The Mike Hammer Collection - Mickey Spillane [2]
Sixty years later, to describe the impact of those six novels—and a seventh non-Hammer Spillane, The Long Wait—is to tempt credulity. The millions of copies the blue-collar writer sold unveiled an audience for franker, more violent popular fiction, and the mystery field in particular was riddled with his imitators. This went beyond just other writers copying Spillane—the first major publisher of paperback original fiction, Gold Medal Books, was created in 1950 to serve the market Spillane had uncovered. He was even their paid consultant, and provided a memorable blurb for one of their mainstays, John D. MacDonald (“I wish I had written this book!”). Gold Medal’s major Hammer imitation was the Shell Scott series by Richard S. Prather, zany comedies that nonetheless worked in the extreme violence and sex Spillane had first trafficked.
The sixth Hammer novel, Kiss Me, Deadly (1952), became the first private eye novel to crack the New York Times bestseller list (the likes of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner had never come close), and the paperback edition was as wildly successful as its predecessors. Hollywood, via British producer/director Victor Saville, came calling, and the new Spillane book and three others were headed for the silver screen.
In the midst of success and celebrity that the young writer could never have imagined came a similarly shocking barrage of attacks. Though often characterized as a right-wing writer, Spillane was—like Dashiell Hammett (but not serving jail time!)—a victim of the McCarthy era. The former comic book writer found himself (alone among popular fiction practitioners) caught up in a four-color witch hunt that started with well-meaning but misguided psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham and ended with a farcical Senate hearing. Wertham’s anticomics book Seduction of the Innocent (1954) detailed example after example of rampant violence, sexually suggestive content, and latent homosexuality in the superhero, crime, and horror “funnies” of the fifties. He singled out only one popular fiction author: Mickey Spillane.
Wertham was not alone in going after Spillane hammer and tongs—diatribes in countless publications from The Atlantic to Parents magazine attacked Spillane as a purveyor of filth, the nadir of popular culture, and the illegitimate father of juvenile delinquency. In public, and even in private, Spillane laughed all this off. But he was secretly troubled and frustrated that what he had conceived as sheer entertainment would be taken so seriously, and that he had become a kind of household-name villain, a synonym for sex and sadism.
How much effect this had on Spillane’s decision to stop writing Mike Hammer novels after his sixth one is unknown. I spoke to him about this many times, and got many answers (some elliptical, others disingenuous), and have come to feel there’s no one solution to the mystery.
Similarly, it’s hard to know whether Spillane’s conversion to the conservative religious sect the Jehovah’s Witnesses was in part a response to this over-the-top criticism. Did Spillane feel guilty, and were the Witnesses his redemption? He never said. He rarely spoke about his religious beliefs in public, and in private said only that he’d responded to what he’d been told by a couple of Watchtower-dispensing missionaries who came to his door in typical Witness fashion.
What can’t be denied is the problem created by his conservative faith for the hard-hitting, sexually provocative fiction for which he’d become rich and famous. Throughout his career, Spillane would alternate prolific periods with fallow ones, going in and out of the church, taking criticism from his fellow Witnesses as late as The Killing Man (1989), when he was nearly sent packing from his South Carolina Kingdom Hall over the use of profanity.
The criticism he received, whether