By Stuart Mitchner

From a gang land point of view, it makes more sense to put a body in the Pine Barrens than in the Hudson River. — John McPhee

I’m beginning a column about Mickey Spillane (1918-2006) with a quote from John McPhee to note the fact that yesterday, March 8, the author of The Pine Barrens celebrated his 85th birthday. While it may be difficult to imagine two writers with less in common, I have no doubt that McPhee could sit down tomorrow, do a month of research, and produce an essay or even a book that would stand as the go-to work about pulp fiction, the mass market paperback revolution, the McCarthy Era, and the author of Kiss Me, Deadly, who once admitted he’s not sure which side of midnight 1918 he was born on (he went with March 9).

Reading McPhee, who grew up in Princeton, you are in the company of a renowned master of non-fiction prose. Reading Spillane, who grew up in Elizabeth and made his fortune writing about the world of buried bodies, you are partaking of an experience that has been compared to eating take-out fried chicken. He himself once used a beloved American snack to tease “those big-shot writers” who “could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.” Besides creating Mike Hammer, the last word in brutal, sex-crazed private eyes, Spillane sold the equivalent of 200 million packs of “salted peanuts” worldwide, and as of 1980, seven of the top 10 all-time fiction best-sellers in America were written by him. 

Sex and Violence

For me, those first seven Signet paperbacks, from I the Jury (1947) to Kiss Me, Deadly (1952), were less like fast food than a combination of bubble-gum and benzedrine consumed on the sly or in junior high study hall, “the sweets of sin” hidden behind the covers of a textbook. While Mike’s sexy Girl Friday Velda — with her “carniverous eyes you could expect to see in the jungle watching from behind a clump of bushes,” her “million-dollar legs,” and “the kind of curves that made you want to turn around and have another look” — stoked my adolescent lust, it was the violence that really jarred and jolted me, the way Spillane makes you feel the words: “I snapped the side of the rod across his jaw and laid the flesh open to the bone. I pounded his teeth back into his mouth with the end of the barrel … and I took my own damn time about kicking him in the face. He smashed into the door and lay there bubbling. So I kicked him again and he stopped bubbling.” How pulpy can you get? You can almost feel the slime of it oozing off the cheap paper onto your fingertips.

It’s no coincidence that Spillane’s popularity peaked during the era of the Red Scare. In one book Hammer blows away 100 Commies with a machine gun. In another, “I killed more people tonight than I have fingers on my hands. I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it …. They were Commies.”

On the Screen

Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), the film version of the last published of Spillane’s all-time best-selling “magnificent seven” is listed in every poll as one of the top ten films noir ever made. At the time of its release it was condemned by the Legion of Decency and the subject of Senate hearings on the influence of “horror and crime and sex pictures” on juvenile deliquency. Evidence that Kiss Me Deadly was the year’s Number One Menace to American Youth included a poster for the film: Mickey Spillane’s Latest H-Bomb! White-Hot Thrills! Blood-Red Kisses!

In French director/film critic Claude Chabrol’s celebration of Kiss Me Deadly, he refers to the source material as “the most deplorable, the most nauseous product of a genre in a state of putrefaction: a Mickey Spillane story,” praising Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides for having “taken this threadbare and lackluster fabric and splendidly rewoven it into rich patterns of the most enigmatic arabesques.” Chabrol must have been reading Spillane in translation. Here are some samples picked at random from the “lackluster fabric” of the original: “The gun in the guy’s hand spit out a tongue of flame that lanced into the night and the bullet’s banshee scream matched the one that was still going on behind me.” Or how about: “It was one of those nights when the sky came down and wrapped itself around the world. The rain clawed at the windows of the bar like an angry cat and tried to sneak in every time some drunk lurched in the door.”

Spillane’s problems with the film version of Kiss Me Deadly began with the title. Like what happened to the comma? Spillane took that comma seriously. When the printers of the first paperback edition mistakenly left it out, he insisted on having all 50,000 copies pulped (thereby pulping the pulp). Several far more significant changes put the film at the heart of post-atomic-bomb paranoia and gave it an appealingly literary spin. Screenwriter Bezzerides said, “I wrote it fast because I had contempt for it. It was automatic writing. Things were in the air at the time, and I put them in.” Besides changing the setting from New York to L.A. and transforming a suitcase full of drugs into a Pandora’s box containing a portable nuclear holocaust, Bezzerides brought in the poetry of Christina Rossetti, put Nat King Cole singing “I’d Rather Have the Blues” on Mike Hammer’s car radio, and later embellished the environment with snatches of Strauss and Chopin, a Brahms string quartet, and Schubert’s Unfinished. It was as if Bezzerides were using high art to mock and subvert the lowlife anti-communist hero so admired by Ayn Rand that she ranked Spillane above Hemingway (at least until she read his Tiger Mann series). “I tell you Spillane didn’t like what I did with his book,” said Bezzerides. “I ran into him at a restaurant and, boy, he didn’t like me.”

Naked Girl in Raincoat

Both book and film open with a bang. It’s night and in the film Mike Hammer (played to a sleazy T by Ralph Meeker) is driving along the Coast Highway when a naked girl in a raincoat (Cloris Leachman) waves him down. In the book she has no name (“All I saw was a dame standing there in the glare of the headlights waving her arms like a huge puppet”); in the film, she’s Christina, named after the pre-Raphaelite poet, and knowing she’s doomed, she leaves behind a written message, “Remember me,” which Mike later discovers is the title of a Rossetti poem containing the line that leads to the key that opens the locker door to the box from hell: “For if the darkness and corruption leave/A vestige of the thoughts that once I had/Better by far you should forget …” The message is underscored when Mike’s ultra-cool cop friend (Wesley Addy, the definitive Pat) gives him a quiet, measured hint about the contents of the box: “Now listen, Mike. Listen carefully. I’m going to pronounce a few words. They’re harmless words. Just a bunch of letters scrambled together. But their meaning is very important. Try to understand what they mean. Manhattan Project … Los Alamos … Trinity.”

The whole jagged, slashing course of violence — the petty sadism, beatings, knifings, shootings, the crushing (pulping?) of a mechanic, even the torturing to death of the girl in the raincoat — appears as minor mayhem in the blowback of the roaring apocalypse that pours forth from the box when the film’s screaming Pandora opens it.

Violating the Actress

After almost 20 years of watching cable television, from The Sopranos to Deadwood to Breaking Bad to Penny Dreadful, I feel like I’ve taken a crash course on the aesthetics of violence. In shows like the ones we’ve become addicted to, it’s a given that people are going to do terrible things to one another; that’s the cathartic dynamic that gives an edge of life-or-death significance to the characters and events and dialogue. People have complained about the rape scenes in Game of Thrones, not to mention the Red Wedding sequence when in fact one of the most truly shocking acts of violence — the rape of a housemaid by a guest’s valet in the servant’s quarters — took place in that bastion of strained civility, Downton Abbey, which came to the happiest of all possible endings Sunday. What made the rape of Anna so disturbing was not just that it happened on the far side of Pulp in the realm of Masterpiece Theatre but the sense that both the actress (Joanne Froggat) and the character had been violated by an author taking merciless advantage of his audience the better to keep it watching.

With Mickey Spillane, you get what you pay for. If you don’t like the salt, don’t eat the peanuts. At least, to paraphrase John McPhee, you have “a sense of where you are.”

Reality TV

On the subject of violation and exploitation, I can’t help thinking of the self-imposed torture suffered by Governor Christie at the Mar-a-Lago ballroom with the Donald the other night. I kept trying out Shakespearean scenarios. Christie as Brutus, Christie as Coriolanus, Christie as Malvolio. I wonder if the governor would have been able to hold that same painfully impassive pose during subsequent Trump rallies in Michigan and Louisiana when his man was raging at protestors, punching the air, “get em outa here, get em outa here,” inciting the Mike Hammers in the crowd to take ‘em out in every sense of the word, push ‘em and punch ‘em, do your worst. There was a surge of true violence in those crowds, ugly to see, as the real thing always is.

It’s worth noting that Jane Spillane, Mickey’s third wife, not only donated $286 to the Donald in August, she says he reminds her of Mickey: “He talks the way he feels. It comes out. Yeah, it might offend somebody and upset somebody. That’s life.”