Enrique Bird (ebird@gmgroup.com)
Wed, 15 Sep 1999 18:22:16 -0400
Reply,
A couple of "add-ons" to your email:
1. The end line of "I, the Jury" is, of course, a personal
favorite. I also like the narrative between the 2 pieces of
the dialogue where he comments, more or less, "I had only
seconds to answer her if I didn't want to talk to a corpse".
Sorry, I do not have the book at hand and my previous re-read
was in 1991.
2. The other end line you quote is from the second Mike
Hammer book,
"Vengeance is Mine". Somebody please correct me if I do not
have the correct title here. To me, Spillane went downhill
from then on! (Please remember this is only my personal
opinion!).
Enrique Bird
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tyler, Tom [SMTP:Ttyle@herrick.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 1999 11:05
AM
> To: 'rara-avis@icomm.ca'
> Subject: RE: RARA-AVIS: words
>
> 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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