I went through a recent tear on Spillane, reading or
rereading I, THE JURY; THE BIG KILL; VENGEANCE IS MINE; KISS
ME DEADLY; ONE LONELY NIGHT; MY GUN IS QUICK; THE GIRL
HUNTERS; THE SNAKE; and THE TWISTED THING.
Spillane is an odd duck. Truly. I think he's easily one of
the most influential writers of the genre, and in a more
general way I think he's an important figure in post WW 2
American culture. But that doesn't diminish the fact that a
lot of his writing paled for me this time around.
I, THE JURY has a great beginning and a great ending, but the
rest of it is really a lot of vamping to the finish. The
beginning of ONE LONELY NIGHT is, I think, the single best
sustained piece of writing Spillane ever did, but it soon
descends into a lot of cliched anti-Communism which, no
matter how you feel about the subject, feels like a real
comedown in intensity. VENGEANCE IS MINE is an
extraordinarily interesting book, and a cultural critic could
have a field day with it, but it's absurdly dated and
certainly has lost a lot of it's punch.
Even the two books of his I like the best, MY GUN IS QUICK
and THE TWISTED THING can't be said to be successful in terms
of plot. You can guess the villain in GUN by sheer process of
elimination, and THING gives away the game in the very
title.
The first thing I want to say about Spillane is that he is a
writer of moments. For all of his pose as the consummate
self-depracating tough guy professional, he is in fact
something of a Romantic -- by which I mean his work, when
it's good, is good due to it's deliberately heightened
pitches of emotion. Nobody can sustain that kind of level
over a length of time, which is why even the best Spillane
novels have draggy patches. A Spillane novel builds to a peak
-- it's also no accident that a lot of his best moments are
endings.
(There is still a notion in some circles that Spillane was
some kind of grunting clodhopper, but THE TWISTED THING I
think is the final refutation of that. It is a well-written
and well plotted -- I think his best job of plotting,
actually. It covers a world that Spillane mostly did not deal
with and did it credibly. Of all things, Spillane is actually
quite good at descriptions of nature.)
The other thing I want to say about Spillane is this. The hb
novel has as it's engine a process of uncovering. Generally,
the protagonist reveals the truth of the world, which is seen
to be far worse that what surface reality presents. Usually
the truth of the world is unconquerable: the hb protagonist
basically just makes his/her seperate piece with it.
(While conversely the noir protagonist is subsumed by the
"truth". But I saw there was a whole discussion of that here
already, don't want to open that up again.)
What Spillane did was take that uncovering to a kind of
poetic conclusion. Hammer is constantly uncovering Hell,
basically. And I mean that in the religious sense of the term
-- in MY GUN Hammer and his bad guy are literally in flames
screaming. (The books are constant knocking out of the props
of the world: love, women in general, respectable old men,
children, etc. What's revealed is corruption, yes, but
corruption in a sin-and-damnation sense. Twisted thing,
indeed.)
This is an extraordinary thing, I think: the blending of the
hb crime novel with what is really a kind of religious
revulsion.
doug
Doug Bassett
dj_bassett@yahoo.com
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