Mickey Spillane; Tough-Guy Writer Of Mike Hammer Detective Mysteries

By Adam Bernstein

Mickey Spillane, 88, who died July 17 in Murrells Inlet, S.C., was one of the world’s most popular mystery writers. His specialty was tight-fisted, sadistic revenge stories, often featuring his alcoholic gumshoe Mike Hammer and a cast of evildoers who launder money or spout the Communist Party line.

His writing style was characterized by short words, lightning transitions, gruff sex and violent endings. It was once tallied that he offed 58 people in six novels.

Starting with “I, the Jury,” in 1947, Mr. Spillane sold hundreds of millions of books during his lifetime and garnered consistently scathing reviews. Even his father, a Brooklyn bartender, called them “crud.”

Mr. Spillane was a struggling comic book publisher when he wrote “I, the Jury.” He initially envisioned it as a comic book called “Mike Danger,” and when that did not go over, he took a week to reconfigure it as a novel.

Even the editor in chief of E.P. Dutton and Co., Mr. Spillane’s publisher, was skeptical of the book’s literary merit but conceded it would probably be a smash with postwar readers looking for ready action. He was right. The book, in which Hammer pursues a murderous narcotics ring led by a curvaceous female psychiatrist, went on to sell more than 1 million copies.

Mr. Spillane spun out six novels in the next five years, among them “My Gun Is Quick,” “The Big Kill,” “One Lonely Night” and “Kiss Me, Deadly.” Most concerned Hammer, his faithful sidekick, Velda, and the police homicide captain Pat Chambers, who acknowledges that Hammer’s style of vigilante justice is often better suited than the law to dispatching criminals.

In one typical passage from “The Big Kill,” Hammer narrates: “I snapped the side of the rod across his jaw and laid the flesh open to the bone. I pounded his teeth back into his mouth with the end of the barrel . . . and I took my own damn time about kicking him in the face. He smashed into the door and lay there bubbling. So I kicked him again and he stopped bubbling.”

Mystery specialist Anthony Boucher, writing in the New York Times, said that novel “may rank as the best Spillane — which is the faintest praise this department has ever bestowed.”

Mr. Spillane’s success rankled other critics, who sometimes became very personal in their reviews. Malcolm Cowley called Mr. Spillane “a homicidal paranoiac,” going on to note what he called his misogyny and vigilante tendencies.

Like Hammer, Mr. Spillane learned to keep emotion at a distance when discussing a lifetime of dreadful reviews. “I pay no attention to those jerks who think they’re critics,” he said. “I don’t give a hoot about readin’ reviews. What I want to read is the royalty checks.”

His books were translated into many languages, and he proved so popular as a writer that he was able to transfer his thick-necked, barrel-chested personality across many media. With the charisma of a redwood, he played Hammer in “The Girl Hunters,” a 1963 film adaptation of his novel.

In the 1970s and 1980s, he was a caricature of his tough-guy alter ego as a pitchman for Miller Lite beer, sporting a trench coat, a porkpie hat and a cantilevered blonde.

Frank Morrison Spillane was born March 9, 1918, in Brooklyn, N.Y. He described surviving a very tough neighborhood by inventing ghost storiesto scare others his age otherwise intent on beating him up. By his high school graduation in 1935, he sold his first story to a pulp magazine.

He briefly attended college in Kansas and considered studying for the law before a friend got him a writing and editing job at Funnies Inc., a comic book publisher in Manhattan. He churned out one a day when other authors needed a week.

After stateside service in the Army Air Forces during World War II — he was a cadet flight instructor — he and two friends began a comic book business. About that time, he and his first wife bought several acres of land in Newburgh, N.Y., and he wrote “I, the Jury” to afford the $1,000 property.

During the next several years, Mr. Spillane received large royalty payments from film companies to turn his rush of books into motion pictures. The best was Robert Aldrich’s 1955 version of “Kiss Me Deadly,” with Ralph Meeker as Hammer going after a nuclear secret.

He also scripted several television shows and films and played a detective in the 1954 suspense film “Ring of Fear,” set at a Clyde Beatty circus. He rewrote much of the film, too, refusing payment. In gratitude, the producer, John Wayne, surprised him one morning with a white Jaguar sportster wrapped in a red ribbon. The card read, “Thanks, Duke.”

After a long hiatus from novel writing in the 1950s — partly from his time-consuming conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses — he began a long run of books with characters other than Mike Hammer. He featured an antihero hoodlum in “The Deep” (1961) and “Me, Hood!” (1963), followed by books with protagonists named Tiger Mann, a former spy in the James Bond mold, and Mako Hooker, a former CIA agent who enjoys fishing.

He was fond of making wild claims about his literary stature. At one point early in his career, he was taunted at a dinner party by “some New York literary guy” who told him it was “disgraceful” that seven of the 10 best-selling books of all time bore Mr. Spillane’s name. He replied, “You’re lucky I’ve only written seven books.”

Done initially on a dare from his publisher, Mr. Spillane wrote a children’s book, “The Day the Sea Rolled Back” (1979), about two boys who find a shipwreck loaded with treasure. This won a Junior Literary Guild award.

He also wrote another children’s novel, “The Ship That Never Was,” and then wrote his first Mike Hammer mystery in 20 years with “The Killing Man” (1989). “Black Alley” followed in 1996. In the last, a rapidly aging Hammer comes out of a gunshot-induced coma, then tracks down a friend’s murderer and billions in mob loot. For the first time, he also confesses his love for Velda but, because of doctor’s orders, cannot consummate the relationship.

Late in life, he received a career achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America and was named a grand master by the Mystery Writers of America.

In his private life, he neither smoked nor drank and was a house-to-house missionary for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He expressed at times great disdain for what he saw as corrosive forces in American life, from antiwar protesters to the United Nations.

He was long settled in Murrells Inlet, having once judged a beauty contest there and subsequently fallen in love with the beachside community where he fished, crabbed and skin-dived and housed an impressive gun collection.

His marriages to Mary Ann Pearce and Sherri Malinou ended in divorce. His second wife, a model, posed nude for the dust jacket of his 1972 novel “The Erection Set.”

Srvivors include his third wife, Jane Rodgers Johnson, a former beauty queen 30 years his junior; and four children from the first marriage.

He also carried on a long epistolary flirtation with Ayn Rand, an admirer of his writing.

Art under control in North Korea

What does a totalitarian regime expect from its artists? Jane Portal explores the role of art in North Korea.

Nations have always requisitioned and utilized art works. If anything, this process proliferated in the 20th century, when art was widely adopted for propaganda purposes and those who produced it were strictly controlled by totalitarian states. It was the Soviet Union that initially kept the tightest control on cultural output and defined the needs of the state.

In many ways, art for the state in Kim Il-song’s North Korea followed on from and copied that of Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China, notably the development of Socialist Realist art. Many features of the organisation of artists and the works of art produced are similar, and can be seen as standard features of art in totalitarian societies. In most circumstances, art for the state can be characterised as being essentially large-scale, dramatic and message-laden.

According to the official account, from the 1960s onwards, Socialist Realist art in North Korea took a new development and was independently guided by the philosophy of Juche. Juche was Kim Il-song’s most important political idea, which he used to promote himself as leader of the North Korean people. Juche is usually translated as “self-reliance”, although the academic Dae-sook Suh describes it in practise as “nothing more than xenophobic nationalism”.

Socialist Realism is now referred to in North Korea as Juche Realism. Juche art theorists in North Korea divide world art history into two kinds: “peoples’ art”, reflecting the needs of the masses, and “reactionary art”, reflecting the ideology of the exploiting class. Kim Il-song’s 1966 instruction, “Let’s develop our National form with Socialist content”, is still regarded as the absolute guiding principle of Juche art. This “call” for a new Juche Art was in fact a paraphrase of both Stalin and Mao. Stalin had defined Socialist Realism as “national in form, socialist in content”, while Mao called it “national in form, new democratic in content”.

The “national form” of painting naturally meant traditional Korean ink painting or Chosonhwa, but oil painting (an imported western technique) was also encouraged. Large public wall paintings, which would normally be expected to be carried out in oils, were therefore also produced in ink painting, encouraging ink painters to paint realistically. Still today, there are many more ink painters classed as Merit Artists or Peoples’ Artists than there are oil painters, as a matter of principle.

The subjects originally required by Juche art were limited to such themes as: portraying the General, the relationship of the military and the people, the construction of socialism, National Pride and such like. However, in the 1970s landscape was also approved, when Kim Jong-il instructed: “The idea of describing Nature in a socialist country is to promote patriotism, heighten the national pride and confidence of the public in living in a socialist country.” The result has been a huge increase in the production of oil paintings of natural scenes.

All artists in North Korea are registered as members of the Korean Artists Federation and receive monthly salaries, for which they are expected to produce a certain number of works. Some artists work “on the spot”, at factories or construction sites, whereas others go to an office. Both would be expected to work regular hours and have about two hours of study or discussion in theevenings with regular reports and evaluations. Abstract or conceptual art is forbidden and the subjects and themes of works of art are limited.

There is no question of arranging a solo exhibition but there is a National Art Exhibition every year and an Industrial Art exhibition every two years. There is no museum or gallery of contemporary art and no private galleries, but modern art is included in the displays of the National Gallery “because past tradition is a process by which the present can be understood”. However, most of the works on display are also the ones that appear in all the books on contemporary art  there is no uncertainty as to which are the masterpieces.

In fact, there is no uncertainty at all expressed in North Korean contemporary art, no individual hopes or expressions, no mystery. As Kim Jong-il said: “A picture must be painted in such a way that the viewer can understand its meaning. If the people who see a picture cannot grasp its meaning, no matter what a talented artist may have painted it, they cannot say it is a good picture.”

Shelley’s fantastic prank

Times Online July 12, 2006

In 1809 the controversial naval officer Sir Home Popham invited Peter Finnerty, a radical Irish journalist and supporter of the United Irishmen, to join him on the British expedition to the Scheldt: its object was to attack Antwerp, then held by the French. Although Flushing fell, a large number of troops succumbed to a form of malaria on the island of Walcheren and the expedition ended in disaster with the deaths of around 4,000 men. Finnerty’s reports on these events in the Morning Chronicle led to his arrest and transportation back to England. In January 1810 he accused his “ancient enemy” Lord Castlereagh of trying to silence him and compounded the offence by repeating accusations against the politician about the abuse of United Irish prisoners in 1798. Finnerty was tried for libel in February 1811 and sentenced to eighteen months in Lincoln Gaol. It was not the first time he had gone to prison as a result of clashing with Castlereagh: he had previously spent two years in prison in Dublin for printing a seditious libel and had been made to stand in the pillory. This second libel case was reported in great detail and Finnerty’s plight attracted widespread support, prompting a debate during the summer in the House of Commons and a public subscription, initiated by Sir Francis Burdett, which reached £2,000 on his release. Among those who contributed to a fund to maintain the journalist while he was still in prison was Percy Bysshe Shelley, then an undergraduate at Oxford in his second term at University College. His name appears in a list of four subscribers, each pledging a guinea, printed in the Oxford University and City Herald on March 2, 1811. A week later the journal carried an advertisement for a Poetical Essay, “Just published, Price Two Shillings”; it was described as “On the Existing State of Things . . . for Assisting to Maintain in Prison Mr. Peter Finnerty, Imprisoned for a Libel” and was “by a Gentleman of the University of Oxford”. Similar advertisements for the book appeared in the national press, in The Morning Chronicle (on March 15 and 21) and in The Times (on April 10 and 11).

Shelley’s authorship of this poem was known to his contemporaries at Oxford and the existence of the pamphlet was recorded by the Oxford bibliographer and book collector Philip Bliss. Those who knew Shelley might have associated this publication with An Address to the Irish People (Dublin, 1812), the first work to appear with his full name on its title page (rather than a pseudonym or his initials), and in which he refers to Finnerty’s fate (“He was imprisoned for persisting in the truth”). The designation “by a Gentleman of the University of Oxford” gave little away in itself, but sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that this was also the formula used on the title page of the anonymous gothic novel, St Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance, which Shelley published in 1811 in London with the Pall Mall bookseller J. J. Stockdale. His third anonymous publication of the year was The Necessity of Atheism (Worthing: printed by C. & W. Phillips) in which he collaborated with his fellow undergraduate T. J. Hogg. It was that pamphlet which led to Shelley and Hogg being sent down from University College on March 25, “for contumaciously refusing to answer questions proposed to them and for also repeatedly declining to disavow a publication entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’”. It seems likely that the Poetical Essay, whose authorship was probably known to the authorities, contributed to the poet’s expulsion, the episode that his cousin Thomas Medwin rather mildly called “Shelley’s mishap at Oxford”.

The Poetical Essay was no doubt one of what another contemporary at University College, C. J. Ridley, described as “Shelley’s strange and fantastic pranks”. Although it was advertised as for sale by the London publisher B. Crosby & Co. (“and all other Booksellers”), it was actually printed by the Oxford firm of Munday and Slatter. Two months before it was published, on January 11, Shelley had written to Hogg saying: “I have a Poem, with Mr Lundi which I shall certainly publish. There is some of Eliza’s in it: I will write tomorrow I have something to add to it & if Lundi has any idea (when he speaks to you of publishing it wth my name[)] will you tell him to leave it alone till I come”. “Mr Lundi” must be John Munday and the letter might be taken to suggest that Shelley and his sister Elizabeth had been working on the poem together and that the “something to add to it” might relate to the imprisonment of Finnerty. The brother and sister had previously collaborated in the production of the poet’s first book, Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (Worthing, 1810), which had to be withdrawn when the publisher, Stockdale, realized that one of the poems in the collection of lyrics and gothic narratives had been lifted entirely from a piece by M. G. Lewis.

Original Poetry sank from view and was forgotten about until 1859; an actual copy of the collection was only discovered in 1897, when it was reprinted in facsimile by Richard Garnett. The Poetical Essay, however, has completely eluded Shelley scholars for nearly two centuries. Its title page – whose contents, including the epigraph concerning the ravages of famine from Southey’s recently published The Curse of Kehama (1810), were reproduced in the press advertisements – made it clear that it had some direct link with the case of Peter Finnerty, but the nature of “the State of Things” (Stephen C. Behrendt has detected an allusion to Things as They Are, the proper title of William Godwin’s Caleb Williams) remained obscure. What Kenneth Neill Cameron described as “One of the unsolved mysteries of Shelley bibliography” can now be solved, for a copy of the pamphlet has been discovered and is in the possession of the booksellers Bernard Quaritch.

The pamphlet is a quarto, consisting of twenty pages with a final leaf of notes on the recto and errata on the verso; printed on paper with a watermark date of 1807, it is stitched and uncut, still very much in the same state as it was when it was issued. The poem is dedicated “TO HARRIET W–B–K”, that is Harriet Westbrook with whom Shelley eloped in August 1811: this constitutes the first printed reference to the poet’s wife. The dedication is followed by a “Preface”, a short essay touching on politics and religion, calling for “a total reform in the licentiousness, luxury, depravity, prejudice, which involve society”, not by warfare, which he vigorously denounces, but by “gradual, yet decided intellectual exertions”. The poem which follows consists of 172 lines of rhyming couplets.

It ranges over the devastations of war, the fearless voice of Sir Francis Burdett, the iniquities of Castlereagh, the tyranny of Napoleon and the oppressions of colonial India. Rather than remaining focused on Finnerty and Ireland, Shelley is concerned with England and the war:

Millions to fight compell’d, to fight or die
In mangled heaps on War’s red altar lie . . .
When legal murders swell the lists of pride;
When glory’s views the titled idiot guide.
It is the “cold advisers of yet colder kings” who have “the power to breathe / O’er all the world the infectious blast of death”.

Burdett is the hero of the poem and Castlereagh, with his “Vices as glaring as the noon-day sun”, its principal but unnamed target. As former President of the Board of Control and Colonial Secretary, Castlereagh stands for the iniquities of British rule in India (“The fainting Indian, on his native plains, / Writhes to superior power’s unnumbered pains”), while in Europe, Napoleon is like an “evil spirit brooding over gore”. Shelley’s concluding vision is of the virtuous reign which the overthrow of monarchy will bring:

Man must assert his native rights, must say
We take from Monarchs’ hand the granted sway;
Oppressive law no more shall power retain,
Peace, love, and concord, once shall rule again,
And heal the anguish of a suffering world;
Then, then shall things which now
confusedly hurled,
Seem Chaos, be resolved to order’s sway,
And error’s night be turned to virtue’s day –

While some of the language in the poem, for example the use of abstract terms, is reminiscent of Shelley’s other work, the regularity of the couplets is uncharacteristic. A possible explanation for this could be the fact that the poem was some sort of collaboration between Shelley and his sister Elizabeth. The fate of the pamphlet has been a mystery. The switch from local advertising in Oxford to its appearance in national newspapers coincided with Shelley’s move to London after being sent down from Oxford. It is known that although Munday refused to publish The Necessity of Atheism, Shelley put copies of it in the windows and on the counter of the bookseller’s High Street shop. They were spotted by a Fellow of New College there and all but one of the shop’s stock of them was burnt in its back kitchen. Munday and Slatter may have disposed of their copies of the Poetical Essay in the same way. In April, however, it was said to be available from Benjamin Crosby & Co of Ludgate Hill in London. These press advertisements and the Quaritch copy of the pamphlet suggest that previous theories that Shelley withdrew it, or that the Oxford printers refused to produce it until they were paid by the aristocratic but hard-up undergraduate, cannot be sustained.

Whatever the explanation for the disappearance of the pamphlet, some of the early history of this copy can be recovered. Immediately after being sent down, Shelley went to London. His arrival is recorded in a famous passage in Thomas Medwin’s Life of him:

I remember, as if it occurred yesterday, his knocking at my door in Garden Court, in the Temple, at four o’clock in the morning, the second day after his expulsion. I think I hear his cracked voice, with his well-known pipe, – “Medwin, let me in, I am expelled;” here followed a sort of loud half-hysteric laugh, and a repetition of the words – “I am expelled,” with the addition of, “for Atheism.”

Shelley was, as ever, in financial trouble and after a time in London he spent some of May and June 1811 with his father at Field Place, trying to mend their difficult relationship. When he eloped with Harriet Westbrook he sought money and legal advice from Medwin’s father, a solicitor who lived near to the Shelley home at Horsham in Sussex. It seems likely that it was around this time that he gave the sole surviving copy of the Poetical Essay to Thomas Medwin’s younger brother Pilfold (The unusual first name was a family one: Shelley’s mother was Elizabeth Pilfold), who was then about seventeen years old. He signed this copy at the top right of the title page. The signature can be compared with that on documents relating to Shelley in the Horsham Museum.

It is not unusual for manuscripts which are thought to have been lost to reappear  by their very nature they can be hard to read, hard to identify and may easily be passed over  but it is extremely rare for printed books of any period to be rediscovered after an absence of 200 years. The Quaritch copy of the Poetical Essay is all the more remarkable for its unexpected emergence and for the insights a full study of it will give into Shelleys development as a poet and political thinker.

THE STORM OF STYLE