Ticket 2 Ride

One could say they created each other. The new biography, Spillane, King of Pulp Fiction, by James L. Traylor and Spillane’s writing partner, Max Allan Collins, is an entertaining look at the creator of private detective Mike Hammer.

I’m not a huge fan of either, but I respect the popularity and success of Spillane, and the longevity of the tough guy detective Hammer. Spillane cranked out the books that sold in the millions, his gift for the tough, in your face style of writing, touched a nerve in post-war America.

Writing saved him from other jobs and afforded him the opportunity to become financially stable. Spillane worked for a comic book publisher, writing for graphic publications. The style of writing, short and to the point, was like an exclamation mark to the art. He emphatically claimed to be a writer, not an author. He wrote for money.

Spillane and his wife lived in a tent while he wrote to purchase materials to build his cement-block house, where they lived for a number of years. “Spillane sat at a battered typewriter with a cat on his lap and wrote more of the twenty-five dollar each filler stories he was still able to place.”

Everything changed with I, the Jury, published in 1946. Seven publishers had turned it down because of the sex and violence.” They said it was too dirty,” Spillane recalled, “and all that kind of stuff… they had never seen anything like I, the Jury!“

Spillane did not invent pulp fiction, but he turbocharged it. “The evocative, art-deco-flavored artwork on the first paperback edition of I, the Jury had resonated with readers looking for something new. It depicted a seated Hammer with his back largely to the camera, his 45 trained on a seductive blonde unbuttoning her blouse-sex and violence, striptease and judgment, it was all there.”

I, the Jury tapped into some unmet need. Film noir was a popular style of cinematic storytelling at the time. In postwar America, millions of G.I’s had returned home enlightened to the world and the depravity of man. Darkness had crept into the human psyche like never before. “The private eye as avenging hero, the combat vet who kills his lover out of loyalty to a fellow soldier’s memory- is what truly set author and character apart. So had the unusual near-psychotic ravings of the antihero on the rampage.”

This was all new. The creation of the “American Dream” helped G.I.’s go to school and buy homes, the population exploded and life was good. But not so fast. The cherry had fallen off the sundae, and writers like Spillane captured that feeling of underlying problems; the dream could also be a nightmare.

“By the conclusion of I, the Jury, the reader has learned much about Mike Hammer. The detective has a strong sense of duty and friendship, has compassion for the suffering of humankind, and is a man who finds society’s means of delivering justice ineffective. He is also a violent man, a self-labeled misanthrope susceptible to great rage and quite capable of exacting a suitable revenge for the murder of a friend. Similarly resonating in I, the Jury was the way the postwar world seemed to have let Hammer down. The private eye may have respect for the police in general and a certain policeman in particular, but he has contempt for a judicial system that allows the guilty to either escape unpunished or with so little punishment that there is no deterrent to crime. Hammer essentially views himself as a cop, an unpaid public servant, although by One Lonely Night he has come to consider himself an avenging instrument of God.”

Instead of a one-off crime mystery, Mike Hammer became a series of books. Spillane wasn’t just letting a character grow from book to book, Hammer became Spillane’s weapon of choice. The public respected and the Mike Hammer character offered Spillane opportunities. He appeared as himself in the crime mystery Ring of Fear (1954) and as Mike Hammer in The Girl Hunters (1963). Who was Mickey Spillane and who was Mike Hammer?

Spillane became one of America’s first celebrity writers, Those first seven novels made Mickey Spillane a rich man, and a controversial one. He always had a love-hate affair with being a celebrity, though hobnobbing with the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Rocky Marciano, Jack Webb, Martha Raye, and Jayne Mansfield in the early 1950s.

Spillane signed a four-movie deal with Columbia Pictures, and granted first-refusal rights to films of any other Spillane novels. Spillane licensed the rights to Mike Hammer for radio, and had a separate deal to sell film rights to television. Mike Hammer was popular and Spillane was learning how to market a valuable asset.

Perhaps the best Mike Hammer film was Kiss Me Deadly, based on the sixth Hammer book. This 1955 film, directed by Robert Aldrich, was a bit over the top, but it struck gold. Described by Aldrich as “a coldly terrifying vision of mid-twentieth-century America, a bizarre, enigmatic look at the McCarthy era and the atomic paranoia to come.” The film was number five on the Gabiers du Cinéma list of the ten best films of the year and it was attacked by Senator Estes Kefauver’s Subcommittee investigating juvenile delinquency “for its excessive violence and dubious morality.” Great publicity!

Spillane sold the Mike Hammer films to MCA/Revue for television syndication. “Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer debuted on January 7, 1958, the fastest-selling film series in MCA’s ten years of syndication”; soon it would be the highest-rated syndicated mystery series nationally. Seventy-eight episodes would appear in a two-season run through September 1959, staying in syndication well beyond that.”

Spillane kept writing Mike Hammer books and sought to keep the character alive on every possible media. Spillane did not really branch out with other characters, certainly no character as unique as Mike Hammer.

Spillane was collecting more than enough money as his books were very popular and reprints, so his writing tapered off. Collins and Traylor write that Spillane liked to have fun and worked on his bucket list. “Mickey Spillane was a guy with enough money to take on all the hobbies and macho pursuits he’d ever dreamed of flying with the Air Force reserve, scuba diving for Spanish treasure in the Florida Keys, racing stock cars on dirt tracks, and traveling with Clyde Beatty’s circus and Ringling Brothers, too, getting shot out of a cannon.”

Spillane enjoyed danger and live vicariously through Hammer. Collins and Traylor write that Spillane, “went as himself into seedy joints under dangerous circum-stances, rooting out information for police and the FBI. Supposedly he was picking up color and background info for his novels, which due to his notoriety and the nature of his fiction got him admitted just about anywhere, unquestioned. In the 1950s and ’60s, this undercover work for which he took police tactical training took him to New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, gathering intel for local authorities and federal agencies. Drug rings and organized crime were the targets, his moonshine adventures a small part of it.”

Mike Hammer’s popularity had peaks and valleys. Spillane had no trouble marketing Hammer, because he was also selling himself. Talk shows, magazine interviews, radio, he soaked up the publicity. “The period beginning in 1961 did represent a second tide of Spillane titles, including four Hammer thrillers- ten novels in all, four more than the first wave. Sales were excellent. By 1970, The Deep and The Girl Hunters had sold four million copies each in the USA, matching all but I, the Jury and The Big Kill at five million.”

The sex and violence world of Mike Hammer was strange for a man who embraced religion like Spillane. As a Jehovah’s Witness, sometimes embracing it seriously, other times not so much, he was not like Mike Hammer. He drank, he liked guns and liked to have fun, but he didn’t fool around with other women, yet his sexist attitudes were similar to Hammer. A complicated man.

Mike Hammer had a major revival with actor Stacey Keach in several television series and TV movies in the 1980s and 1990s. Keach was a good fit as the detective. Spillane benefited too. His gig as a Miller Lite beer pitchman made him a great deal of money, and popular to new generations. Over eighty commercials were filmed.

Occasionally, Spillane stepped in front of the camera. One such time was to play the part of a writer in a Columbo episode, “Publish or Perish.” He was murdered of course.

Was Mike Hammer good writing or just a populist character who tapped into a big psychological itch, revealing cracks in the postwar dream-state? Collins and Traylor deliver a very interesting read on a true American character. Spillane was a complicated man even though he wore the persona of a very uncomplicated private detective character. You don’t have to be a Spillane/Hammer fan to appreciate the story, and Spillane’s impact on crime fiction.