Tyler, Tom (Ttyle@herrick.com)
Wed, 15 Sep 1999 11:04:58 -0400
My favorite hardboiled line comes from Spillane's "I, The
Jury." Hammer gut shoots a woman he considered marrying
because it turns out she killed his friend. "How, how could
you?" she asks. "It was easy," Mike replies.
And then there's the Hammer where his love interest strips
naked on the last page and provides Mike with a last-line
surprise: "Juno was a man!" Mike shoots her, of course.
Lest Hammer/Spillane be thought unfriendly to females, don't
forget his beloved Velma. He worshiped her, became a stew bum
after she disappeared, and eight years later pulled himself
together in order to machine gun her adbuctors - commies, as
I recall. So he wasn't harsh with all females. (Of course,
there was the small matter of Velma's being hung nude from a
hook for awhile before Mike got there with his machine gun,
but her reward for such tribulation was great: being reunited
with the palooka of her dreams).
> I guess if we're into doing great hard-boiled lines,
that may or may not
> appear in hard-boiled fiction or film, we should
include Flannery
> O'Connor's bleak line from "A Good Man Is Hard to
Find," wherein the
> killer, after shotgunning a grandmother, says
something like, "She'd a
> been
> a good woman if there'd been someone there to shoot
her every day of her
> life."
>
> Now that's a line that sticks to you. And many of
O'Connors' stories
> belong somewhere in the noir universe, even if
"gothic" was the favorite
> adjective of critics.
>
> Bill Hagen
> <billha@ionet.net>
>
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