EAT YOUR HEART OUT QUENTIN TARANTINO: MY MICKEY SPILLANE INTERVIEW

 

NOTE: In the summer of 1999, Mickey Spillane arrived in London to be honoured by the late lamented Crime Scene festival at the NFT. He had just flown in from South Carolina, via Charlotte, that morning, and his BBC handler wanted to make sure I understood I had 45 minutes with Mickey, who was, after all, in his 80s. Then he would rest before taking a taxi to Broadcasting House for another interview. After 45 minutes, Mickey shooed the handler away, and I ran out of tape as we continued talking until, literally, he was being pushed into the taxi cab.Caspar Llewellyn-Smith ran what follows, my short version of the interview, in the Daily Telegraph that Saturday--I later transcribed the whole thing for Crime Time, and maybe I'll post that here sometime too; it's worth it!

I, THE JURY, Mickey Spillane’s 1947 best seller, boasts the most infamous ending in hard-boiled fiction. Mike Hammer knows the woman he loves has murdered his best friend. She is seducing him with a strip tease. She’s also reaching for a gun behind her back. Hammer plugs her in her naked belly with a slug from his .45.

How c-could you?" she gasped
I had only a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
"It was easy," I said.

Eat your heart out, Quentin Tarantino. More than 50 years after writing those words, the king of pulp fictions is in London. Spillane's 81 years old, but his handshake could still crush a hoodlum’s trigger finger. He will deliver a Guardian Lecture tonight to keynote a season of crime films at the National Film Theatre, which includes the debut of a Spillane documentary directed by award-winning crime writer Max Allan Collins. "He was savaged by the critics," says Collins, "so Mickey developed this persona, entertainer and pitchman." 

And how. Interviewing Mickey is like saddling a bronco who refuses to be broken, and knows all the cowpunchers’ tricks. Ask about critics and he’ll tell you about interpreting between Salvador Dali and Jimmy Durante, who were both speaking English, more or less. Ask about politics and he’ll tell you about being shot from a circus cannon. There's no slowing down. And he’s still answering the inevitable questions about Mike Hammer’s violence with laughter.

"I tell them, you know why Mike shot that woman in the belly? He missed!"

Nowadays the violence of so-called neo-noir is high fashion, while Spillane’s has become somehow declasse. On its 50th anniversary, I THE JURY went out of print in America for the first time. Mickey’s surprised to learn he’s coming back into print in the UK with Robinson Publishing’s HARDBOILED: A MIKE HAMMER OMNIBUS, released to coincide with his visit. (Note: You can find my essay on the two Hammer omnibuses here).

"Corporate turnovers," he shrugs. "They thought I’m old and passe. I tell them I’m not an author, I’m a writer. I’m a merchandiser. I did Miller Lite commercials for 19 years on TV. The Mike Hammer TV series has been brought back for the fourth time. People know me, they stop me on the street."

In the adverts, Spillane, in trench coat and fedora, played himself as Mike Hammer with enough ironic humour to launch a thousand Tarantinos. "Hey, Mickey, got a Lite?" "Sure thing doll." The series featured many of America’s most famous sportsmen, but he was the star, the one they all looked up to. Spillane, like John Wayne (who gave him a treasured vintage Jaguar as a reward for some script doctoring) was what American men aspired to be. "Things change," he sighs. Well, almost sighs. "The Blue Ribbon’s gone in New York. We have no leaders to admire, all we’ve got is that cocksman in the White House" 

Spillane isn’t crazy about any of the Mike Hammer films either. The first, I THE JURY, was made by Victor Saville in 1953. Its NFT showing will be its first British showing in its original 3D format, and with the 20 minutes of cuts by the censors restored. But Spillane has never seen it all the way through.

"I went once in Brooklyn. Biff Elliott walks on screen and says "I’m Mike Hammer," and a voice in the audience howled ‘DAT’S Mike Hammuh?’ I walked out." He laughs again. "Victor wanted to make an epic, THE SILVER CHALICE, which fell on its face with a deathly thud. So to save money he gets this slob writer, and he rooned it! They have Mike getting knocked out with a wooden coat hanger!"

Ten years later, Spillane was cast as his own hero. Can you imagine Raymond Chandler playing Philip Marlowe? Mickey looks at stills from THE GIRL HUNTERS. "Good grief, did I ever look like that? There’s Shirley Eaton. What a pro; no ego, she just played the character and made me look good." The filming was done in Britain, where he palled around with gangsters like Billy Hills and Jack Spot. "When we needed a .45 for Mike, Billy brought a sack full of guns to the set, with live ammo."

The best-regarded Hammer adaptation is Robert Aldrich’s KISS ME DEADLY, which ends in nuclear holocaust. Mickey hates it. "They never even READ my book!" Aldrich saw an apocalyptic strain in Hammer, and critics have recently tried to connect that to Spillane’s faith. He’s a Jehovah’s Witness, but the critics got it wrong. "It’s not the end of the world we witness," he says, "but parousia, the coming of the peace of God, the end of the system of things as they are. It’s taking in knowledge."

But confounding the critics is his favourite pastime. "It tears them up. I had seven books at once in the top ten best seller list. I said ‘you’re lucky I don’t write three more!'"

He’s written two children’s books. The first, THE DAY THE SEA ROLLED BACK, won the Junior Literary Guild Award. "I keep winning these crazy prizes," he shrugs. "It meant the book sells to libraries." And he’s still writing.

"I’m halfway through a new Mike Hammer novel," he says. "But I used to write fast…now my rear end gets tired. I’m not full of piss and vinegar any more. The vinegar’s all gone." He wrote I, THE JURY in nine days, originally plotting it as a comic book starring "Mike Danger". The book revolutionised the publishing industry.

"I knew it would be a hit. Paperback reprints were huge during the war, and I saw a market for originals. All those soldiers coming back. A little sex wouldn’t hurt, and they’d seen violence. I got a comic distributor to guarantee a paperback reprint, got a $1,000 advance from Dutton for the hardcover." Soon the only books outselling Spillane were the Bible and Dr. Spock. "I’ve gone downhill ever since," he laughs. 

Spillane has a radio interview next. He’s been talking for two hours; I’ve long since run out of tape. Across the room in the Savoy, a business meeting has ground to a halt, eavesdropping on Mickey’s spiel. After he leaves, they ask, "who was that?"

"Mickey Spillane," I tell them.

"Mickey Spillane! How do you interview Mickey Spillane?"

"It was easy," I said.

MIKE HAMMER ON THE OMNIBUS: MICKEY SPILLANE REVISITED

The Mike Hammer Omnibus Alison & Busby, 10.99, ISBN 074900519X
The Mike Hammer Omnibus, Volume Two Alison & Busby, 10.99 ISBN 0749006307

I met Mickey Spillane when he came to London for Crime Scene 2000, and none of his books was in print, an odd fate when you consider he’s one of the biggest selling writers of all time, and Mike Hammer remains a valuable ‘brand name’, with TV and movies always playing somewhere. I interviewed him for the Daily Telegraph, and he kept going with such enthusiasm that I transcribed almost the whole thing for Crime Time, for whom I also wrote about the Crime Scene tribute. Mickey went out of print partly because times had changed and partly because publishers didn’t realise that there was more to Mike Hammer than politically incorrect sex and violence, not necessarily in that order. Though nowadays, you would have thought, sex and violence was enough, and Mickey certainly was ahead of the curve in both areas. As said in my Daily Telegraph piece, ’eat your heart out, Quentin Tarantino’.

So I applauded when A&B got his first six Hammer novels, which are probably his best work, back in print, and appreciated even more that they took the trouble to attach two useful introductions. The first volume’s was by Max Allan Collins, who also directed a fabulous documentary, ’Mike Hammer‘s Mickey Spillane‘, which received its UK premiere at that Crime Scene. The original brief reviews I did of these two books when they came out languished in Crime Time’s dank vaults, so I've approached them anew here.

Collins’ introduction reminded me that I first came to Hammer as a teenager, and the point about that is that when I was a teen his books were still considered hot stuff, not what a 13 year old should be reading. My mother always said she named me Michael because she liked Mike Hammer, and felt she had to sneak-read Mickey’s books, even though she was 19, already married and pregnant with me by then.

Those were strange times: men like my father had been made adult by war--I have a photo of my dad, just out high school, posing in his Navy uniform while in a football stance--straight from playing against Hillhouse to taking on the Nazis or the Japs. They returned to America changed, having seen both death and Paris. In his excellent introduction to the second volume, Lawrence Block reminds us that Mickey started out writing comic books, and when soldiers returned home from World War II, they were ready for the action and realism they’d known at war, but wanted it in a simpler, more direct fashion that they got, say, from Remarque.

Their world was soon shrink-wrapped in the Cold War, a permanent repression, both political and personal, running parallel to the American Dream, sort of what the Bush regime has tried to recreate over the past eight years in Washington,and which the McCains and Palins, the Robert Gateses and General Petraeuses of this world would love to perpetuate. There is a palpable sense of tension in the first three Hammer novels between the Mike Hammer who buys into this propaganda war and plugs commies with slugs of lead, and the Mickey who sees a world of feverish desires which shouldn’t be or can’t be expressed, and thus often lead to violence when they are. Those first three books were I, The Jury, My Gun Is Quick, and Vengeance Is Mine. Note the first-person pronouns in every title. They reflect the first-person prose, which drags you along kicking and screaming and enjoying the nightmare ride.

I think it was the seductiveness of the ride which attracted Robert Aldrich to Spillane, although he was appalled by the attraction of what he saw as a fascist impulse. Aldrich made a film of Kiss Me Deadly, which is included along with One Lonely Night and The Big Kill in the second omnibus. He and screenwriter Buzz Bezzerides basically deconstructed Spillane, taking the paranoid narration and the instinctive violence and distilling them into a remarkable document of Cold War angst.

Mickey, of course, hated it.

That was understandable, but he really shouldn’t have minded. Deconstruction is, in some ways, the sincerest form of flattery. Going back to the originals convinces me that Mickey had something real going: it got diluted, perhaps after he found religion, perhaps when he turned himself into a marketing tool, perhaps for some other reason. Mickey didn’t need me, or anyone else, to psychoanalyse him. He wrote, and kept writing, but for a brief period in the early 1950s, he had his finger closer to the pulse of America than anyone, and that’s why these six novels are still essential reading today.