I haven’t written about Mickey Spillane here for a while.

For latecomers, I started reading Mickey and Mike Hammer when I was twelve or thirteen. Private eyes were all over the TV in those years (1958 – 1960) and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer was one of the first, along with Perry Mason – Peter Gunn, 77 Sunset Strip and many others joined them soon.

I already was a kid who liked to read the literary sources of movies and TV I’d enjoyed, and most of the private eyes had literary roots. I quickly discovered Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. They became, and remain, my pulp pillars.

Even at that early age I could see the fascinating differences between them – how Hammett was spare, how Chandler was literary, how Spillane was visceral. And I relished those differences.

But what surprised me, as I researched the three writers at the library, was how Spillane was viewed with disdain and even disgust. That research revealed that Mickey was the most popular of the three, and for a time had been the most popular in fiction period. Why, then, was he a pariah?

It became clear, over time, that it was Spillane’s perceived political stance – a conservative one – that turned the nicer murder mystery community against him. Chandler was openly contemptuous of Mickey, dismissing him as a comic book writer.

Well, that may have been part of why I liked Spillane. I was not aware that his professional career had largely been one of a comic book scripter before he turned to the mystery writing game. But I was a comic book kid, a consumer of comics and even a collector, so Spillane spurred my all-in-color-for-a-dime blood.

What I wasn’t was political – at 13 or so, I had little grasp on politics. Later I began to question being a hereditary Republican, having grown up in GOP household; and by early college – after a flirtation with Ayn Rand – my burgeoning politics had definitely moved left.

That hadn’t changed my opinion of, or love for, the work of Mickey Spillane. I’d had a seemless transition from Mickey’s first six bestsellers (1947 – 1952) and his multi-book comeback in 1960. (I had discovered Ian Fleming in between.) I was familiar enough with Ayn Rand to know that she had sparked his four-book series about reactionary secret agent Tiger Mann. But I never thought of Mickey’s work as anything particularly political.

Today, as I see commentators about noir fiction talking dismissively about Mickey, I see that politics is a big part of it – politics and perceptions of him and his work coming from people who have read little or none of it. The majority of the casual scorn heaped upon Spillane inevitably talks about Mike Hammer in terms of fighting “Commies.”

The first six Spillanes (I, the Jury through Kiss Me, Deadly) were the enormous bestsellers that put him on the map. One of those books has Hammer taking on Russian agents – the glorious One Lonely Night. The rest find him taking on gangsters and psychopaths and other apolitical foes.

The next batch of Hammer novels, starting with The Girl Hunters (1961) deal on occasion with foreign foes in a very Ian Fleming sort of world, indicating Spillane was trying to keep up with the market he’d turned his back on. These novels are not particularly “Commie”-bashing, although the Dragon is a KGB agent in The Girl Hunters. Again, Mickey seems to be nodding to his new competition: Ian Fleming.

And yet the critics of Spillane and Hammer speak only in those anti-Communist terms – an easy mistake if you are criticizing Mike Hammer’s creator without having read him much or at all. None of these critics seems to have noticed that the villain of one of the key early novels is plainly based on Joe McCarthy.

It’s all snobbery. Hammett and especially Chandler are designed for readers who see themselves as aficionados of superior mystery fiction. Spillane clearly has a working-class audience in mind with his blue-collar hero.

All of that was beyond me as a young reader, but I see it now. Hammett was one of the founders of the feast that Hemingway regularly served up (I happen to prefer Dash to Ernie), a spare style that reflected a no-nonsense view of the world; after all, Hammett had been a real-life PI. Chandler, schooled in Great Britain, created a fantasy detective, a chess-playing tough guy who tossed off one fancy simile per page like alms to the poor.

And I love both Hammett and Chandler.

But the pulp majesty of Mickey Spillane is what drew me in to the genre – me and a couple of generations of readers. This is how you grab a reader (or customer, as Mickey put it):

Many of the critics of Spillane do so while praising the film version of Kiss Me, Deadly (which lacks Mickey’s characteristic comma). But they aren’t familiar enough with the text to know how, in certain respects, faithful the film is to Spillane. We see Hammer as the world sees him, which is not entirely admirable; but we also experience that paperback world that surrounds him, that noir universe the film inhabits but that Mickey created.

Consider the opening of One Lonely Night:

How many times have you seen somebody say that Spillane was a lousy writer? Even those who grant him storytelling gifts like to dismiss him as some kind of literary lowlife.

So it is about politics in the end.

The kind of politics that dismiss, that condescend, that judge without consideration. I am happy my politics weren’t formed when I met Mickey. And I am here to tell you that Mickey knew my politics and his were not aligned. Of course, Mickey had become a Jehovah’s Witness decades before and politics was off-limits in that branch of faith.

But he was conservative, all right. And I was a liberal.

We never talked about it. But he entrusted to me his unfinished manuscripts – someone he knew to be liberal, but who understand his famous character. And you know what? He was an artist and didn’t give a damn about politics.

My pal Jim Traylor and I wrote Mickey’s biography for Otto Penzler at Mysterious Press, Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction. You can get it here.

Here’s another health update.

I wound up back in the ER last week with another of those attacks that I guess are called aphasia – spells of an inability to talk coherently, even using made-up words while at the same time maintaining a more or less mental clarity.

One attack was diagnosed as T.I.A., which is a minor stroke. That I’ve had several recurrences is disturbing, but they appear connected to the two ablations I’ve had – the spells have followed in a day or two, and then disappeared.

We are looking into this and related stuff – in both instances, I’ve been diagnosed with urinary tract infections. Right now I’m recuperating from the most recent heart-related ablation, which I’m told will take a month or so. I am in no pain but require a lot of sleep, and I am definitely slowed down.

Barb has been great. She is truly unbelievable.

And your warm good wishes are much appreciated; but I assure you we’re on top of this.

M.A.C.

Tags: Mickey Spillane