All Guts, All Glory: A Tribute to Mickey Spillane

“You don’t read Mickey Spillane. You LIVE him. And you can’t study him. You just let him smack you around a bit before putting the book down.”

That was how I was introduced to the infamous mystery author — a short two sentence rant by a college professor eager to strip away the scholarly bullshit of his normal curriculum and get to the heart of why Spillane mattered. It was going to be a hard sell on most of the class. We were all so used to the snooty air of importance that accompanied most literary discussions that to take on this writer’s pugilistic prose, each sentence snapping like the neck of another underworld lowlife, required an aesthetic disconnect many of us just didn’t possess. How were we going to overcome our own publication prejudice and embrace this decidedly pulp fiction? It was, apparently, part of the education process, as well as the teacher’s overall plan.

The first few attempts were chaotic. Comments like “cut rate Hemingway” and “dime novel idiot” where tossed around with arrogant aplomb. Instantly dismissed by most if not all, the first few chapters of I, The Jury proved to be a real trial by fictional fire. Part of the problem, of course, was that Spillane was formulating his heroes and villains out of the era in which he lived. Since we were taking on his rock hard private dick Mike Hammer in an early ’80s air of male sensitivity and pre-PC backlash, an old school vodka and vomit detective seemed like an unnecessary alien out of a sci-fi novel. Men no longer handled situations with their fists and their fury. They talked things out, made mention of their emotion, and rationalized even the most difficult paths.

Not Hammer. His was a mannerism made out of pure machismo, slathered in sex and invigorated by violence. We had been warned that Spillane tended toward the baser and barbaric side, shocking to the late ’40s/early ’50s audience who wasn’t used to such strong-arm tactics. Derived from his first forays into fiction — he got his start as a comic book writer before World War II broke out — Spillane’s style was all action verbs and atmosphere. It was an ideal you had to accept as fact, just like the professor said. You had to walk into his world of dames and palookas, hoods and rats and simply acknowledge the clear-cut distinctions between his reluctant good and his overpowering evil. If you didn’t, you’d find his novels like a proverbial punch to the gut. If you did, you’d enjoy a throwback to a time when men were might, women were cheap and the booze and clues flowed freely between them.

Like the film noir that his novels emulated, Spillane was never very interested in the denouement. His crime fiction wasn’t carefully fashioned around clockwork plotting that mixed red herrings in with the evidence to make each book a puzzle box waiting to be solved. Instead, they drew their occasionally irrational conclusions out of bruises and bullet holes, a trail of dead bodies leading to the most likely of all the usual suspects. In fact, the last man (or woman) standing was typically the guilty party. It was this simpleton storytelling that made Spillane a page-turner — and an artistic blight. But it also negated his easily translation into other mediums. While film thrives on spectacle, the ’50s cinema wasn’t about to explore the debauchery buried inside each Spillane tome. Instead, they did what the modern movie business called “re-imagining”.

Gone were the smut and the smash, in came an exaggerated approach that tried to mimic (badly, one might add) Spillane’s literary technique. I, the Jury was only semi-successful, while a version of Kiss Me Deadly met with disdain, especially from the author. A ’50s TV series was short-lived, and Spillane’s own turn (in The Girl Hunters) as the Mike Hammer character was praised, but quickly cast aside. In fact, the lack of a successful transition to big screen popularity probably hurt Spillane’s reputation and acceptance the most. While Spillane was not desperate for the dough, he could have used the acclaim. Movies seem to suggest acceptability, and if any one fictional character could use that kind of illogical legitimizing, it was Hammer. As the enlightenment of the 1960s came to the fore, Establishment figures like the author were mocked and disregarded. As the social consciousness turned, so did its attention to Spillane.

He survived the ’70s, making the occasional commercial appearance. He stopped publishing novels in ’73, and wouldn’t do so again until ’89. In the ’80s, Spillane became a quasi-household word again, thanks to a middling take on his Mike Hammer character. After testing two TV movies featuring the seminal character (1983’s Murder Me, Murder You and ’84’sMore than Murder) a series was greenlit. Oddly enough, instead of going for a period presentation, the decidedly ’50s figure was cast within a contemporary setting. For many fans of the fictional detective, this was heresy. Yet it was attractive enough to warrant a couple of seasons. Spillane was back, but in a decidedly minor way.

Yet once Mike Hammer made his minor dent in the television ratings, Spillane and his output were more or less written off. At the time I was being taught I, The Jury‘s slam-bang social symbolism, Armand Assante was starring in a brand new big screen reworking of the novel. I had moved on to law school when Stacy Keach made Hammer a white washed prime time fixture. Unable to compete with the novel new kid on the block, the MTV-fashioned hyper-stylized Miami Vice, the show argued that Spillane’s two-fisted narratives just couldn’t match with the short attention span sentiments of this brand new hour long variation on the music video. Besides, the small screen eradicated much of the salable sex and violence. After years on the fringe, Spillane sort of sank into oblivion. Jury was not a hit, and no one was clamoring for him to pick up pen and start scribbling (though he did continue to write).

He did have his allies. One friend who supported him in the latter years was writer/filmmaker Max Allan Collins. A student of old fashioned detective cinema and a proponent of something he called neo-noir, Collins remains best known as the creator (with Richard Piers Rayner) of the graphic novel Road to Perdition. Oscar nominated for the big screen film adaptation starring Tom Hanks, Collins also created a pair of novel cinematic thrillers — Mommy and Mommy II: Mommy’s Day — both featuring the return of The Bad Seed‘s trademark terror, Patty McCormack. Along with an experiment in real time crime fiction (Siege at the Lucas Market) and an incredibly short film about Elliot Ness, Collins’ major achievement to the scribe’s souring legend was a remarkable documentary entitled Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane.

A longtime fan of the genre and its primary proponent, Collins gave Spillane roles in his horror/thriller experiments, relying on the presence that made his appearances in all those Miller Lite Beer commercials a resounding hit. In turn, Spillane sat down for several revealing interviews, giving Collins access to information both personal and professional. One walks away from Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane with a greater appreciate of who he was, and what he meant to detective/mystery fiction. A devout Jehovah’s Witness, Spillane never let his morals mess up a good story. He also applied previous tenures in the circus (where he participated in a trampoline act and was frequently shot out of a canon) and military as the foundation for his plots. Never overtly political in his books (though his choice of villains would contradict such a statement), he was so personally jingoistic and uber-patriotic that John Wayne once gave him a Jaguar XK140 for his staunch anti-Communism stances.

He also had famous literary admirers. Ayn Rand reportedly championed Spillane’s prose, admiring its efficiency and effectiveness, while Collins himself cites the author as the benchmark for all post-modern crime drama. While critics continuously called for his head, Spillane’s novels ushered in the profitable paperback era of publishing, selling millions and making the author wealthy in the process. It’s no surprise then that cash was the also primary concern for I, the Jury‘s creation. Needing $1000 to put a house on some property he owned, Spillane adapted an old comics character he created — a PI named Mike Danger — and nine days later, he had his book … and his check. When asked about his discipline, Spillane is candid. He never rewrites, and never looks over the galleys. As long as he has his ending, and a “slam bang” opening, the rest just comes naturally — and no one is going to modify it.

The documentary shows a softer side of Spillane as well, a man whose literary reputation often clouded his genial, jocular personality. He is pained over the depiction of his most famous character (he was never really happy with Keach, preferring Brian Keith’s version of the detective from the earlier ’50s version) and argues for his own turn as the private eye. Clips from the film prove that Spillane may have had a point. His body a block, his head a chiseled stand for his angular, intimidating fedora. Spillane’s Hammer was the printed page come to life, not so much a character as a conceptualization. He was the Id locked inside all macho men, the brute force behind the otherwise admirable American Dream. You believed his Hammer was a man of his word — even if those sentiments included a little slaughter, or some slap and tickle. His face a mass of wry wrinkles as he recalls his brief Hollywood tenure, Spillane adds that he thought his performance was “good”.

He’s gone now, though many would argue that, without Collins’s film, Spillane would have been a forgotten fixture of an America past. If anything, his death at age 88 reminds us that many figures from the previous popular culture are frequently erased from our memories by the selective revisionism of an agenda-based record. Constantly referred to as a “pulp” writer, a misogynist and a flag waver, Spillane’s begrudging legacy was always moderated by the self-righteous desire to maximize his social unacceptability. To many, he represented the worst of the commercial end of literature – tactless, superficial and completely pandering. It was even a sentiment shared by the author himself. When asked about his approach to fiction, Spillane argued to never underestimate the power of violence to sell books. He then added sex so he could cover all the bases.

Yet the truth is that Spillane helped the struggling world of books to connect more effectively with the meat and potatoes populace of a post-War world. He used his blue-collar bluster and potboiler poetry to redefine the concept of cool, and eliminated the moral middleman when it came to situations of right and wrong. Using instinct instead of intellect and balls instead of brains, his characters were proactive and potent. They just didn’t meter out justice, they jammed it down your throat. He didn’t just celebrate freedom, he used it as the fuel for his liberating literature. Sure, he was an old fashioned author with a distinct (and some would argue, derivative) style. But Spillane didn’t ask you to read him. He wanted you to LIVE his books. I eventually learned that in a Northern Florida classroom 25 years ago. It’s a lesson that many will now have to discover posthumously.