Thu 14 Jul 2022
A PI Mystery Review by Tony Baer: MICKEY SPILLANE – Kiss Me, Deadly.
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews[10] Comments
MICKEY SPILLANE – Kiss Me, Deadly. Mike Hammer #6. Dutton, hardcover, 1952. Signet #1000, paperback, 1953. Reprinted many times.
So, yeah, this is my third crack at Mike Hammer (previously having read I, the Jury and One Lonely Night). I was a big fan of the Stacy Keach TV show Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer in the 80’s. Which I think may be part of the reason why I keep trying to enjoy the books — results be damned.
In this yarn, Mike Hammer finds himself cruising down the highway between Albany and Manhattan when an escapee from the loony bin leaps in front of his coupe wearing only an overcoat. He picks her up. Shenanigans ensue.
They get rolled by the mafia, literally rolled off a cliff, and Hammer gets framed for the lady’s murder.
Turns out the lady he picked up was the moll of a that guy bilked the mafia out of $2 million bucks worth of merchandise. And now the mafia thinks Hammer knows where it is. He’s got to get the goods and kill the bad guys before they kill him. And this time he’s without his trusty .45 as the FBI pulls his license. So it’s two-fisted action for Hammer. But the results are never truly in doubt. If there’s one thing Hammer doesn’t lack, it’s self-confidence.
—
I think Spillane may be a better writer than he gets credit for. His prose isn’t half bad half the time:
“Trouble. Like the smoke over a cake of dry ice. You can’t smell it but you can see it and watch it boil and seep around things and know that soon something’s going to crack and shatter under the force of the horrible contraction….”
“I went to say something. It never came out. The moon that had been hidden behind the clouds came out long enough to bathe the earth in a quick shower of pale yellow light that threw startlingly long shadows across the road and among those dark fingers was one that seemed darker still and moved with a series of jerks and a roar of sound that evolved into a dark sedan cutting in front of us.”
And he’s quite good at action scenes, clipped and visceral: “I had my hand clamped over his, snapped it back and he screamed the same time the muzzle rocketed a bullet into his eyeball and in the second before he died the other eye that was still there glared at me balefully before it filmed over.”
—
The problem is really just that Mike Hammer is a jerk. And the dialogue that comes out of his mouth is frequently so stupid it stretches credulity: “Get your nose to the ground, kitten……Velda…..Show me your legs.” His mouth just utters one cliche after another. You couldn’t use much of the tired patter at all now for any film script other than parody.
The other problem is the plot. You get the feeling Spillane doesn’t know ‘who did it’ either. He’s like Mike Hammer. He figures if he keeps punching and punching the typewriter and Hammer keeps punching and punching the bad guys, at some point he’ll make it. Heroes turn villains and villains turn hero on a dime, with little explanation. Motives are as hazy as are lines of authority and control. In the end all you know is that Mike Hammer metes out justice and all the bad guys are dead. And least Hammer thinks so. And Hammer says if you kill the right guy for the wrong crime, what does it matter?
Me? I guess I care a bit too much about the process. I guess I’m just not a Hammer guy after all.
P.S. I did really enjoy the movie — but it’s been awhile. It’s by Robert Aldrich with a screenplay by A.I. Bezzerides. It’s currently available for free at https://archive.org/details/kissmedeadly1955_202001 and I’ll have to check it out again soon.
July 14th, 2022 at 9:15 pm
Early Hammer was very much about effect and impact, though there are decent plots to be had.
He got much better at the plot element when he came back from the hiatus with THE GIRL HUNTERS though he lost vs bit of the early power.
Ultimately you like Spillane and Hammer or don’t. The criticism matters or you are able to ignore it. Generally I get enough out of it that my result is positive and I applaud the energy. Sometimes it is rougher going than others.
July 15th, 2022 at 12:07 am
I first read Mickey Spillane in the seventh grade. It was a quantum over the Hardy Boys, I can tell you that. The ten year gap between this one and THE GIRL HUNTERS was a fatal one, as far as I was concerned. He may have become a better writer in the meantime, but even if he did, the thrill was gone, and I never read another.
July 15th, 2022 at 9:36 am
I read Jean Kerr and Fritz Leiber parodies of Spillane before I got around to Spillane himself…I preferred the parodies.
July 15th, 2022 at 9:53 am
The first Spillane novel I read was THE DEEP, but KISS ME, DEADLY was the second one and my first Mike Hammer. I liked it okay but after I went on to read the others that were out then, I thought it was one of the lesser entries in the series. Haven’t reread it in close to 60 years, so I have no idea how I’d feel about it now. I remember exactly where I was when I read KISS ME, DEADLY, though, so maybe that counts for something.
July 15th, 2022 at 1:21 pm
I like Mike Hammer best when I think of him as a comic strip caricature—the hardboiled detective superhero. Dick Tracy meets Tarzan. James Reasoner discusses the Mike Hammer comic strip today on his blog: https://jamesreasoner.blogspot.com/2022/07/from-files-of-mike-hammer-mickey.html?m=1.
July 15th, 2022 at 4:56 pm
Some of the criticism here reminds me of Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner stories. Lots of over-the-top tough guy dialogue. Charming in a way but highly inauthentic.
July 15th, 2022 at 8:41 pm
Anthony Boucher ended up coming around to Spillane if only as an authentic voice from the pulp era carried over into modern times, and there is some truth there. Later writers who came well after Spillane’s heyday managed to take something from Chandler and Hammett and a little from Spillane too so there is a direct line with many tributaries between Spillane and Robert Parker and a Lee Child.
It is ironic that John D. MacDonald loathed Spillane yet Travis McGee resembles Mike Hammer more than Philip Marlowe in any real sense. Both are Justice Figures before they are detectives.
Hammer is a private detective certainly, but he is far closer to Justice Figures like Race Williams, the Shadow, the Spider, McGee, and Mack Bolan than the detective tradition of Chandler, Hammett, and Gardner. It’s no real surprise to discover Spillane read Tarzan, the Saint, and Bulldog Drummond probably more closely than Chandler.
In a lot of ways Hammer is closer to a d’Artagnan, or Edmund Dantes than a Sam Spade, only the voice and milieu are strictly in that tradition. Spillane’s voice though, other than Daly, is less the hardboiled tradition and voice than the voice of the returning veteran of WW II, cynical, tough, burnished to a certain hardness by combat, not seeking an authentic voice, but being one, a new American voice out of the War and Hollywood as much as BLACK MASK. It’s not strictly a literary tradition.
It’s a mistake to think of Spillane as a continuation of the hardboiled school of the twenties and thirties, he’s more of the hero pulps, adventure pulps, thrillers, Warner Bros. movies, comic books, and the War than the hardboiled tradition. There is, in fact, a Spillane tradition that offshoots from the hardboiled school with its own voice, tradition, style, and milieu. It is inauthentic to think of it as a continuation of Chandler and Hammett. Like it or not, it is as new as they were when Spillane first hits though a few writers like Latimer teased it before him.
Where you can compare Spillane to Ian Fleming is that they both create a new Post War voice and world out of what had come before, but as Fleming was different from Buchan, Sapper, and Cheyney Spillane was different from Chandler and Hammett in wholly new ways.
Spillane for me either works or doesn’t. Either I get taken in and go along for the ride (most of the Hammer books some of the better stand alones) or he loses me completely (the Tiger Mann books). There is no middle ground. I don’t read him uncritically, but I read him for Spillane and not some ideal of the hardboiled school or a detective story much as I don’t read Fleming for a spy novel quite the way I read any other spy novel.
It is difficult to explain exactly why I tolerate things in Spillane I might throw another book across the room for, but it comes down to what I find unique and impossible to copy about Spillane and it isn’t the hardboiled voice or school of writing.
Spillane’s real gift is not letting you see the art, and it is there, but instead convincing you Mike Hammer, or whoever his narrator is, is telling you a story in a back booth in a decent bar over a few brews and pretzels long past when you should have paid up and gone home. That intimacy, that one on one authenticity, is unique to only a few writers, and the ones who do it best inevitably are the biggest selling writers in whatever genre they write in.
July 15th, 2022 at 10:44 pm
David,
I have thought along similar lines, not about Mike Hammer or Spillane, but that Edmond Dantes has been patterned after baby Jesus by Dumas with his escape standing in for the resurrection.
July 16th, 2022 at 7:03 am
David,
I have no idea if Spillane read Robert E. Howard in the pulps. Timing-wise, it’s certainly possible. But that same storytelling intimacy you mention in Spillane can be found in Howard, who said that it was like Conan was standing beside him, telling him the stories as he typed them up. I get the same feeling with Spillane and Hammer.
July 16th, 2022 at 10:32 pm
James Reasoner,
Very much. Howard captures that feeling of a story being revealed rather than created. It’s a subtle difference in the relationship between the reader and the writer. It may come down to nothing more than the reader believing in the character and not spinning tales about a made-up person. Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, Nero Wolfe, even Modesty Blaise all have that quality, but it changes the reading experience completely when a writer has that quality.