Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (109 page)

International celebrity came when the
New Yorker
devoted the whole of an issue
to
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
in 1961. The magazine went further by giving her an office, with the understanding that whatever she chose to write they would print. She was set up in an apartment in Manhattan. Jean Brodie was, she liked to say in later years, her ‘milch cow’. Slender means no more. At one reckless moment she bought a racehorse. Spark found she liked the metropolitan lifestyle –
haute couture
, exclusive restaurants, expensive jewellery, jazz dives. She was also possessed of a beauty which she took great care of. Her New York stint established a pattern by which she would get the best of whatever ‘exiledom’ she found herself in, until the place palled. Irrational quarrels were usually the indication that she was ready for a move. She became increasingly quarrelsome with age. She left Macmillan who had published her for thirty years because of a misprint on a blurb which was not, as she saw it, taken seriously enough. As with places, so with lovers – she wore them out. ‘Your sole conception of love is selfish,’ complained one. But selfishness was essential to her art.

In what was intended to be her
magnum opus, The Mandelbaum Gate
(1965), she came to grips with her gentile Jewishness. But ‘magnum’ was not her
métier
. Jewish critics in New York made that clear to her. In 1966 she moved to Rome. In Italy she resided in a series of grand residences, complete with a full complement of staff, a PA and a butler. Novels were now pulsing from her pen at a high rate and all sold well. She took on large topics – Watergate in
The Abbess of Crewe
(1974), for example – and experimented with Alain Robbe-Grillet’s skeletal
roman nouveau (The Driver’s Seat
). Her styles were as restless as her physical movements. Her central preoccupation remained theological, particularly the question of the malevolence of God. She had worn it down to the bone in
The Only Problem
(1984). The hero is writing a monograph about the
Book of Job
and ‘he could not face that a benevolent Creator, one whose charming and delicious light descended and spread over the world, and being powerful everywhere, could condone the unspeakable sufferings of the world … “It is the only problem,” Harvey had always said.’ Sometimes it is impossible to suppress the suspicion that Spark became a Catholic for the raw material it supplied her as a novelist rather than for the welfare of her soul.

Her last years were poisoned by a feud with her son Robin, now an artist. An orthodox Jew, he questioned her ‘Gentile Jewish’ hybridity. Furiously, she cut him out of her will, leaving everything to her aged personal assistant, Penelope Jardine. He would have to get by with what she hurtfully called his ‘lousy paintings’. She was made a Dame in 1993. Her last years were plagued by osteoporosis which she endured stoically. She died in Florence and is buried there.

Hemingway hated me. I sold 200 million books, and he didn’t.

He was christened ‘Frank Morrison Spillane’, but ‘women’, he claimed in later life, ‘liked the name Mickey’. Young Spillane was brought up in a ‘very tough’ neighbourhood in New Jersey. His father was a bartender and a Catholic; his mother, a Protestant. He claimed to have read all of Melville and Dumas before he was eleven. After high school, he went to Kansas State College, starred briefly on the football field, and dropped out. In the
de rigueur
way of aspirant writers at the time, he kicked around in the Depression of the 1930s, working for a while as a Long Island lifeguard – ‘women’, he discovered, liked that too. In 1935 he began submitting work to ‘slick’ magazines, ‘working my way down’, as he later recalled, ‘to the comic books: Captain Marvel, Captain America, Superman, Batman – you name it, I did them all … a great training ground for writers.’ Fast-order work would be Spillane’s speciality.
I, the Jury
(1947) was dashed off in nine days. When the car containing his manuscript of
The Body Lovers
(1967) was stolen two decades later, he claimed to be concerned only about the loss of his wheels: ‘the missing manuscript just means another three days’ work’.

Spillane served in the US Air Force during the Second World War and, by his own account, flew fighter missions. In interviews he claimed two bullet wounds and a civilian knife scar sustained while working undercover with the FBI to break up a narcotics ring – but one may be suspicious. On demobilisation he worked in Barnum & Bailey’s circus as a trampoline artist (the setting is used in his 1962 novel,
The Girl Hunters
). More profitably, he bounced back into writing.

Spillane himself acknowledged the influence of only one crime writer on his work, Carroll John Daly, creator of the private eye, Race Williams. He flaunted his lack of authorial polish, claiming, mischievously, never to introduce characters with moustaches or who drank cognac because he could not spell those words.
I, the Jury
introduced the series hero Mike Hammer, whose tough-talking, woman-beating, whisky-swilling machismo answered the needs of the post-war ‘male action’ market and its nervous uncertainties about masculinity now that there weren’t Japs or Krauts to kill. Estimates suggest global sales of around 200 million. By 1980, seven of the top fifteen all-time bestselling fiction titles in America were Hammer novels. ‘People like them,’ Spillane blandly explained. The climax of a Mike Hammer narrative invariably features sadistic execution. The most hilarious is in
Vengeance is Mine
(1950), which ends with the line (just before she/he gets it in the gut) ‘Juno was a Man!’

The link was often made between Spillane and Joe McCarthy, and over the years Hammer’s victims were as likely to be ‘reds’ as ‘hoods’. Whatever, they were rubbed out. In
One Lonely Night
(1951), the hero mows down forty communists with a machine-gun. Originally there were eighty, but the publishers ‘thought that was too gory’. Spillane regarded himself as a super-patriot, and was so regarded by others. John Wayne gave him a Jaguar XK140 in honour of his anti-communism and Ayn Rand (author of
Atlas Shrugged
) commended his prose style to her neo-con disciples. Spillane’s patriotism was, however, always tinged with a pessimistic, quasi-religious sense of doom. In the early 1960s he predicted a race war in America, although he seems not to have been a racist himself. He was old enough to have experienced anti-Irish prejudice against ‘Micks’.

The Hammer novels are written as spoken monologue and are stylistically direct. Spillane had great faith in the slam-bang opening, believing that ‘the first page sells the book’. He claimed never to read galleys or rewrite. He had, however, an odd compulsiveness about punctuation, and once insisted that 50,000 copies of
Kiss Me, Deadly
(1952) be pulped after the comma was left out of the title. The Hammer novels enjoyed new leases of life and income for the author in film, radio, comic-strip and television adaptation.
I, the Jury
was filmed twice (1953, 1982), as were other Hammer books. The only film that has any distinction is Robert Aldrich’s exaggeratedly
noir, Kiss Me Deadly
(1955). Spillane disliked it – not least because of the missing comma. Possessed of rugged good looks, he played Hammer himself in the film of
The Girl Hunters
(1963), turning in a commendable performance.

As an author of pulp, Spillane’s guiding principle was that ‘violence will outsell sex every time’, but combined they will outsell everything. As part of the promotion for his novels he adopted a Hammeresque persona, which was transparently an act. He once told a British interviewer, ‘I always say never hit a woman when you can kick her.’ When asked ‘Is that the treatment you give Mrs Spillane?,’ he primly replied, ‘We’re talking about fiction.’ There were two long gaps in Spillane’s career. The first followed his conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1952, which led to a ten-year hiatus in novel-writing. He returned to form in 1961 with the best of the Hammer novels,
The Deep
. There was another gap, between 1973 and 1989, during which he again wrote no full-length fiction, though he did try his hand (as a dare with his publisher) at two, well-received, children’s books. During this period he was famous to the American television-watching public for his appearance in Miller Lite beer commercials, though he was reported not to be a heavy drinker. Over his last decades, to his disgust, Spillane received increasing critical respect for his contributions to the idiom of crime fiction, and for having played a pioneer’s role in the postwar paperback revolution.

My conscience is clear; I never shot anybody that didn’t need to die.
Daly’s PI, Race Williams

Daly is plausibly credited with inventing – or, at least, pioneering – the hard-boiled, PI (Private Investigator/Private Eye) detective genre, rendered classic in the
Black Mask
magazine, with his 1922 story ‘The False Burton Combs’. He can also be said, not least by the man himself, to have invented Mickey Spillane. Daly was born in Yonkers, New York, and educated, with a stage career in mind, at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He started at the bottom of his chosen profession as an usher and rose to be manager of a theatre in Atlantic City. He was not, it would appear, successful in this line of work – although it was in these years, presumably, that he picked up his facility with vernacular American idiom.

In 1913, he married Margaret G. Blakely. Little else is known of his personal life, other than anecdotal fragments, but he was apparently agoraphobic and dentist phobic. Fear of open places (and, perhaps, predatory orthodontists) led him to isolate himself as an eccentric recluse in White Plains, on the outskirts of New York. Once, it is recorded, he did venture into the metropolitan wilds of Manhattan, only to forget where his house was on his return. A neighbour had to point it out to him. ‘Once,’ another anecdote goes, ‘for the sake of research, Daly decided that maybe he should get to know what it was like to handle a gun. Daly, leaving his temperature-controlled home, went and bought a gun only to be arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. As one friend observed, “That was the end of Carroll John Daly’s research.”’ He had a wealthy uncle who put funds his way with which he could sit at home and spin out his tough-guy fantasies. He finally made it into print in
Black Mask
, aged thirty-three, preceding Dashiell Hammett’s first ‘Continental Op’ story in the magazine’s pages by a few months. Daly’s most significant literary creation was his thuggish Private Eye, Race Williams, whose ‘ethic’, as Daly called it, is summed up in boasts such as the following, in
The Snarl of the Beast
(1927):

It’s the point of view in life that counts. For an ordinary man to get a bullet through his hat as he walked home at night would be something to talk about for years. Now, with me; just the price of a new hat – nothing more. The only surprise would be for the lad who fired the gun. He and his relatives would come in for a slow ride, with a shovel-ful of dirt at the end of it.

A beastly snarl indeed.

Daly’s star sank at
Black Mask
with the appointment of the magazine’s influential editor, Joe ‘Cap’ Shaw, who despised the artless crudity of Daly’s literary style. It showed up badly against the felicities of Hammett, or Chandler. Daly’s connection with
Black Mask
, having served its purpose by pioneering a genre in which he no longer excelled, ended in 1934. Thereafter he simply fed the country’s pulp fiction and comic-book industry with low-grade product. Daly was, however, yanked back into the public eye by Mickey Spillane. In interviews given in the late 1940s, when he was the bestselling novelist in America, the creator of Mike Hammer acknowledged that Daly was the only novelist who had ever influenced him. Spillane dutifully wrote to Daly (whose address he had, with difficulty, discovered) to say: ‘Yours was the first and only style of writing that ever influenced me in any way. Race was the model for Mike; and I can’t say more in this case than imitation being the most sincere form of flattery. The public in accepting my books were in reality accepting the kind of work you have done.’

It was graciously done. But when Daly’s literary agent was shown the letter she promptly set about suing the multi-millionaire Spillane for self-confessed plagiarism. Daly as promptly fired her, with the rueful comment that Spillane’s was the only fan letter he had ever received.

Way back then, they didn’t think Shakespeare was a good writer.