I think my comment on Mickey Spillane was taken out of
context. Maybe it was my misreading of the original
question.
I was actually giving the thumbs up to Spillane's early Mike
Hammers while critizing his awful spy novels, and by
inference everything he wrote past the original 6 Mike
Hammers.
It's not really clear if Spillane was intending for Mike
Hammer books to be taken completely seriously and certainly
Spillane doesn't take himself seriously.
It's hard to imagine Spillane is being completely earnest
when in one Mike Hammer (I can't remember which one, the
titles all tend to blend together in my mind) Mike spends the
entire book having the hots for the femme fatale... but
something prevents him from kissing her. And then the big
reveal is-- duh-duh-duh, she's a dude. Come on, Mike is such
a red-blooded macho man, but he can't tell if the "hot dame"
is a man or woman UP CLOSE!?! It's an astonishingly stupid
twist.
I don't know in what context the Mike Hammers were read at
the time, but in the post-modern age, I take the Spillane
books as kind of the literary equivalent of the Arnold
Schwarzenegger/Sylvester Stallone big dumb action movies.
Each of them understands the genre requirements (big guns,
hot dames, bottles of hooch) for Spillane and
(big guns, big muscles and bigger explosions for Arnie and
Sly's movies).
As a detective Hammer is a total failure. He never solves the
case until literally ALL of the suspects are dead. But as an
action hero the books are enthusiastic and entertaining.
Spillane is one of the best at describing brutal/comic book
style action.
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