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By Root 912 0

alter ego hero named Sam Briscoe, “who loves women, fast cars—and solving murders.” Sort of like Spenser: For Hire with his own honorary bar stool at the Lion’s Head (where Jessica Lange had waitressed in the mid-seventies before ending up in King Kong’s paw) and a bust of Brendan Behan to bless the beer foam. The cover illustration of the paperback of Dirty Laundry featured Hamill’s own handsome Hollywood head of hair with some icy dame in the background whose V-plunging cleavage was an open invitation for uptown snob and downtown knob to clash in the satin sack. For all of his ability to nail down a phrase and magnetize a regular-guy rapport with readers, Pete didn’t possess the primitive guile and gusto of the phenomenal Mickey Spillane, the creator of Mike Hammer and such disreputable brute forcers as I, the Jury and Kiss Me, Deadly, whom I once had the opportunity to interview at a police equipment office, for reasons now forgotten. Mick was a swelluva guy, if I may be idiomatic. Spillane didn’t believe in fancy setup fiction. Go in hard, get them hooked, and leave them happy, that was the literary praxis he lived by. “The first page of a novel sells that novel, the last page sells the next one” was his maxim, and it’s a better one than most of the wrapped morsels of wisdom from those Paris Review “Writers at Work” interviews with various laureates who discuss their craft like medieval wood-carvers. Hamill tried to muster the door-busting pulp energy of a Mike Hammer-head (“I skulled him with the gun butt,” growls his he-man avenger), but he was too much of a self-conscious poet of the common man to pull it off, which made his steamier passages worthy contenders for what would later in London earn their own Bad Sex Awards. Here is how my review of Dirty Laundry for the Voice ended:

When Briscoe is naked and handcuffed, a Mexican whore unzips her jumpsuit and straddles the defenseless hero. As she rapes him, she keeps her boots on, the perfect porno touch. The funniest sentence in the book is when Hamill, after describing her up-and-down motions, writes: “She tossed her head, but the bun stayed in place.” After her muffled orgasm, Briscoe grabs a gun and jams it in her gut. “Stop right there, sweetheart,” he says. “Or you’ll never come again.”

After 200-plus pages of pistol-whipping and kiss-my-boots kink, it’s a bit disconcerting to flip to the front of the book and read the dedication:

This book is for my Daughter

DEIRDRE.

Daddy, you shouldn’t have!

Oh, I was such a scamp. Shortly after the review appeared, Pete did a column in the Daily News in which a buddy commiserated with him over my slam. Was it a real buddy or a ventriloquist’s dummy? Newspaper columnists had a much freer hand with colorful dialogue back then, in the heyday of Jimmy Cannon, Jimmy Breslin, and similar heirs to Hemingway, John O’Hara, and salted peanuts. He banged you up pretty good, Pete’s buddy said. Yeah, Pete conceded, like a weary sailor home from the sea, but he’s young, and someday he’ll be on the receiving end, then he’ll know what it’s like. Laugh while you can, buddy boy, but someday I’d be the one hurting, that was the word from the ring corner of the reigning champion. And of course Pete was right! Curse his perspicacity! I brought out a novel of my own years later, a novel Pauline Kael had tried to mother out of existence, and I got mine. Not universally, but the naysayers had a pecking party while I made like Tweety Bird with my little wing in a sling. (Showing his resilience, Pete revived Sam Briscoe in a 2011 crime solver called Tabloid City, and bully for him.) But, looking forward, looking back, what was the alternative? Not writing criticism, not trying fiction? The filthy secret about writing fiction is in the early ski runs, when no one’s watching, it’s fun. A reviewer’s praise only means something to readers if it has a force of personality and conviction behind it that hasn’t been compromised by too much cream filling in everything else you’ve written. Free-swinging writing was more expected in the