This is the first entry of a new column to be devoted generally to crime fiction in the hard-boiled or noir categories. I'd intended it to be an introductory piece, telling you all a little bit about myself, and including a definition of terms.

However, when a giant, arguably the last true giant, in the hard-boiled/noir tradition passes from the scene, taking note of that individual's accomplishments and triumphs necessarily takes precedence over all previous plans.

IN MEMORIAM– MICKEY SPILLANE



Frank M. “Mickey” Spillane (9 March 1918 – 17 July 2006) was born in Brooklyn, New York, to John and Mary Spillane. Baptized “Frank Michael” in the Catholic church of his Irish father, and “Frank Morrison” in the protestant church of his Scottish mother, he was generally known as “Mick” or “Mickey” from his early childhood, though to his mother he was always “Babe.”

Growing up mostly in a tough Elizabeth, New Jersey, neighborhood, Mickey was an able enough athlete in high school to win a football scholarship to Kansas Teachers College, though he left after a short time to return east, where he got a job at Gimbel's Department Store.

Retail sales bored him, and he found he could make more money writing free-lance stories for the fledgling comic book industry. It was for this medium that he created his iconic private eye character, Mike Hammer, so critics who early on dismissed Spillane's novels as “trashy comic-book stuff” were inadvertently hitting the nail on the head.

Deliberately patterning his character on Race Williams, Carroll John Daly's pioneering Black Mask detective, Spillane eventually wrote at least three comic book scripts about his ultra-tough Manhattan PI, calling him “Mike Danger” in this early incarnation. The first appeared as a back-up feature in a 1942 issue of The Green Horner , but the editor changed the character's name to “Mike Lancer.”

By this time the US had been pulled into World War II, and Spillane had already volunteered for military service as a fighter pilot in the Army Air Corps. His combined skill at aviation and verbal communication had the unwanted effect of keeping him out of combat. He spent most of the war stateside as a flight instructor, and was not assigned to an active fighter squadron until the conflict was almost over. It was during this time that he met and married his first wife, the former Mary Ann Pearce, with whom he would have four children.

After the war, Spillane tried to put together a comic book with Mike Danger as the cover feature, hoping to raise enough money to build a home on an acreage of rural property he'd bought, but the plan fell through (the two still-unpublished Danger stories would eventually wind up being printed in the 1950's in Crime Detector Comics ). He needed to find another way to raise the money for building materials. He decided to try writing a book.

Reimagining Mike Danger as the hero of a prose novel, and changing the character's name from “Danger” to “Hammer,” he sat down at his typewriter and, in nine days (or maybe nine teen , depending on which interview you read) churned out a violent, sexy tale of murder and revenge called I the Jury . He sold the manuscript to E.P. Dutton, which brought out the hardback edition in 1947.

The book was an immediate success, selling out in hard cover. Months later the first soft cover reprint appeared, and also sold out. Over the next six decades, more than eight million copies were sold in paperback. For years, I the Jury was the unchallenged holder of the title “Highest-Selling Mystery Novel Ever Published.”

Spillane followed up with five more Hammer novels, Vengeance Is Mine! (Dutton, 1950), My Gun Is Quick (Dutton, 1950), The Big Kill (Dutton, 1951), One Lonely Night (Dutton, 1951), and Kiss Me, Deadly (Dutton, 1952), and one stand-alone, The Long Wait (Dutton, 1951). Every one flew off the shelves.

On the strength of those first seven novels, Spillane became the best-selling writer, not just the best-selling mystery writer but the best-selling writer, on the planet. At one point in the mid-1950's, of the top ten best-selling novels ever published, seven were by Spillane. When one member of the cultural elite pointed to this statistic as evidence of the debased sensibilities of the American reading public, Spillane's response was characteristic.

“Just be happy I didn't write three more,” he jeered.

During this time, he became a Jehovah's Witness, and this religious conversion is often pointed to as the reason Spillane seemed to retire from writing. In fact, his newly adopted faith had nothing to do with it. Indeed, he'd already converted by the time he started writing Kiss, Me Deadly .

Spillane, always unpretentious, was totally up-front about what his main inspiration for becoming a mystery writer was. “Dollars,” he'd say when asked. And with seven best-selling novels continuously in print, to say nothing of ancillary income from film versions, a Hammer radio show, a Hammer TV series, and (returning to his roots) a syndicated Hammer newspaper strip, dollars were no longer an issue, and, thus, no longer an inspiration.

He now had the time, money, and leisure to indulge himself and live out some of his macho fantasies, racing cars, working in a circus trampoline act, and scuba diving for sunken treasure.

It was probably during this time, though sources differ and Spillane was always vague about it, that, following a family tradition (his uncle and several other family members were policemen), he put in a short stint in law enforcement as a criminal investigator for the Manhattan DA's Office.

“I was the best undercover man they ever had,” he'd later say. Paradoxically, it may have been his celebrity status that made him so effective by providing him with a ready-made cover identity. Reportedly, it was during this time he finally got the combat experience denied him during the war, sustaining two bullet wounds and a stabbing during an investigation into a drug ring. He'd later write several stories and novels featuring undercover cops, presumably deriving the plots from his own professional experiences.

Moreover, while he might have claimed that he was too busy having fun to write when he didn't need the money, the fact is he hadn't really retired from writing at all, just from novels. He still kept his hand in and his craft honed with short stories, articles, dramatic scripts, scripts for the Hammer comic strip, etc. Throughout the supposed “drought,” his work could be found in dozens of magazines, and, when later collected, this short material would fill several books, including The Tough Guys (Signet, 1971), Tomorrow I Die (Mysterious, 1984), Together We Kill (Five Star, 2001) and Byline: Mickey Spillane (Crippen & Landru, 2004)

In the early 60's he divorced Mary, though the two would stay friends, and, with sales starting to slow after more than a decade, returned to long-form fiction with an urban gangster novel called The Deep (Dutton, 1961). This was the story of a young hood who returns to his old neighborhood to when his boyhood pal, who's been running the local rackets to this point, is murdered. His ostensible purpose is to simultaneously avenge his buddy's murder, and take over his buddy's business. The lead character's return to his old stomping grounds was an effective metaphor for Spillane's own comeback as a novelist. It also got him a tiny measure of something that, financial success notwithstanding, had largely eluded him to that point, critical respect. Except for novelist Ayn Rand, Spillane had received virtually universal pans from literary critics and social observers. Anthony Boucher, the top mystery reviewer in the country, had always been one of Spillane's most vociferous critics calling his work “the ultimate degradation of the [hard-boiled] school.” But of The Deep he admitted, perhaps a little grudgingly, “that it's possible for even an old enemy of his, like me, to view him afresh and recognize that he does possess a certain genuine vigor and conviction lacking in his imitators."

Spillane followed this up with his first Hammer novel in more than ten years, The Girl Hunters (Dutton, 1962), which also garnered some positive reviews, with Boucher reluctantly granting that Spillane was “a master at compelling you to read the next page.”

When The Twisted Thing (Dutton, 1966) appeared, Boucher wrote, “For almost twenty years I have been one of the leaders in the attacks on Spillane; but of late I begin to wonder whether we reviewers . . . may not have underestimated his virtues . . . I suggest that [Mike Hammer's] creator is one of the last of the great storytellers in the pulp tradition, as he amply demonstrates in The Twisted Thing .” Boucher, of all people, had become a Spillane convert.

During this comeback period, when the James Bond craze made espionage the most popular sub-genre in crime fiction, Spillane, who had already involved Hammer in cloak-and-dagger plots in One Lonely Night and The Girl Hunters , put his own spin on the spy novel, creating his second series character, US Counterspy Tiger Mann (essentially Mike Hammer in secret agent drag). Mann appeared in four novels, The Day of the Guns (Dutton, 1964), Bloody Sunrise (Dutton, 1965), The Death Dealers (Dutton, 1965), and The By-Pass Control (Dutton, 1967). In the ‘60's, during the height of the 007 vogue, the Mann books were, collectively, the highest-selling series of spy novels by an American.

Around this time, he also married a second time. His new wife was model Sherri Malinou, 24 years Spillane's junior, whom the writer had hired to be the model on a paperback edition of the Hammer novel The Body Lovers (Dutton, 1967), and decided to keep around for awhile.

Later, he liked to tell the story of how he and Sherri entered a county courthouse to apply for a marriage license. A deputy sheriff on desk duty in the lobby took a look at Spillane's tough-guy mug, and the young lady next to him, pointed down a hall, said, “There.” Spillane and Sherri walked where the desk sergeant had directed them and found themselves in the squadroom of the Sheriff's Juvenile Division. The deputy had assumed that Spillane was a detective who wanted to book a youthful offender.

In addition to her appearance on the paperback cover of The Body Lovers , Sherri was also featured on the dust jackets for The Erection Set (Dutton, 1972) and The Last Cop Out (Dutton, 1973), and played a bit part in the 1970 film version of Spillane's novel The Delta Factor , but the marriage didn't last, and they separated after a few years, later divorcing.

Meanwhile, the small trickle of critical acceptance continued to grow. Spillane was undergoing a re-evaluation, and, in retrospect, was looking pretty good. In years to come there would be even be awards. A Junior Literary Guild award for the children's mystery The Day the Sea Rolled Back (Dutton, 1979), a PWA Shamus for the short story version of “The Killing Man,” a PWA “Eye” award for Lifetime Achievement, an MWA Edgar for a TV-movie featuring Hammer, and an MWA Grand Master award for Lifetime Achievement. Spillane had had the last laugh on the scores of naysayers who had so excoriated him in the beginning.

At the same time, Hammer had evolved into a genuine pop culture icon, played in various dramatic mediums by a host of actors, Larry Haines and Ted deCorsia on radio; Brian Keith, Darren McGavin, Kevin Dobson, and, most successfully, Stacy Keach on TV; Biff Elliott, Ralph Meeker, Robert Bray, and Armand Assante on film.

But for many, the best, most faithful interpretation of Hammer was contributed by Spillane himself, who played the legendary sleuth in a film version of The Girl Hunters , for which he also co-wrote the script. The identification between Creator and Character was now complete.

Through it all, Spillane remained unpretentious, unapologetic, and unbowed. A master at self-promotion, he made frequent appearances on TV, appearing on everything from Password to Columbo , from 60 Minutes to David Letterman . Spoofing his own tough guy image, he made his most memorable TV mark in a series of beer commercials for Miller Lite.

In 1983, he also got married again, to former South Carolina beauty queen Jane Johnson. This third marriage “took,” and they remained together for the rest of Spillane's life.

Spillane's influence on other writers has been profound. Richard S. Prather's Shell Scott, Michael Avallone's Ed Noon, Stephen Marlowe's Chet Drum, Mike Roscoe's Johnny April, Wayne Dundee's Joe Hannibal, C.J. Henderson's Jack Hagee, and even, curiously, Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski all have more than a touch of Hammer about them. Characters ranging from Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry to Don Pendleton's Mack “The Executioner” Bolan, all owe a huge debt to Spillane. He was also generous to up-and-coming young writers, mentoring, among others, Dave Gerrity and Max Allan Collins.

I only met Spillane once, when he was doing the convention circuit to hawk a new Mike Danger comic book he was working on with Collins. Characteristically, when he saw a beautiful young woman (my future wife, Katy, as it happened) in the group of fans clamoring for an autograph, he began flirting shamelessly with her.

What I recall most from that short meeting was the depth of personal charm he exuded. He was a genuinely likeable guy, and when he found out I was a cop, he became almost solicitous, talking briefly about his own experiences on the Job. And he was generously encouraging when I told him I hoped to be a writer.

“Of all the books you've written,” I asked, “which is your favorite?”

“Any writer will tell you that his favorite book is either the one he just finished, or the one he's working on now,” he replied.

Though he had no literary pretensions and claimed to have no literary ambition beyond making a living, Mickey Spillane had more natural literary talent than he was ever given credit for in his early days. He claimed that, as long as the books continued to sell, he didn't care about the critical shellacking that the cultural elite gave him during those early years, but I think it may have bothered him more than he admitted. Indeed, the book many consider to be his best, One Lonely Night , seems to have been meant, at one level, as a metaphorical response to his army of detractors, though the rebuttal he gave in that novel was hardly one that would have placated or persuaded them. Whatever he thought of his early attackers, later critical accolades must have pleased him.

Spillane's novels are often concerned with questions of vengeance and retribution. Success, they say, is the best revenge and, in his long-lasting popular success, and ultimate critical success, Spillane had his revenge on all those who lambasted him back when he and Hammer were first starting out.

And he lived long enough to really enjoy that revenge.

You showed ‘em all, Mick. Rest easy.