Category Archives: Mickey Spillane

Book review, Mickey Spillane, Pulp fiction

Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction

March 15, 2023 Mike Leave a comment

Everybody will get a kick out of this book. Those who are not fans of Mickey Spillane will discover a life story so vigorous and well-lived that most will not only enjoy the read but will convert to Mickey Spillane fandom. And we lucky souls who are already fans will have a fresh appreciation of the artistry, sheer energy, and creativity of one of the best-selling authors of all time.

Max Allan Collins and James Traylor are mystery writers who’ve collaborated on previous books about Spillane. They wrote this biography in an easy-going, conversational style that perfectly suits their subject.

Why do they call Spillane the King of Pulp Fiction rather than the King of Crime Fiction? Because crime fiction is just one genre in the rowdy pulp universe, and Spillane left his fingerprints all over the cultural landscape.

An athletic young man who read voraciously, Mickey Spillane got his start writing comic books, and worked with many of the greats, including Stan Lee and Bill Everett. He penned storylines for Sub-Mariner, Captain America, and the Human Torch, just to name a few. Working with comics trained him to work fast, and that meant no holds barred on the imagination. Spillane later claimed his years writing comic books were the happiest years of his life. They certainly influenced his visual and physical writing style.

He foresaw that the soldiers and sailors returning home from WWII would appreciate action-packed, affordable books. After all, the 122 million Armed Forces Edition books distributed throughout the war had sharpened the appetite of the most literate generation America had ever seen. But Spillane also grasped that these veterans wanted more than entertainment. They had fought and bled to defend a country now plagued by widespread social disruption. Corruption, crime, and graft angered them, and many felt powerless and betrayed. Spillane intuited that these frustrated veterans yearned for quick, stern justice.

And so Mike Hammer was born.

I, The Jury, Spillane’s first novel, was a success, but some critics dismissed it as lurid, primitive, even vulgar. Others condemned both the writing and the writer. One critic denounced Spillane for authoring “a glorification of force, cruelty, and extra-legal methods that might be required reading in a Gestapo training school.” Botched attempts at putting Mike Hammer on the screen also bedeviled him.

But he kept on writing, running into some setbacks, but also much success. Success brought money and fame, which allowed him to live a life of adventure, including acting, boating, piloting planes, performing in the circus, roaming the backwoods with revenooers searching for illegal moonshine, and stock car racing. I couldn’t help but think of Yukio Mishima, another author who also lived a life of action.

The character of Mickey Spillane – as vivid and fascinating as any fictional character – was deeper and sharper than his critics realized. He’d trained fighter pilots during the war. Years later, when director William Wellman was stuck while re-editing a movie, Spillane suggested reversing two shots. Wellman considered the idea a moment before admitting, “Doggone it, he’s right.”

Writers will find some useful gems here. Spillane’s dedication to his craft belied his cavalier remarks about his work, such as the infamous, “Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.” In fact, Mickey Spillane cared deeply about writing, and kept honing his skill his entire life. Not to be missed is the short section “Mickey Spillane on Writing.” My favorite pointer: “When you’re writing a story, think of it like a joke. What’s a great punch line? Get the great ending then write up to it.”

Thank you, Mickey.

Detective Fiction, Mickey Spillane, Movies

Where the Western Meets Crime Fiction

August 26, 2018 Mike 9 Comments

John Larison argues that despite the different tropes they use and the different worlds they occupy, crime and Western stories share many structural similarities:

Both are about the triumph of good over evil. Early in a novel of either genre, we will see our protagonist encounter an injustice, usually the victim of crime (who may or may not still be breathing). Both novels will end when the scales of justice have finally been righted; the perpetrators of evil have met their due punishment. In a crime novel, justice usually comes in the form of a court of law. In the western, justice tends to be delivered by a bullet through the heart.

That’s a good start, but there’s more substance, nuance, and grit in both genres. Crime fiction includes many sub-genres, including cozies (Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple tales) and classic whodunits (Ellery Queen). The reader can settle down with one of these books knowing that justice will inevitably prevail, just like in the Westerns. But then there are hardboiled and noir crime stories. While both feature violence in gritty, naturalistic settings, only hardboiled tales come close to the worldview of classic Western adventures.

In hardboiled crime tales, the protagonist shoots it out with the bad guys to protect the innocent and restore justice. Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer is an updated John Wayne battling the bad hombres of New York City. However, in noir tales, traditional justice is just as hard to find as an innocent victim. For example, Raymond Chandler paints a bleak view of human nature in his novels, with both the criminal underworld and the “respectable” upper class up to no good. In such a world, the protagonist has to settle for upholding his personal code of honor, justice for the innocent proving too elusive, if not illusory.

Some of the “crime-westerns” Larison cites in his article certainly don’t end with the good guy riding into the sunset after protecting the righteous and punishing the wicked. Just to name one example, Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country For Old Men” ends with the bad guy, a sociopathic hit man, virtually unscathed and free, leaving behind the corpses of almost all the sympathetic characters. The sheriff who failed to catch the killer or protect the innocent acknowledges his uselessness at the end, and dreads the evil that’s spreading across the land he once loved and knew. Not exactly “Shane.” But, as Larison says, still wildly entertaining.

Mickey Spillane, Writing

Mickey Spillane’s Work Keeps Coming 12 Years After His Death

March 3, 2018 Mike 11 Comments

I say it’s high time Mickey Spillane received proper appreciation for his raw, visual writing. Certain critics turn their noses up at him — still — but his work nevertheless continues to attract new legions of readers every generation. Maybe they see something the so-called critics don’t. From The Passive Voice:

Mickey Spillane was never adored by critics. He famously said that his own father called his work “crud.” For the mystery novelist, none of it mattered.

“I don’t have fans,” he said in a 1981 People magazine interview. “I have customers. I’m a writer. I give ’em what they wanna read.”

He died in 2006 at 88, but his work hasn’t stopped. In the past 12 years, his estate has released nearly 20 of his unpublished and previously uncompleted novels and short stories, some as graphic novels and audio plays, many of them featuring the hard-boiled private eye he created, Mike Hammer.

Mickey Spillane has long been a favorite of mine, and definitely exerted a deep influence on my writing. Few authors can match his mastery of first person pov. Jim Traylor, Spillane’s biographer, said this about Spillane’s rough-and-tumble prose: “It’s not very highbrow, but it’s very real. It’s very Old Testament. It’s eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.”

And riveting. Not only did Spillane produce entertaining tales that still lure enthusiastic readers, but the brash new author who shocked readers with I, the Jury grew as an artist over the years. As novelist Max Allan Collins once noted, Spillane made the leap from “brilliant primitive” to “polished professional” over his long career. In 1995, he won the Edgar Allen Poe Grand Master Award for mystery writing, which over the years has also recognized Raymond Chandler, John le Carré, and Elmore Leonard. Pretty good company for a writer so many have dismissed as a hack.