Many years ago, when I was living in New York City, I read several of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer novels. I believe I read the first five or six; I am positive that I thought the fourth,
One Lonely Night, the best, and stopped reading them because the fifth (and maybe the sixth) was not nearly as good as
One Lonely Night. Just recently
I bought a stack of worn out Mickey Spillane paperbacks with salacious covers from the outdoor clearance racks at the Wonder Book in Frederick, MD, and feel like it is time for me to check in with Spillane again. Let's try a collection of three non-Hammer short stories printed in 1969,
The Tough Guys. This book is pretty easy to find, and a scan of it is also available for free at the internet archive.
"'Kick It or Kill!'" (1961)
Like David Bowie's "'Heroes,'" this story has quote marks in its title that make it look odd when you type it out. The publication page of my copy of The Tough Guys lists the copyright of this story as "Transworld Publishers Ltd., 1963," but it certainly looks like "'Kick It or Kill!'" appeared in a 1961 issue of Cavalier, complete with an illustration of two guys whipping a bound woman. The New Thrilling Detective Web Site suggests this story is also known as "The Girl Hunters," which is confusing, because a Mike Hammer novel bears the name The Girl Hunters as well as the film based on that novel, a film which, by the way, stars Mickey Spillane himself as Mike Hammer.
Our narrator, Kelly Smith, starts off the story (which is like 45 pages here in The Tough Guys) making a common mistake I have made myself--leaving New York City! Listening to his doctor (another mistake!) he has said good-bye to the Big Apple for a two weeks rest on remote Lake Rappaho. The little town there, Pinewood, turns out to be inhabited by mobsters Kelly knows from New York, as well as a hot chick who is bitter because her sister committed suicide last year by jumping out of a Manhattan skyscraper. Outside of town, up on a hill, is a mansion, home to a secretive millionaire who got rich bootlegging; Kelly Smith, by going here and there in this town of 2,500, and--when he isn't beating people up or getting beat up--talking to people, quickly enough learns that the millionaire hires young women from Pinewood to work in the mansion and pays them big bucks to endure whippings. Lots of perverted wealthy people come to the mansion to participate in parties that center on drug use and the whipping of these attractive young ladies, including a Soviet attaché who uses the mansion as a sort of distribution point for the narcotics with which the commies are flooding America as a means of weakening our society.
Kelly and the hot chick fall in love, and work together to bring down the evil in the mansion. For most of the story, Spillane is cagey about Kelly's line of work--is he a criminal, or a P.I., or some kind of cop?--and near the end we learn his true affiliation. The female lead is admirable--tough and brave--but she also acts emotionally and impulsively, jumping to conclusions and taking stupid risks without thinking them through, and one reason she falls for Kelly is that he is man enough to tell her what to do and keep her under control. While Kelly is recovering from an injury, his reckless new girlfriend tries to infiltrate the mansion all by herself in order to kill the millionaire, and Kelly has to follow her in there to save her. In the final moments of the story, which climaxes with the mansion going up in flames and scores of perverts, crooks and commies getting killed, we learn that the secretive millionaire is a United States senator.
This is an entertaining trifle, competently written, paced and constructed, that perhaps will interest readers in our current era as a reflection of popular attitudes in the early 1960s about drugs, communism, corruption in Washington, and gender roles. I guess the title refers to the importance of drug addiction to the story (as a means of controlling them, the millionaire hooks the women he hires on drugs--what other source of drugs is there up here in the wilderness?--and the female lead initially suspects Kelly is a drug addict because he has brought morphine capsules to Pinewood to treat the pain from his healing gunshot wound) but lots of people get kicked in the story, some kicked to death, so maybe the title has a sort of double meaning.
"The Seven Year Kill" (1964)
The publication page of my copy of
The Tough Guys lists the copyright of "The Seven Year Kill" as "Mickey Spillane 1964."
Galactic Central clued me in to the fact that the story has been included in various printings of a British collection of Spillane stories,
The Flier, the first of which came out in '64, and also appeared in
Intrigue Mystery Magazine in 1966. (It looks like the collection
The Flier has never been printed in America, and that the story known as "The Flier" in England was printed in the United States as "Hot Cat.")
Our narrator this time around is Phil Rocca, washed up journalist. A decade ago he wrote a terrific story, but it would have ruffled the feathers of wealthy gangster Rhino Massley and Phil's editor and publisher refused to run it. Rhino then framed Phil and out hero spent seven long years in prison. Now Phil spends his time drunk and hungover in a crappy Manhattan apartment, day dreaming about murdering Rhino, whom he believes is already dead.
As our story begins a hot chick takes refuge in Phil's apartment--she is being chased by killers! After the killers beat up Phil and leave, the girl comes out of Phil's closet and tells Phil her story. In one of those coincidences we see in fiction all the time, she is Terry Massley, the daughter of Rhino with his estranged wife; Terry grew up with Mom in California and never met her father, in fact knows nothing about him, not even that everybody calls him "Rhino." Terry's mother just died, and when Rhino heard the news he sent Terry a letter, asking her to come to New York so he could lay eyes on her for the first time. Wait, Rhino is alive!? When Terry got to Gotham people started trying to kill her and she hasn't been able to make her rendezvous with Dad! Phil can barely believe his good luck--Terry can lead him to Rhino so he can achieve his long-dreamed-of revenge! Of course, Phil doesn't tell Terry that her father is a mobster and Phil's only goal in life is to choke the life out of this louse; he just tells her he'll help her find her Dad.
Phil travels around town, and when he's not beating people up or getting beat up by people, he is using his contacts from his reporter days to figure out if Rhino really is still alive. There is plenty of evidence Rhino had polio and died in an iron lung in Phoenix, but Phil figures that was all faked. Of course, maybe some guy is impersonating Rhino in order to capture or kill Terry--the criminal underworld thinks Terry might have some papers of Rhino's that could incriminate important hoods. Phil and Terry fall in love, and Phil explains the horrible truth about her father to her. In the second half of the 70-page story Phil heads to Phoenix to look for more clues while Terry stays in NYC and investigates a lead, hunting down Rhino's private nurse, who it seems was also his lover. Phoenix turns out to be more like New York than you might expect, at least from Phil's POV--he talks to people in the process of collecting clues, pushes a thug around, and gets beat up--you know, the usual, just like at home. He forces that thug to dig up Rhino's grave, and finds it empty! Rhino really is alive!
Back in New York Phil works with the cops and an old newspaper pal as they tangle with mobsters, and then in the climactic scene Phil rescues Terry from Rhino, who is beating her--Rhino hates women and wishes he had had a son.
"The Seven Year Kill" is fine, but it has fewer interesting themes than "Kick It or Kill!", which, however shallowly, addressed or at least mentioned the Cold War, the problem drug abuse presents to individuals and to societies, and gender roles in sexual relationships. There are two potentially interesting character things in "The Seven Year Kill" which Spillane could have done more to develop. First, Phil's alcoholism. Phil's addiction to the sauce could have been a hurdle he had to overcome to achieve his vengeance on Rhino and to build a relationship with Terry, but instead Spillane perfunctorily just has Phil throw off his addiction with ease--one day he is a wretched drunk and in the space of like two days he has evolved into a healthy social drinker who can drink one glass of the stuff and effortlessly dismiss any desire for a second drink. Maybe we are supposed to see in this astounding recovery a testament to the power of the love of a good woman, presenting a contrast to the second potentially compelling character element of "The Seven Year Kill," Rhino's misogyny.
Throughout the story we get repeated indications that Rhino hates women and is always beating them up, leading up to the climax in which he is beating his own daughter, whom he wishes was a boy. This misogyny doesn't jive very well with the other big component of Rhino's personality, his obsession with that nurse--much of what Rhino does in the story, and what sets the whole plot in motion, is Rhino's pursuit of the vast amounts of money he needs to keep the faithless lucre-loving nurse by his side. Spillane tries to square this circle by having Phil say that the nurse is "the exception that proves the rule" and with the fact that the nurse has movie star good looks--she is an actress who has a nursing degree and only works as a nurse between acting gigs on Broadway and the idiot box. All the clues indicating Rhino was a woman-hater had me kind of expecting Rhino to be gay or a woman in disguise or something like that, and I was a little disappointed that Spillane didn't do anything more interesting with Rhino's sexuality, but I guess Spillane figured he'd done those sorts of things enough already in the Mike Hammer novels and didn't want to do them again.
Speaking of repetition, the scenes of violence in "The Seven Year Kill" are good but multiple times Phil is one second away from getting shot dead and then the police arrive just in time to save him or Terry distracts the gun man just in time or something. I know this is a staple of fiction, but more than once in a 70-page story is a little much.
"The Bastard Bannerman" (1964)
This one made its debut in the magazine
Saga. Like
Cavalier,
Saga has a guarantee--readers who were dissatisfied with the magazine were eligible for a refund. How would you get your refund? Through the mail from the publisher? Would they send you a 25¢ or 50¢ check? (If you look close, you can see that
Cavalier offers
double their money back to readers unhappy with this month's stories about beating people up and getting beat up.) Or would you just get cash from the news agent? Would you have to give the magazine back to the small businessman who sold it to you so he could sell it to the next guy curious about methods of goading candy dancers or the bedroom habits of French and Arab girls? Did anybody actually go to the trouble of getting his money back?
Cat Cay Bannerman is the bastard of the title, the illegitimate son of a rich guy who lived in a big mansion. Cat's mother died giving birth to him, and Cat lived in the mansion as a child. Cat's father then died, and after that Cat suffered the tyranny of his uncle Miles and his cousins Rudy and Ted. At age twelve Cat ran away. Today, twenty or so years later, out of curiosity while passing through town, Cat--now a big tough guy who is packing heat--returns to the mansion. Miles is now a pathetic old man! Rudy and Ted are now fat! And Cat's other cousin, Anita, who had a crush on him when they were twelve-year-olds, is now a total fox! She has "deep purple eyes" and "her breasts accentuated the womanliness of her, dipping into a pert waist and swelling into thighs and calves that were the ultimate in sensuous beauty." The ultimate! And there are more surprises. One is that there are gangsters from Chicago whom Cat recognizes hanging around the mansion. Cat immediately beats them up in front of the Bannerman clan. But Cat doesn't beat up the other new addition to the Bannerman household--real estate guy Vance Colby, Anita's fiancé! Beating up Vance Colby will have to wait a few dozen pages!
Cat flits hither and thither in town, talking to people and collecting clues in between episodes of getting beaten up and beating up other people (Vance Colby is among those who get beaten up.) One of the themes of the story is that rich people get special treatment, and, because his last name is Bannerman, doors open up for Cat that help him unravel the mystery of what is going on in the Bannerman mansion, why those organized crime figures are there. You see, Rudy and Ted have wasted a lot of the family money on gambling, and got mixed up with mobsters in hopes of recouping the family fortunes by becoming partners with the mob in an illegal enterprise. But a disaster occurred that has left the Bannermans at the mercy of the gangsters: there was a murder at a night club when Rudy was there, and because Rudy was blind drunk at the time he suspects the mobsters are telling the truth when they say they saw Rudy do the killing and claim they retrieved the murder weapon with his prints on it. The gangsters want a million bucks or they will pin the murder on Rudy.
Other plot threads involve Cat and Anita's rekindled love and a femme fatale, the wife of the murder victim; this hot number dances burlesque at the night club and is a nympho who sleeps around and is very eager to seduce big strong Cat.
In some ways "The Bastard Bannerman" is better than "Kick It or Kill!" and "The Seven year Kill." The characters and their relationships are more interesting here, and because of the love triangles (Cat-Anita-Vance Colby and Anita-Cat-nympho dancer) and a depressing unrequited lust element (Rudy is crazy for the nympho dancer but when he wangled his way into bed with her he coouldn't get it up and was humiliated) the sex side of this story is better than that of the other two.
However, the way the plot of "The Bastard Bannerman" is resolved is far less satisfying. In "Kick It or Kill!" and "The Seven Year Kill" we get an ending in which there is a terrible bloody fight as the narrator rescues the female lead from torture and death. "The Bastard Bannerman" uses two of literary history's lamer devices. First, we have Cat suddenly learning he is the heir to two million bucks put onto a trust for him by his father. Second, there is a scene in which all the characters sit in a room and Cat describes how he figured out who really murdered the guy at the night club--it was Vance Colby. Boring! We also learn after 60 or so pages that our narrator is a cop, something (as in "Kick It or Kill!") which Spillane has kept from us, allowing us to speculate that Cat is some kind of criminal himself or maybe a P.I.
While the first two stories in The Tough Guys try to provide the reader catharsis by having the hero rescue his lady love and destroy his enemies in battle, I guess in "The Bastard Bannerman" we are supposed to achieve satisfaction by witnessing Cat, who was put upon by the idle rich in his youth, prove he is better than they are--he bangs the nympho with whom Rudy was unable to perform, outwits the criminals who had Rudy and the other Bannermans over a barrel, and ends the story a millionaire while the previously rich Bannermans are penniless.
**********
The three stories in
The Tough Guys are acceptable entertainments--they move at a fast pace and the sex and mayhem are diverting, and while the constant talking to people to collect clues isn't exactly thrilling, the colorful characters who wittingly or unwittingly, willingly or under duress, provide the narrator the clues he needs to get to the next scene, are sort of fun. Spillane, at least in these stories, unfortunately fails to portray his main characters in enough depth to offer us any real human drama or real human emotion; I didn't really care who got killed or whether the narrator succeeded in his goals, the perils and the gore generated no real tension or fear, just a sort of amusement.
Reading these crime capers set in the middle of the 20th-century, by the contrast they provide, served for me as a powerful reminder of what I enjoy about science fiction and fantasy stories. An SF story, even an adventure one by, say, Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, Robert Howard, Henry Kuttner or C. L. Moore, the appeal of which is as much based on sex and/or violence as is that of one of these Spillane stories, almost always offers at least a thin additional layer of interest--the surprise, intellectual challenge and/or spur to stretch the imagination triggered by its speculations about future technologies or alternate social arrangements or alien biologies, or its descriptions of milieus in which the supernatural is real. A cop busting into the mansion of a corrupt senator to rescue a woman who is being whipped pushes the same buttons as does a barbarian busting into a wizard's tower to rescue a woman from being sacrificed to an evil god or a spaceman busting into a flying saucer to rescue a woman from being experimented upon by space aliens, but wizards and aliens and spells and spacecraft are inherently more stimulating than drug-dealing senators, raise more interesting questions and paint more exciting pictures in the mind.
I'm thinking we'll read more hard-boiled detective fiction soon, by Spillane and other authors, but first a visit with the sage of Teaneck!
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