later Hammer
book covers. Tiger Mann, Spillane's only other series character, was
inspired by
James Bond boom. The character was first introduced in
novel Day of the Guns
(1964). According to some sources, Spillane claimed to have completed
the book in three days. "You know the meaning of death in this business. You can make it happen and when it comes your turn you're ready to accept it. You know the odds and the meaning of an assignment or you're not part of the group at all. You don't call for help outside your own control unit unless the situation is so critical your own death is relatively unimportant in view of what could happen to the free world." (The Death Dealers, Corgi Books, 1965, p. 12) The unshamedly sexist and misogynist Mann kills enemies of the American way. "She was dead when I reached her and she never heard me say, "I told you I was the mud-dauber type, spider."" (The By-Pass Control, Corgi Books, 1968, p. 220) Mann featured in four novels. He worked for an ultra-right-wing billionaire named Martin Grady, who has established his own private espionage organization. In 1983 Spillane married Jane Rodgers Johnson, a former Miss South Carolina, and twenty-eight years his junior. She grew up near his home in Murrells Inlet. In 1995 the Mystery Writers of America finally presented him the Grand Master award. Spillane returned to comic books in the mid-1990s by co-creating a futuristic Mike Danger for a company called Tekno Comics. Although he did not do the script writing, Spillane completed a draft of a Mike Danger science fiction novel. In addition, Spillane wrote two books for children. The Day the Sea Rolled Back (1979) earned him a Junior Literary Guild Award. Most of Spillane's short fiction was produced in the 1950s. The unbeatable Hammer survived to the 1990s, outliving William
Crane, Philip Marlowe, Mike Shayne, and Lew Archer. In Black Alley
(1996) he wakes up from a coma and tracks down a missing $89 billion.
Times have changed, and Spillane reveals his tough-guy's fondness for
Wagner (1813-1883), the German opera composer, whose music had a strong
appeal to the Nazis. Today, however, Wagner's music is almost
unreservedly accepted without political overtones. In an interview at
the age of 83, Spillane mentioned that he still writes and has finished
a couple of adventure stories. The last novel about Hammer was under
work. Spillane died in July 2006, at the age of 88. He never wrote his
long promised autobiography. For further reading: 'Death's Fair-haired Boy' by Richard W. Johnston, in Life (23 July, 1952); One Lonely Knight: Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer by Max Allan Collins (1984); Murder in the Millions by J. Keneth Van Dover (1984); The American Private Eye by David Geherin (1985); 'Toward a Semiotic Reading of Mickey Spillane' by Odette L'Henry Evans, in American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre, edited by Brian Docherty (1988); Speaking of Murder, ed. by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg (1998); A Mickey Spillane Companion by Robert L. Gale (2003); 'Mickey Spillane: "Can't Spell Cognac,"' in Booze and the Private Eye: Alcohol in the Hard-Boiled Novel by Rita Elizabeth Rippetoe (2004); Mickey Spillane on Screen: A Complete Study of the Television and Film Adaptations by Max Allan Collins and James L. Traylor (2012); 'Mickey Spillane – kaupallinen kirjailija' by Tapani Bagge, in Ruumiin kulttuuri (4/2018); Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction: A Biography by Max Allan Collins & James L. Traylor (2022); Truman Gumshoes: The Postwar Detective Fiction of Mickey Spillane, Ross Macdonald, Wade Miller and Bart Spicer by J.K. Van Dover (2022) Films: In 1962 Spillane portrayed his own detective character Hammer in The Girl Hunters. Except his own performance, he was not satisfied with the actors playing Hammer. According to Spillane, Kiss Me Deadly "stank", and Stacey Keach is a good actor, but "he doesn't know how to wear a hat". Other films: Ring of Fear (1953), Colombo series (1973), Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (1956-58, starring Darren McGavin); Mickey Spillane's Margin for Murder (1981, starring Kevin Dobson), Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer: Murder Me, Murder You (1983, starring Stacy Keach), The Return of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (1987), The New Mike Hammer (1987). Selected bibliography:
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