HEROES NEVER DIE: PARKER AND HAMMER

Note: this essay originally appeared as my twelfth American Eye column at Shots, in January 2009. I originally posted on this site a link to the piece, but the link no longer functions, hence my reprinting it now. But it prompted a spirited exchange with Max Allan Collins, which you can find with the original post here.

HEROES NEVER DIE

It's always sad to mark the passing of an era, and even sadder when you're reminded of another you'd marked already. This essay is dedicated to two giants of the field, which makes it appropriate that one of the books discussed is The Goliath Bone, the first of a number of Mike Hammer manuscripts Mickey Spillane left behind and which Max Allan Collins has completed. And at the end of January, less than a month after Donald Westlake's sudden death on New Year's Eve, Richard Stark's latest, and I suppose last, Parker novel, Dirty Money appears. It occurs to me you could argue that all the Parker books were begun by Westlake, and finished by Stark from Westlake's notes.

At one point in Dirty Money, the police release an artist's sketch which deliberately makes Parker kinder and softer, exactly what I mentioned when Westlake revived Stark and Parker in 1998 (was it really that long ago?). Kinder and gentler? Parker and Claire actually stay in a Berkshires B&B surrounded by leaf peepers, and Parker manages to blend in, as far as that goes. The subject of Parker aging never comes up, although his attitude toward Claire is somewhat less prehistoric than it was in the first series of books. He doesn't seem to have aged because Parker was never really a child of his time, or any time, but there is one problem: modern technology, surveillance, communications, forensics, have certainly made the life of the professional criminal more difficult.

The story picks up where Ask The Parrot left off, but the botched heist happened two books ago, in Nobody Runs Forever. I am convinced Westlake intended this story to be on-going, from book to book, for just as long as he could manage. Raymond Chandler once wrote that whenever your plotting gets stuck, have someone with a gun come in the room, Westlake has refined that dictum; the characters may or may not have guns, but they almost always have or can discover larcenous motives—double cross has always been the central theme of the Parker books. Parker is looking to collect cash he left behind in a church, and all sorts of people, from a tough-talking lesbian bounty-hunter to a hapless wanna-be true crime writer, are getting involved, and most of them are looking to take some of the dough, or all of it. They are introduced and described with such care, as are others, like the real Tony Soprano, New Jersey crime boss Frank Meany, or the Massachusetts state trooper Gwen Reversia, that you're certain they were destined to appear again. My feeling is that Parker's anonymity would continue to be compromised, book by book, until Westlake reached the point he couldn't write Parker out of. Things always came back to haunt Parker; if his life were easy, it would never have been fun to write about. Or to read. So I'm sad that my dream of Parker's Last Stand will never come about.

According to Mickey Spillane, there could never be a last stand for Mike Hammer, because 'see, heroes never die. John Wayne isn't dead. Elvis isn't dead...you can't kill a hero'. He said it to me when I interviewed him, he said it on stage the next night at the NFT, and I'm sure he said it a million more times. And it's true, but only to a point. The Duke didn't die, of course, but he went out perfectly before that death, in The Shootist. Even earlier he'd had the luxury of working his way through a host of different valedictory performances, among them The Cowboys (very good) True Grit (good) and McQ (not so good) before he and Don Siegel made their small classic.

Mike Hammer had no such luck; he's been out of print for a long time, consigned to being a relic of his era; Hammer is firmly entrench-coated into immediate postwar America, he's one of the best representations of the era's unconscious drives, and even though he moved reasonably well into the sixties, the ferocious drive and energy wasn't there; the times had changed (and so, in fairness, had Mickey). Mickey left six Hammer manuscripts in different stages of completion, and The Goliath Bone was the most fully finished, but it's also the most risky with which to launch a Hammer revival, because it's set in post 9/11 New York, thus taking Mike Hammer as far as possible out of own times and into a time warp.

Face it: Hammer has to be in his eighties by the time the jets crash into the World Trade towers. For the story's purposes, he's played as if in his late fifties or early sixties, I'd guess, and he's actually planning on making Velda an honest woman at long last, but it never jells. That's because it's not your disbelief you're being asked to suspend, but your belief, in the character Mickey created, and in the writing he did when he was young and hungry. The writing here, whether it's Mickeys or Max's, just doesn't have the same intensity; it's too knowing. The thing that made Kiss Me Deadly work so well as a film was that Robert Aldrich and Buzz Bezzerides recognised the primal drives that Hammer represented; they felt the energy in the prose, the manic power of the character. That's gone now; this Mike Hammer is far closer to Mickey doing his Miller Lite ads, or telling his fantastic stories; Stacy Keach could play this story in the TV series without too much problem; hell, Mickey might even be able to play it himself, in his 80s. But as Hammer fiction it just doesn't take off.

Not that they don't try. As Velda says, at one point, Mike is taking on, literally, the whole damn world, and the David and Goliath metaphor isn't lost on anyone. This is just before they actually do get married, and Mike turns down a hell of a seduction attempt on the eve of his wedding; this is a kinder gentler Mike Hammer too. Well kinder, maybe. And there are plenty of jokes about relics.

But even as the plot gets going, it winds up depending on his trusty .45 being not so trusty after all. The biggest twist is, if you know the Hammer novels, pretty obvious, and though it's fun, it just isn't the same thing. At one point, Pat Chambers, Hammer's long-time buddy, police foil, and longer-after Velda, says 'nothing lasts forever, Mike'. Velda tells him 'a relic is in the past, Mike'. That contradicts Mickey, who said that heroes never die, but they're both right. Heroes live forever, but they live in the worlds in which they are heroes, and they aren't always such heroes in other worlds. Apparently, some of the other unfinished Hammer novels are period pieces, and some take Hammer through the decades. I'll look forward to seeing what Mickey and Max do with Hammer in the world where he belongs. 

DIRTY MONEY by Richard Stark

Quercus, £16.99 ISBN 9781847247117

THE GOLIATH BONE by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Quercus, £17.99 ISBN9781847245953

THE REHEARSAL, PLAYING THE DANE: Pan Pan's Egging Hamlet

Forty years ago, in my last semester at Wesleyan, I took a seminar in Hamlet with Prof. Sherman Hawkins—what I remember best about it is that I also got paid, in my capacity as a university building & grounds employee, to drive the class down to the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven to see the play, with a young Stacy Keach playing the lead. But we also covered a lot of the revenge tragedies that were so popular in Shakespeare's time, putting the play into a genre context to see how it transcended that genre, as it were.

I was reminded of that when I saw Pan Pan's production of The Rehearsal at the New Zealand International Arts Festival in Wellington last week. I have to say I was attracted as much by the poster, which played up the play's subtitle: Playing The Dane with a picture of a great dane wearing a huge Ruff collar. It suggested a certain playfulness with Hamlet, a promise which was only partially delivered. In their efforts to deconstruct Hamlet play, Pan Pan have created something that's more interesting than entertaining, often thought-provoking, but often failing to follow up on its own provocations.

The Rehearsal deconstructs Hamlet in two parts. In the first, three actors vie to play the lead role: they are put through audition paces by the director, a casting director, and an academic who has opened the play by reading an essay. The opening essay was delivered by Prof. Harry Ricketts of Wellington's Victoria University and presumably written by him—though the original Dublin production apparently used Trinity College prof Amanda Piese as the lecturer (and what may be a part of her lecture was included in the programme). It was so much not a part of the play itself that the theatre's 'no mobiles' and festival's promotional announcements came over the PA system after he'd finished, as if to cue that now the play itself would begin. It reminded me of Brecht, who liked the didactic because he didn't trust his audience to get what he was trying to say unless he laid it out for them—I'd argue that's because Brecht's plays don't always do what he wants to think they're doing, but that's a different essay. But if such a comparison, of Pan Pan's Shakespeare to Brecht, were intentional, it's not taken that much farther.

At the end of the act, the audience is invited to come on stage and vote for their preferred Hamlet by standing behind him. This is a little bit of theatrical fun which sadly doesn't continue into the second act—and doesn't really tell us much about whether the audience is sympathetic to the various prejudices exhibited by the director, the perceived talent of each actor, or indeed some deep insight into which approach might best suit the character of the brooding prince. But it does give a hint as to where The Rehearsal is going. Particularly when one of the aspiring Hamlets is asked to perform as if it were a play by Beckett.

The second act takes place on a gorgeous set lit by candles and filled with gleaming dustbins. The desk behind which those who cast the play sat is moved to the rear, and none of those characters play any part in the rest of the play, until the academic delivers a smaller essay to close it out. Their presence is hardly noticeable, unless you're expecting something from them, in which case you'll be disappointed. The set, with huge mirrors on each side, to a great extent overpowers the performance—at times it is far more interesting than what the actors are doing, as when they perform Hamlet's 'to be or not to be' soliloquy as a round. It makes its point: that it is not only Hamlet who faces such existential dilemmas, very well, but once made, the point is lost amidst the dustbins.

But like those giant mirrors, the scene reflects the uncertainties around the character, the way Shakespeare plays with language, and has Hamlet himself play with language; the way he deliberately renders insights into his nature uncertain. At one point there is reference to Hamlet in terms of the 'instability of being', and surely Shakespeare's point is that all being is unstable. Pan Pan's point may be more that all interpretation is unstable; in the second act there are a number of reflections on legendary performances, particularly Irish ones. It may be post modern commentary of our perception of the play through its adaptations, but it's also something that suggests the academic essay, or the pub debate, is somehow more memorable than the performance itself.

That the two failed Hamlets play Laertes and Horatio adds a sense of reflection to their characters as well—highlighting the parallels which Shakespeare has drawn into the play. When the traveling players arrive, they segue from playing The Murder Of Gonzago, the famous play-within-a-play, to doing Hamlet itself, thus making a play within a play within a play. This is acted out by local schoolboys, who were quite good in their roles but left me wondering if this device, like that of the local academic, was intended to show that anyone could perform Hamlet (in which case, why Pan Pan?) or maybe to providee a sort of local relevance with which to sell the play more easily to festival programmers around the world?

The one element of the play that becomes more certain is its treatment of Ophelia. Judith Roddy's sassy interpretation steals the show—the production leaves you in no doubt of the strength of Ophelia's character, and the way that strength is ignored, indeed repressed, by a particularly misogynistic set of attitudes from virtually all the male characters, including her brother, her father, and her lover. Given that Gertrude's presence is diminished greatly, this seems to me the most straightforward of the play's reinterpretations.

The least straightforward element is the play's failure to engage fully with the Beckett references it litters through its various Hamlets. That they are there shouldn't surprise coming from an Irish production, and given the other Irish references in the performance (aside: isn't it fascinating how the greatest 'English' novelist, poet, and playwright of the past century were all Irish?). But it was disappointing they weren't taken further, because once it started my thinking down those lines, seeing Clove and Hamlet together at last, the potential for re-evaluation seemed overpowering.

Because Hamlet is as much a prototype of Theatre of the Absurd as an apotheosis of revenge tragedy. In the Absurd, characters tend to be trapped by their neuroses, which are usually traceable to things buried in childhood, as in Freudian psychology. They are able to cope only by re-enacting rituals, often of a nature that seems ridiculous when we watch. It is not a perfect fit, but given that the undercurrent of the incest theme (as I mentioned, played down by Gertrude's diminshed role), and given Hamlet's almost ritualistic see-sawing, it makes a lot of sense (think too of the extreme Freudian interpretations many famous Hamlet productions have put forward). So when you have highlights from Hamlet performed on a giant Endgame garbage-can set, you'd expect the connection to be exploited more fully. And that, in the end, is the problem with The Rehearsal—it is indeed a rehearsal for ideas about Shakespeare's play, more than a working out of those ideas. It is content to end with another footnote from a professor, and leave us thinking. This is not a bad thing, it would just be so much more satisfying if the literal great dane on set had actually done something, if the play itself had finally come down somewhere, instead of all over the critical place.