Now that we've entered the real heart of the Spillane
controversy -- the intellectual-political aspect of his work
-- I'd like to reference a cartoon by Jack Ziegler, clipped
years ago from the Village Voice. It's titled
"Spillane meets Joyce!" In it, James Joyce greets the Mick
with: "Mickey, loved the economy of language and the
telegraphing of events in 'I, The Jury' and then again in 'My
Gun Is Quick.'" The thought bubble over Spillane's head
reads: "Say, he ain't so tough!"
Here're are a few questions to think about: Has anyone totted
up the male vs. female murderers in Christie, or, to use a
more noir example, Erle Stanley Gardner? Does Sherlock
Holmes' avowed misogyny diminish his place in the detective
pantheon? Why do the politics of Ian Fleming or Donald
Hamilton or Richard Prather matter so much less than
Spillane's? Finally, has anyone read any of the more recent
Spillane novels, where Mike Hammer, in his later years, has
become politically correct, more or less? Where he's planning
to marry Velda after a fifty-year courtship? Where, as best I
recall, he and Velda attend the New York symphony and dine at
the Four Seasons?
I guess my point, if I have one at all, is this: if the early
Hammers didn't have something special (and I suspect it may
have been a unique, gut-to-printed page directness) they
would not have become bestsellers and we would not be
spending all these days discussing them.
Dick Lochte
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