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The last of the great tough-guy writers is gone. Mickey Spillane possessed none of the elegance of Chandler or Hammett, none of the plotting skills of James M. Cain, none of the demented genius that drove the Big Three Noir Gods (Woolrich, Thompson, and Goodis), but he sure wrote a damned good yarn. And his prose was addictive, no two ways about it. You could scoff at a sentence like "The sky burped and burped, and then threw up, and a new day began." (The Erection Set, which had an awesome early '70s babe-photo cover.) But there was no mistaking this kind of machine-gun prose:

The roar of the .45 shook the room., Charlotte staggered back a step. Her eyes were a symphony of incredulity, an unbelieving witness to the truth. Slowly, she looked down at the ugly swelling in her naked belly where the bullet went in. A thin trickle of blood welled out.... Her eyes had pain in them now, the pain preceding death. Pain and unbelief.
"How could you?" she gasped.
I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
"It was easy," I said.

That was the end of his 1947 novel I, The Jury, the first of his Mike Hammer novels. Perhaps the Mick learned his trade all too well while toiling at Timely Comics (the company that eventually wound up being Marvel) -- whatever it was, he had the gift of machine-gun rat-a-tat-tatting out long crazy, discursive sentences that drew you in, no matter how much you resisted. Mike Hammer's friends and lovers all wound up dead (the reason Mike plugs the gal in the above passage is because she did in an old buddy of his); years before Ian Fleming kept disposing of James Bond's girlfriends, Spillane's readers always knew anyone who showed any affection for Mike -- outside of a stray newspaper dealer, cabbie, Pat Chambers the stock police detective, and the faithful secretary to end all faithful secretaries, Velda -- had to wind up dying a grisly death for which Mike could seek revenge. A man who recognized literary stylists on impact, the great god Terry Southern, said Mickey wrote "in a manner which made Malapart, Celine, and other high priests of the roman noir look like a bunch of pansies."

I had thought of offering a clip from Mick's work as Mike Hammer in the very so-so vanity project The Girl Hunters (1962), where the world found out his voice was a bit high for a hard-berled detective, but decided the above few minutes of clips from a latter-day Dick Cavett show (circa 1987) revealed more about him. Cavett was hosting a mystery-writers panel, and so Mick appears with Robert Parker (mustached gent), Evan Hunter (aka Ed McBain, checked jacket), and (no kidding) a nun who was writing decently selling mysteries at the time. Spillane is in top form, telling the tale of the immortal last line from Vengeance is Mine (he never i.d.s the book), talking about what Mike Hammer looked like, proudly reading his worst reviews, and giving credit where credit was due: plugging one of his favorite writers, the much-neglected Frederick Brown.

The "gritty" novelists of today can't hold a candle to this very canny wordsmith who wielded a manual typewriter as ruthlessly as his character did a .45. Farewell, Mick.

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