Douglas Greene (dgreene@odu.edu)
Fri, 17 Sep 1999 20:43:02 -0400
Sure, Spillane was (is) racist, sexist, homophobic, and
often fascist--but despite all that, his books have a
narrative drive that few othr writers come close to. His
writing style, sentence by sentence, is fascinating. For a
long time, I said that Spillane was "the writer as working
stiff"--that's certainly his public persona; y'know, his
statement that no one drinks cognac or wears a mustache in
his books, because he can't spell those words. But I think
it's more than that. Many of his descriptions of Hammer's
mean streets have a sort of muscular poetry . . .
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