LAST CALL FOR THE MICK: In Memoriam: Mickey Spillane

Note: This remembrance appeared originally in January 2007, in issue 50 of Crime Time, when it was still a magazine, six months after Mickey's death in July 2006. I came across it misfiled in my computer, re-read it, and felt saddened again that I didn't get to write a proper obit of Mickey for one of the British papers. You'll find the Daily Telegraph version of my interview with Mickey on the site here, maybe I will go back and post the whole interview soon. Note in this piece, which is as I wrote it, not as it appeared, I mention Sax Rohmer's novel President Fu Manchu; didn't that turn out to be prophetic! Since Mickey was so derisive of 'that cocksman' Bill Clinton when I interviewed him, I would love to ask him his thoughts on Donald Trump. In the meantime, a heartfelt RIP to Mickey, and though Max has done a great job with his unpublished oeuvre, I still miss him.

LAST CALL FOR THE MICK

Respectability really didn't sit all that well with Mickey Spillane, although the world more than caught up with the sex and violence of his Mike Hammer novels, and like whores and politicians, crime writers become respectable if they hang around long enough.  Indeed, more people probably know Mickey from his days as the guy in the trench coat fronting Light Beer commercials.  'Hey Mickey, got a Light?'

He was due a re-evaluation anyway, which began with Max Allan Collins' excellent documentary Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane.  Those early novels,  the ones written in money-making pulp fever before he found religion, before he began making his living being Mickey Spillane, have real narrative drive.  They're structured solidly, and while the characters veer between stereotype and psychopathology, more than anything they present a picture of immediate Post-War America that most writers couldn't beat with the butt of Mike Hammer’s .45.

Not that there was anything wrong with Mickey making his living being Mickey, because his passing  really does mark the end of an era.  He was everything the generation that won the big war, and their younger brothers, wanted to be.  Handsome, successful, the best in the world at what he did.  I look at the photos of the youthful Mickey signing his first big contract and I see Ted Williams, or John Wayne.  Remember, Mickey played Hammer in The Girl Hunters, and didn't do a bad job. How many other writers could match that?

Mick represents an era when tough guys didn't swear in front of ladies.  Where men wore hats that could be knocked off in fights.  Where hair tonic kept your crewcut stiff.  Where strippers in pasties were hot stuff, suggesting sex you didn't have to sit through a TV dinner to get.  An age where people believed in things like truth, justice and the American way, and no one had yet proven them wrong.  Where men had to do what men had to do.  The Mick believed in this world, and his readers felt it in his writing, so they believed too.

When Mickey came to London in 1999 his BBC minders gave me 40 minutes for my interview. Mick was 80 something and had flown overnight from South Carolina. He kept shooing the minders away so we could keep talking. I ran out of tape. It didn't matter; Mickey was still telling me stories as they pushed him into the cab to Broadcasting House.  I told him my mother had named me Michael because she'd loved Mike Hammer, reading him pregnant at 19 and feeling very adult.  'Jeez ya shudda hoyed the names they gave me,' he said, a pitchman to the end.

Ironically, the film Kiss Me Deadly, which satirizes Spillane brilliantly, may be the most enduring part of Mickey's legacy.  For film buffs it might be John Alton's 3-D noir camerawork on I The Jury. It certainly won't be Biff Elliott, nor Stacy Keach, nor the underrated Armand Assante, nor any of the other actors who tried to play in Hammer time.  I suspect the Mike Hammer novels will live on, as period pieces perhaps. they might get studied in American Studies classes, the way mine under Richard Slotkin read President Fu Manchu back in 1971. But Mickey Spillane, who sold America on the virtues of the American way, via paperback sex and violence, will certainly live on, because he was his own most enduring creation. I'll miss him.

MICKEY SPILLANE'S COMPLEX 90

The good thing about Complex 90 is that it reads like vintage Mickey Spillane, which shouldn't be a surprise, as Max Allan Collins, who has finished the book for Mickey, explains in the introduction. The title had once been announced for publication in the early Sixties, and Mickey gave him a partial manuscript to safeguard. It's set in 1964, with a new president in Washington and a new leader in Moscow, and Mike Hammer is hired as a bodyguard to accompany a straight-shooting (in the non Hammer sense) Republican senator to Russia, after helping said Senator survive an assassination attempt that killed his primary bodyguard. The novel opens with Hammer having got himself back to America after escaping from a Russian jail, and leaving a trail of (coincidentally enough) 45 Commies behind, meaning he's now an international incident.

Hammer then tells the first part of the story to the panel of US intelligence bigwigs, in flashback. This is always a dangerous thing, because you'd think he'd edit a few of the more lubricious details out of what he says (as opposed to what he tells us, the readers). This is the best pure Hammer in the book; his prison break is fast action set up by his hard-boiled resistance to his captors. As I said, vintage stuff.

Back in America, the question becomes why the Russians went after Hammer with such zeal. A question of revenge, against him and/or Velda, his former secretary and, as it turns out, an agent of the same top secret agency that employs Hammer? Or is there some other motive? Hammer investigates, Russians try to kill him, and he must beware of the motives of people who may appear to be friends, or, as always with Mike, potential lovers.

The story moves quickly, moved by its actions, as you expect from Spillane at his best. It's denouement is somewhat complicated, relying on an awful lot of engineering complicated plots which don't always seem necessary, and there's far more time spent on Hammer's head-butting with authority, establishing his own freedom to use his own methods, than there is on fleshing out (so to speak) some of the characters who are potentially villains. So when the truth is revealed, it's nowhere near as much shock as it ought to be.

My problem with the book is that this isn't a vintage of Hammer of which I'm particularly fond, although I thought The Big Bang, another of Mickey's posthumous collaborations with Max, set in 1965, was superb in many ways (you can read my review here). I remember liking The Girl Hunters (1961), but in Complex 90 the concept of Mike and Velda as secret agents gets carried to retrospective extremes—going back to the OSS during WWII for Velda—and Sixties spy excess. If the agency Mike and Velda work for really is so secret, why is Hammer carrying its ID around in his wallet, and how would anyone else know what the ID meant? I know this was the era of James Bond and Matt Helm and Man from UNCLE, but Mickey had Tiger Mann, and to me Mike Hammer is far more interesting as a private eye than a secret agent, especially since a good portion of his secret agency, as I mentioned, involves him arguing his bosses into letting him be a private eye. Call me conservative (which is what a Mike Hammer fan ought to be).

There is also an interesting private scene with Velda, which details her torture when she was trapped behind the Iron Curtain on a mission, which ends with something less than tender, but does go a long way into explaining why Mike and Velda never felt the need to marry—an issue in 21st-century set Goliath Bone. When I reviewed that book, it prompted a spirited exchange with Max Collins about what he called my 'distressingly literal' take on the book—and you can find that exchange here. I'm also going to reprint the original Shots review, as it doesn't seem to be up at their website any longer. And post the Telegraph version of my 1999 interview with Mickey. Meanwhile, enjoy...

Complex 90 by Mickey Spillane and Max Alan Collins

Titan Books £17.99 ISBN 9780857684660 

Note: This review, in slightly different form, will also appear at
Crime Time www.crimetime.co.uk