Thu 28 Feb 2013
Mike Nevins on MICKEY SPILLANE and “I, THE JURY.”
Posted by Steve under Authors , Columns[14] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins
The first time I saw Mickey Spillane was at a Bouchercon, back when he was the public face of Miller Lite beer. The second and last time I saw him was on April 27, 1995, the evening of that year’s MWA dinner. As 1994 Awards chair I got to host the pre-dinner cocktail party for Edgar nominees, and Spillane got to attend because, over vehement objections from some older mystery writers who were on the other side of the culture wars of the HUAC-McCarthy-Red Menace era, he was about to be given the Grand Master award.
Like just about everyone else in America I had read Spillane’s early novels — the septet of bestsellers that began with I, the Jury (1947) and climaxed, if that’s the word, with Kiss Me Deadly (1952) — but almost nothing that he’d written in the Sixties and later. Like just about no one else in America except intellectuals and critics, I thought his books were terrible. What turned me off was not so much the rabid right-wing politics or the gruesome sadism of the action scenes as it was the inept plotting and linguistic boners.
The basic storyline of I, the Jury is simplicity itself. Manhattan PI Mike Hammer vows to personally execute the murderer of his buddy, ex-cop Jack Williams, who had lost an arm in the Pacific saving Hammer’s life. In his search he meets a seductive female psychiatrist, a pair of man-hungry twin sisters, a medical student who lives with a racket boss, and other lovables. After wading through the carnage of four more murders he gets to carry out his grim sentence, gut-shooting the psychiatrist and narcotics queenpin Charlotte Manning. The last two lines of the book are justly famous, or at least infamous. Manning: “How c-could you?†Hammer: “It was easy.â€
I could devote several pages to how and where I, the Jury goes off the rails but will limit myself to three specimens of track-jumping, the first trivial but telling, the others crucial.
(2) The second and third murders take place in a whorehouse which Hammer has under personal surveillance. Both the second victim and Charlotte Manning, the murderer, are by this time well known to our sleuth, and neither of them knows he’s on the scene, yet both manage to get in by the front door without Hammer spotting them. Miraculous luck is again with Charlotte as she escapes from the house and area while police have the whole block surrounded.
(3) The fourth and final murder victim is Jack Williams’ fiancée Myrna Devlin and the crime takes place at a society party with 250 guests. Would you believe that every blessed one of them turns out to have an alibi for the fatal minutes? At the time Charlotte shoots her, Myrna is wearing Charlotte’s coat. (Don’t bother to ask why.) This means that afterwards she has to take her coat off Myrna’s body, find Myrna’s coat, put a bullet hole in exactly the spot to coincide with the hole in Myrna, put that coat on the dead woman, and cover up the hole in her own coat. She also has to gamble that neither the gun nor its silencer nor the hole in her coat will be noticed during the investigation and that she’ll be able to get all three items off the premises under Hammer’s eagle eye. Once again miraculous luck sits on her shapely shoulders. Yikes!
In Chapter 12 Hammer visits a movie theater and sees a crime film, calling it “a fantastic murder mystery which had more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese.†The perfect description for any Spillane novel!
One of the things that surprised me when I revisited I, the Jury recently was that so much of the writing is so pedestrian and ordinaire. Clearly Spillane hadn’t yet mastered the psychotic rants which pockmark his novels of the early Fifties. But every so often one finds a linguistic flub that lingers in the memory:
“Living alone with one maid, a few rooms was all that was necessary.â€
“It gave me ideas, which I quickly ignored.â€
“He took off like a herd of turtles.â€
“When Velda heard about this she’d throw the roof at me.â€
“‘Well, you know that he was in a medical school. Pre-med, to be exact.’â€
Talk about a distinction with a difference! Was Spillane the inspiration for all those lunatic lines that began streaming from the smoking typewriter of Michael Avallone a few years later?
A year and some months after Spillane was named a Grand Master, the publisher of the prestigious Library of America series asked me to comment on the authors and titles tentatively selected for the Library’s two-volume American Noir project. My only suggestion for Volume One, which covered the Nineteen Thirties and Forties, was that Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man be replaced by three or four of his short novels.
Volume Two, which dealt with the Fifties, was slated to include two books I didn’t think could be called American Noir: Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, because most of it doesn’t take place in America, and Ross Macdonald’s The Galton Case, because having a series character and first-person narrator readers can easily identify with (Lew Archer, of course) seemed to me to rule it out as noir.
I proposed as a substitute someone who was conspicuous by his absence in the table of contents. You guessed it. Mickey Spillane. As a writer, I argued, Spillane stands beside Highsmith and Macdonald roughly where Ed Wood stands among film-makers vis-a-vis Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. But in terms of the development of noir he’s of such immense historical significance that American crime fiction and crime films of the Fifties just can’t be understood without him. (This is why I never objected to his receiving that Grand Master award.)
Mike Hammer of course is a series character and first-person narrator just as much as Lew Archer but he’s certainly not one readers can easily identify with. In fact, I contended, critics would long ago have ranked Hammer with Lou Ford in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me as one of the genre’s most convincing sociopaths if only Spillane hadn’t labored under the delusion that he’d created a hero.
I’ve been commenting on mystery fiction and mystery writers for almost half a century but have discussed Spillane only once in a chartreuse moon and have never advocated for him except in my correspondence with Library of America. How did Atticus Finch do? Miserably. How many of my suggestions were accepted? You guessed it. None. But I did enjoy the interchange and wound up with complimentary copies of some very nice volumes. One of which I expect to figure in my next column.
February 28th, 2013 at 2:26 pm
“Taking off like a herd of turtles…”
This, speaks to me. I like it. And, I am amused by it.
February 28th, 2013 at 2:30 pm
Still laughing. Ready to get on with my day but am on the floor…when not typing.
February 28th, 2013 at 5:47 pm
I have to agree with Mike. For many years, ever since 1951, I’ve had mixed feelings about Mickey Spillane. I was 9 years old in ’51 and overheard my father telling a friend about the ending of I THE JURY. He called it a “great” ending and when I read it later that night I also thought it was great!
But over the years I sort of dismissed Spillane. Now however, I would have to agree that he had a big influence on crime and noir fiction. I don’t know about including him in the Library of America series however.
February 28th, 2013 at 5:58 pm
I would have included Spillane in the LOA series, but I would have picked ONE LONELY NIGHT. Anyone who doubts Spillane’s talents as a writer needs to read this one.
February 28th, 2013 at 8:01 pm
Wow, and here I thought I was the only one who didn’t like this book. In fact, I hated it precisely for the ineptitude of its plotting, as well as Mike Hammer being a psycho and women showing up just for the sex.
That being said, the more I learn about him, the more I begin to like him. I particularly like the point he made that when someone picks up a book, they read it to get to the ending, not the middle — so your ending should really knock ’em dead. I don’t think he accomplished it in I, THE JURY, but the idea itself speaks to me.
March 1st, 2013 at 3:54 am
When I first tried Spillane it was the late 60s and he was out of style, but so were Noir movies and hard-boiled PIs. I had devoured Hammett and Chandler and I really R-e-a-l-l-y wanted to like Spillane, but as I waded into THE LONG WAIT I kept thinking, “Damn this is dumb!” Or as Angie put it, “Boy, he sure can write!”
March 1st, 2013 at 5:59 am
Love him or hate him- Spillane is a cultural icon.
His name is known even to people who have little time for crime fiction.
The Doc
March 2nd, 2013 at 12:14 pm
The Doc is right. I have a jazz album by John Zorn with the title “SPILLANE”. And the German pop artist Uwe Lausen made a painting in the sixties which he gave the title:”I,the Jury”. Many years ago I began to read ONE LONELY NIGHT and was really impressed. It reads like a Nordic saga or Greek myth, very unusual for a crime novel. I cannot remember why I did not finish the book, perhaps because of the plot.
March 2nd, 2013 at 12:38 pm
I made a snide remark about Spillane once in the presence of Max Allan Collins and he never spoke to me again.
March 2nd, 2013 at 1:59 pm
#9. Randy, I have been waiting for a visit from Mr. Collins. He has commented at this site before and is very protective of his close friend Spillane.
I could be wrong but I’d guess Spillane would laugh this off and think of his book sales figures. I have never met Max, but I know you can say whatever you want about me and it doesn’t bother me, but badmouth a friend and I attack.
I am not a fan of Spillane’s work, its too intolerant, judgmental, and humorless. But I am anarchist when it comes to the English language. I believe in only one rule, does the reader understand your meaning. There Spillane succeeds. You don’t read a Spillane story, you feel it. Few represented an era of readers beliefs and culture better than Spillane does the white male in the 50s.
March 3rd, 2013 at 8:22 pm
I read my first Spillane when I was 9 or 10. My dad had a bookcase filled with Spillane, Mignon G. Eberhart, Agatha Christie and Perry Mason paperbacks next to the fireplace. He bought them either soon as they hit the newsstand at Ernie’s drugstore or he might have subscribed to them, if they had such things then. Anyway, “Vengeance is Mine” was one of the newer looking books on the shelf. I liked the cover, opened it up and read “The guy was dead as hell.” Blew my mind. I became an instant fan. My dad told me not to read the rest of it, which, of course, made it all that more imperative for me to do. I read all of Mickey’s and a couple of Gardner’s. Never took to the British cozies.
April 19th, 2013 at 9:40 am
This is belated (very) and off-topic to boot, but I wanted to get to Mike Nevins as soon as I found this.
So here goes:
I found myself looking over my old TV Guides for reasons unrelated to this post.
I usually find the Good Stuff without looking for it – unbidden, as it were.
So there I am with the Chicago edition of TVG for the week of February 13-19, 1960. The cover features the stars of Peter Gunn and Mr.Lucky (the story is about Blake Edwards), which is what I had been looking up, to comment on another blog.
After I do my “research”, I’m scanning the rest of the issue, and I happen upon the TV Teletype-New York feature on page 4.
Four paragraphs down, I find this item (exact wording; style as close to TVG as HTML permits):
ABC’s mulling a new series about books, Author, Author, for next season. Writers CLIFTON FADIMAN, MARC CONNELLY, S.J.PERELMAN, RONA JAFFE, and MANFRED LEE took part in the audition tape …
I suppose I’ve had that particular TV GUIDE in my chest’o’drawers for perhaps 5 to 10 years or more; it just never occurred to me to read that page until a couple of nights ago. I live by myself, so nobody saw my double-take.
And here, Mike Nevins, is where I kick it back to you.
Did you happen to know about this proposed TV Author, Author?
You once mentioned having a TV GUIDE collection of your own; would the Feb.13-19 1960 number be among them?
And I know it would be too much to hope for, but is there even a microscopic chance that the “audition tape” referred to (as having been made) still exists?
ABC was still a shoestring network in 1960; bits and pieces of things turn up every now and then, but a kinescope of Manny Lee, alongside Connelly, Perelman, and the others … that would count as a find …
“… of all sad words of tongue or pen …”
April 19th, 2013 at 9:56 am
Mike
An interesting find, that’s for sure. I’ll forward your question on to Mike right away.
— Steve
September 15th, 2014 at 5:30 pm
they don’t write books like that any more!