Literary critic La Farge compares the fictional character of Mike Hammer to the real-life demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy. While his perspective reflects the disdain that many intellectuals expressed toward most sensationalist fiction, La Farge is troubled less by its low-cultural appeal than by its parallel with McCarthy's "witch hunts" and their premise that one man believes that he alone has the power to expunge communism. La Farge thus connects the popularity of Spillane's novels to the erosion of civil liberties during the early Cold War.
Many million people in the United States have bought, and presumably read, the books on the adventures of Mickey Spillane's creation, Mike Hammer, the Vigilante-Killer. I know that there have been at least six of these published since 1947; and that the one called I, the Jury had sold by August, 1953, 1,600,000 copies. As of June, 1954, 24,000,000 copies of Spillane's books had been published. One of these books, called Kiss Me, Deadly, even had the unusual record for a so-called murder mystery (Spillane's books have much murder and little mystery), of finding itself on the best-seller lists of the New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times.
This is a phenomenon that merits examination, although part of that examination has been made before. What is phenomenal about it is that a series of books can be written in what is supposed to be the form of fiction, but is not truly fiction, but rather a wholly unadmirable kind of wish-fulfillment on both an immature and a potentially destructive level, and be immediately successful on a scale far beyond average.
It would be a lot more fun (and a lot easier) to write a parody of these Mike Hammer books instead of an article, but the point to be made is a serious one, unfortunately, and the parody is limited in its application and has already been brilliantly done by Walt Kelly in his Uncle Pogo So-So Stories under the title of "The Bloody Drip by Muckey Spleen," about "Meat Hamburg, Private Eye, Ear, Nose, Throat, and Leg Man, in another Big Game of Corpse and Robbers."
I don't know what moved Spillane to write about Mike Hammer as he did. Certainly there is in none of the three books I have made myself read anything whatever to justify the assumption that the series was cynically begun merely as a way of creating a highly salable commodity; though the continuance of the series might be a cynical act on the part of both author and publishers. Cynicism implies a form of prior intelligence that is nowhere evident. Rather there is indicated clearly by these books something very like a necessity felt by the author to explain again and again, and to attempt to justify, the philosophy of the very central character of all of them, Mike Hammer, as though that philosophy were justifiable. Many an author has felt himself compelled to create a character who is evil, or sadistic, or immoral, or a combination of these (as is Mike Hammer), and has been equally compelled to attempt to make some facet of that character sympathetic or even attractive to his readers, either through a genuine compassion or an intellectual conception of the variations possible within one human being. But it has never been my experience before to read of a sadist whose sadism was held up as a justifiable means to an admirable end.
What troubles me about this manifestation is that Spillane seems to have succeeded in making the character of Mike Hammer acceptable to a huge public. In this I believe he but reflects (and profits by reflecting) an attitude already held by that public - an attitude which has grown to an extent that is at the least inimical to the basic principles on which our country has so far operated. Mike Hammer is the logical conclusion, almost a sort of brutal apotheosis, of McCarthyism: when things seem wrong, let one man cure the wrong by whatever means be, as a privileged savior, chooses.
There is nothing new in history about McCarthyism, which has occurred again and again since recorded time, and reflects nowadays the human impatience of men at the necessarily slow movements of a government of laws, not of men. There is equally nothing new about the essential skeleton of a character like Mike Hammer, who represents in himself a one-man army of Vengeance and Retribution. In essence (but only in essence) he belongs to the Robin Hood tradition: the man who operates on the side of the Good but outside of, or in conflict with, Constituted Authority; and who (for whatever reasons) decides entirely for himself what is the Good and what is the Bad. He has even two recent forerunners in Edgar Wallace's "Ringer" and Leslie Charteris' "Saint"; and Erie Stanley Gardner's "Perry Mason," a lawyer, breaks the laws so that Right may Triumph. Hammer shares with all of these a willingness to take the law into his own hands, to bring to trial, to judge, to condemn (but in his case even personally to execute) those who he singly decides to have been of the Bad; and there is given to him, as to them, always some motivation, some purpose, that is in part laudable or, at least, popular. With them too he operates, as has Senator McCarthy, on the final philosophy that the end can justify the means: in this Hammerism and McCarthyism are similar.
We hear a great deal nowadays about witch-hunting, and this reflects the disgust of all truly liberal minds with the continuance of an old and bloody tradition in our country. The witch-hunt is still practiced because we continue to have within us a strong residue of fanaticism, which operates to force us toward the elimination, rather than the alteration, of anything we disapprove, regardless of any balanced judgment and in conflict with all liberality of being; and because we are still close to the frontier days when it seemed necessary for men to take the law into their own hands, there being no other apparent alternative. The existence of the Vigilantes seemed to frontiersmen necessary, and such a system fitted into their impatience with what they saw as wrongdoing and the remoteness of the law. That such a system should ultimately spread from the elimination of cattle rustlers and brigands to persons whose moral, racial, religious, or political outlook was disliked by the majority of a community was inevitable. Its children have been the persecutions and intolerances, the riots and the lynchings that mar so much of what is fine and good in our historical growth as a nation.
It is well, in thinking of this (as we must to understand Hammerism's popularity), to add to it another modern factor. This is the huge, impersonal groupings of an industrial civilization, creating (almost by opposites) a frontier of overpopulation instead of isolated dwellings of, scattered humanity. No system of law-enforcement has yet been devised which can operate successfully within an industrial complex composed of a packed humanity of diverse and disparate backgrounds, desires, income, needs, and social habits that does not seem to such people cold and impersonal and essentially hostile. To many overcrowded city men, infected with the impatient fanaticism which colors our historical tradition (or the tradition they stem from in other lands), Hammerism must appear to be a comprehensible and justifiable method, one that the individual can grasp. It is the dream of justice, however imperfect, meted out without delay, with fierce and wonderfully satisfying immediacy? Those who, in their massed anonymity, feel their own individual helplessness and isolation lend to see in all the slow process of law the corruption of justice by the privileged. Hammerism, like McCarthyism, seems to cut through to that swiftness of retribution, regardless of privilege, that they themselves (the unprivileged) despair of. That this can spell the ultimate corruption of a republic of laws is not realized by such people. But I shall have more to say of this, in illustration, later on.
Mike Hammer, like the stories in which he appears also derives from the recent work of other writers in America, the so-called Tough School of Fiction. Spillane has simply carried further - I believe to a point beyond which it will, happily, be impossible to go - the work of such great or truly gifted writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and more exactly, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler. The interesting and significant difference here is that all of these men write with brilliance and ability and their characters, however hard boiled, have reality and three full dimensions. Mr. Spillane's writing is frequently and painfully bad by any standard; and none of his characters, including Mike Hammer, has any true reality whatever.
I do not think one can explain, even partially, the popularity of Mr. Spillane's bloody murder stories by saying that there was so much killing done by so many Americans between 1941 and 1945 that millions of them became calloused to death by violence. History doesn't support that thesis. Some men were much toughened by combat but the huge majority of them came off from the experience with a desire to put that side of war - and the brutal methods self-preservation taught them - as far back in their minds as possible. The truly toughened man who has actually fought in combat is more often able to afford psychologically to be gentle than the untried or the untoughened. Judging entirely from the evidence of these three books, one would say that Spillane had never been in actual combat and might, indeed, be somewhat compensating for that in these stories. (Since writing this I have learned that Spillane was in the Army Air Forces during the last war, but was kept in the U.S. as an instructor; and that he volunteered for active duty in Korea, but was not accepted.)
What then, is the explanation for the great popularity of the stories about Mike Hammer? Perhaps it will be well to see what sort of man he is, as Spillane presents him to his enormous public.
Hammer is a large man, described as extremely powerful physically. His physical prowess of all sorts is in no way impaired by heavy drinking and smoking, of course; and this follows a usual stereotype. He is irresistible to all the women he meets, and his effect on all of them is identical: they want to have physical intercourse with him at once, and often do. This occurs with frequency in the three books I have read, with the two notable exceptions of Velda, his secretary and female counterpart, of whom I shall say more later; and Charlotte (in I, the Jury), whom he later murders by shooting her in the stomach while she is unarmed. To both these women he becomes (in different books) engaged and, with a stereotyped nobility of character nowhere else evident in him, he refuses to sleep with them before marriage, though both of them urge him passionately to do so. This nobility of soul is faintly clouded by the fact that he is well supplied with a succession of women toward whom he doesn't have to be noble at all; and isn't.
All the women are identical physically (with the single exception of Linda Holbright in One Lonely Night, who is described as having a face that is not pretty), being young and full-bosomed, wide shouldered, with perfect bodies and legs. Their only differences are the color of their eyes and hair; and Mike Hammer is so perceptive that he can foretell an unbleached blonde from a photograph. They frequently wear nothing at all under their outer clothes (except for Velda, who packs a .32 automatic); these outer clothes are skin tight to show ALL; and they unzip these garments as soon as possible after meeting Mike Hammer. One can, perhaps, best form an estimate of the moral code of Mike Hammer both in relation to women and as a Reformer by his experience with the plain-faced (but not -bodied) Linda.
Linda is a member of the Communist Party. Hammer smiles at her at a Communist meeting. She gives him "the damnedest look you ever saw." "Just for the hell of it" he gives her "one back with a punch to it. What she made of it stopped her breathing a second." Because of this soul-shattering experience, Linda follows the true Spillane pattern and arrives at Hammer's apartment, unbid, later that night; has a drink; is kissed; unzips her dress (which had nothing under it and "peeled off like paint") and offers herself - having never before (a) had a drink or (b) kissed a man or (c) had physical relations with a man. She simply asked of Hammer "nothing except to be shown how to be a woman." She was shown. She left then at once and most conveniently, wanting "to be part of the darkness and alone."
Poor Hammer feels so like a heel that he can't finish more than half of his drink until he comes to this comforting conclusion: "Then it occurred to me that now that she had a little taste of life maybe she'd go out and seek some different company for a change." He stops feeling like a heel, pours another drink and is able to finish it, and goes contentedly to bed. It is an interesting though conceivably ineffective way to reform Communists. And of course provided One not entirely Lonely Night.
Velda, the secretary, is the Lilith conception: every immature or adolescent male's dream. She is beautiful, attractive, young, available, faithful. She will wait for her man forever, and forever want him wholly when he comes back from whatever absence or adventure including a lot of other women. She is simply cross with her man when he forgets to wipe off the most recent other woman's lipstick. Velda has, by the end of the latest book I have read, Kiss Me, Deadly, killed two men herself. She can and does beat up and disfigure permanently any man who makes improper advances to her. Indeed, in these books the only persons who can safely make improper advances are women and to Hammer. Velda "could whip off a shoe and crack a skull before you could bat an eye." Whatever Mike Hammer says is so and true, that is so and true for Velda without further necessity of proof. It is for this that I have characterized her as Hammer's counterpart, because he needs no proof of anything beyond his own personal judgment. Whatever violence Hammer may commit is right in Velda's eyes because he committed it. She shares with him his entire moral outlook on life.
What is that moral outlook?
In each of the three books I have read there is a Vengeance to be executed on the exact basis of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. In I, the Jury it is to revenge the murder of a man who was Hammer's war buddy and an ex-cop. In One Lonely Night it is to revenge the murders and thefts of secret documents of a Communist ring. In Kiss Me, Deadly it is to revenge the murders and acts of drug-peddling members of the Mafia.
In each case Mike Hammer sets out to solve the problem of who is doing these things - not with the intention of bringing the guilty to justice or even to the electric chair, but that he may personally find, judge, condemn, and kill these persons before the police can get them. Not only that: but also that he may act as executioner of his victims in a manner precisely as brutal and violent as the brutality and violence he judges them to have practiced. This intention he also publicly proclaims.
It would be strange enough if a man in fact could do this in the United States at this time of its history and still be allowed at large with a permit to carry a deadly weapon. It would be even stranger if the police cooperated with him, worked with him, fed him information, and protected him. Yet this happens in all three books. Mike Hammer's best and most loyal friend is Captain of Police Pat Chambers. Oh, Chambers warns him from time to time that what he is doing is sort of illegal, this business of going around by himself and killing people he has decided need to be killed; but that is all. Chambers sees, as Hammer does, that the end - the destruction of evil persons or at least of those that Hammer decides are evil - justifies the means to that end. It's quicker that way. Add it to the brutality of the methods of revenge in which Hammer is allowed to indulge to his own entire and declared satisfaction, and you begin to get the moral picture clear. An example from Kiss Me, Deadly may help.
Hammer, disarmed by the FBI, his license as a private investigator temporarily revoked, publicly hunts for two professional killers, Sugar Smallhouse and Charlie Max, off Broadway at night. Both the police and the FBI know that these two are at large and that Hammer has passed the word around that he will get them. He has been told they are out to get him. He finds them in a bar. He renders Smallhouse unconscious by a sort of jujitsu hold from behind, "like a kid snapping worms." He gets Charlie Max, as Max reaches for his gun, by kicking him in the face so that "the things that were in Charlie's face splashed all over the floor." He then breaks Max's arm by kicking that. As he reaches for the gun that Max dropped three members of the FBI stop him, search him, register extreme surprise that he is unarmed, and let him go. Of this Hammer says, "There wasn't a damn thing they could do and they knew it, so I turned around, walked back outside, and started crosstown to the Astor." He gets there, too, unmolested. This was necessary to the story, of course, as he is going to meet a woman at the Astor who has fallen for him so hard that she is going to betray her half-brother to him. It gives one an odd impression of the limitations of legal law enforcement as well as family feeling.
In One Lonely Night the book begins with Hammer rationally upset because a Judge has excoriated him publicly as a killer. The Judge's voice, which had been righteous, says Hammer, "changed into disgusted hatred because I was a licensed investigator who knocked off somebody who needed knocking off bad and he couldn't get to me."
This makes Hammer think, to the extent that that process is possible to him, and he thus describes himself: "That was me. I could have made it sound better if I'd said it. There in the muck and slime of the jungle, there in the stink that hung over the beaches rising from the bodies of the dead, there in the half-light of too many dusks and dawns laced together with the crisscrossed patterns of bullets, I had gotten a taste of death and found it palatable to the extent I could never again eat the fruits of a normal civilization." This is the police-licensed Private Investigator.
Velda's comment on the Judge's words was, "Let's get out of here, Mike. I hate people with little minds. . . . Mike . . . that judge was a bastard. You're an all-right guy."
Another quotation from a later passage in the same book sums up the philosophy of Hammerism throughout all three books. Hammer is answering the Judge in his own thoughts, in the italics which are Spillane's. He is referring to Communists who have stolen secret Government documents of extreme value, but it applies as well to his other acts of vengeance. It is interesting to note how closely his description of Communist methods matches his own.
My guts were all knotted up in a ball and my head felt like a machine shop was going on inside it. Here I had the whole lousy situation right in my hands and I had to keep it there.
Me, Mike Hammer. I was up in the big league now. No more plain and simple murders. I was playing with the big boys and they played rough. The end justified the means, that was their theory. Lie, steal, kill, do anything that was necessary to push a political philosophy that would enslave the world if we let it. Great!
Nice picture, Judge, a beautiful picture of a world in flames. You must be one of the normal people who get the trembles when they read the papers. A philosophy like that must give you with willies. What are you thinking now… how that same secret that was stolen might be the cause of your own death? And what would you say if you knew that I was the only one who might be able to stop it in time? Okay, Judge, sit your fanny in a chair and relax. I have a little philosophy of my own. Like you said, it's as bad as theirs. I don't give a damn for a human life any more, even my own. Want to hear that philosophy? It's simple enough. Go after the big boys. Oh, don't arrest them, don't treat them to the dignity of the democratic process of courts and law… do the same thing to them that they'd do to you! Treat 'em to the unglorious taste of sudden death. Get the big boys and show them the long road to nowhere and none of those sticking little people with little minds will want to get big. Death is funny, Judge, people are afraid of it. Kill 'em left and right, show 'em that we aren't so soft after all. Kill, kill, kill, kill! They'll keep away from us then!
For anything that tries to be so tough, the last six words sound remarkably like a frightened small boy.
But Mike Hammer doesn't confine the statement of his attitude to his private thoughts. He declares it to Captain of Police Pat Chambers at the outset of I, the Jury. Like this, after viewing the body of his murdered friend:
". . . by Christ, I'm not letting the killer go through the tedious process of the law. You know what happens, damn it. They get the best lawyer there is and screw up the whole thing and wind up a hero! . . . A jury is cold and impartial like they're supposed to be, while some snotty lawyer makes them pour tears as he tells how his client was insane at the moment or lead to shoot in self-defense. Swell. The law is fine. But this time I'm the law and I'm not going to be cold and impartial. . . . You're a cop, Pat. You're tied down by rules and regulations. There's someone over you. I'm alone. . . . Some day, before long, I'm going to have my rod in my. mitt and the killer in front of me. I'm going to watch the killer's face. I'm. going to plunk one in his gut, and when he's dying on the floor I may kick his teeth out." (The killer turns out to be Charlotte and he does plunk one in her gut, but it doesn't say that he kicked her beautiful teeth out. Or in.)
So it goes in all three books. He shoots a lot of people in the gut and he kicks a lot of people's teeth out. It's all right because they are all Bad People and Deserve to Die Brutally. They are Bad because Hammer says so. It doesn't affect him at all (and in this he is also like Senator McCarthy) that he makes mistakes. In One Lonely Night he is being pursued by what he believes to be Communists, chasing him at night in their car. He checks to be sure his .45 is free and ready and prepares to "haul the wheel right into them" as they begin to pass him. The car that is following goes off the road and rolls over in a field. It turns out later that its occupants were members of the FBI, ditched by some Communists following them. (Don't ask me how; it is all very obscure and badly written and improbable.) But that they were members of the FBI wouldn't have saved them from Hammer if they hadn't been ditched by the Communists. No, no, to him and then the FBI men were Communists. He takes the woman who was in the car with him to her country retreat (he had previously slept with her there) and tears her dress off and starts to beat her nakedness with his belt because he thinks she tipped off these men he thought were Communists to follow him; and the real Communists shoot her through the window. What she had tipped off was the FBI, thinking Hammer a Communist himself. Hammer the Infallible, the Judge, the Jury, the Executioner. But never forget that Communists are Very Bad People and the quickest and best thing to do to them (or members of the Mafia, or anyone you judge is ripe for it) is to shoot them in the gut, as a starter, of course.
Normally one would say that it was silly to write a critical article about a lot of books so very badly written, so essentially immature in their composition. That's what these books are. Their writing is turgid or grotesque or childish or simply the worst sort of lurid. Or it is plain revolting. A hunchbacked janitor from whom Hammer and his Velda rent a room (to go through it because it had been occupied by a suspect) offers them his own room because it is furnished with a bed and the other is not, and he misjudges their intentions. One can hardly blame him. Of this hunchback it is said: "He leered and looked somewhat dissatisfied because he wouldn't be able to sneak a look on something he probably never had himself." This comes from the mind of our hero, Hammer. One could multiply instances of mistakes in grammar and use of words ("they huddled in recessions of doorways"), inconsistencies (like the "cold, impartial jury" weeping) ad nauseum - and to no good end.
One can say that the readers of murder stories don't necessarily demand good English or even good writing, but simply what is usually described as "thrill-packed action." One can say that of the 24,000,000 persons who have bought or read Mr. Spillane's books many readers must be young and uncritical, and also that many must have got a vicarious satisfaction from the sexual passages reduced to such simple and unvarying animalism, either because their own lives provide no such satisfactions or because they'd like to think of themselves as having such physical prowess. One can say that in a tense world, full of hysterical shrillness, many, as I've attempted to suggest at the outset, isolated within the overlarge groupings of an industrial civilization, must derive from such writing a sort of satisfaction because the Bad get their comeuppance without need for the delays of lawful justice. If that were all it would not be very important. But it isn't all.
There is left the popularity of a Hero who, with such a character as has been described, mocks at and denies the efficacy of all law and decency, flouts all laws, statutory, ethical, and moral, delights in assault and murder that is brutally executed, sets his personal judgment always above that of all other men but in particular above that of those to whom government delegates law enforcement (which he thereby constantly derogates), and makes the words soft and honorable synonymous. This is the sort of philosophy, mutatis mutandis, that has permitted to Senator McCarthy his periods of extreme popularity throughout the nation: one man will, beyond the normal processes, unhampered by the normal and accepted restrains, bring the Bad to his own form of justice. Mike Hammer's Communists and members of the Mafia are, of course, all Very Bad. They are also described as soft, homosexual, stupid, gullible, childish, or easily tricked; but at the same time as the Most Dangerous Thing in the United States. Any means which will, with Hammer, lead to their extirpation and in particular their death by his hand are Good. With Senator McCarthy, any means that will expose Communists, including the derogation of all Public Servants, the telling of lies, the irreparable damaging of the innocent, the sensational and the unfounded charge, is justified so long as he thinks it is the right thing to do. Each, then, reflects the other, though McCarthyism kills but careers where Hammerism (perhaps in the end more mercifully) kills life itself.
When one has fought for years against the many forms and many evils of mistaken censorship one walks warily in asking the question, how much responsibility lies at the door of the publishers of Mickey Spillane? It cannot be possible to conceive of two firms as established as E. P. Dutton and Company and the New American Library of World Literature (which publishes Signet books) as being as naive as he makes himself appear by his writings. Was there in them at first but the wholly unanalyzed hope that this bloodier than the bloody, this tougher than the tough product would sell like hot cakes? Did they ever, as they continued to publish (but now with a full knowledge that they were exploiting a rarely excellent gold mine), stop to consider what they were doing in being the agents to disseminate books which would surely be read, and which would hold up to contempt almost every form of human decency in law and in life? Did they (incredibly) agree with the philosophy of Mike Hammer? Or did they decide that it was none of their business to pass a moral judgment on a man's books which had proved so financially profitable? Or did they perhaps generously plan to use the profits from the Spillane gold mine for the furtherance of the cause of true literature - even though that would be to accept the thesis that the end did justify the means? I do not know the answers to these questions.
If it were my responsibility now, I would neither censor nor ban the published works of Mickey Spillane; for the most worldly reason: to do so would be but to increase their sale. For another, a more difficult reason, it is hard always to establish that the reading of any such books is in itself a corrupting factor on any individual, no matter how young and callow and impressionable. But one must ask a larger and more difficult question than those concerning the responsibility of Spillane's publishers. What has come to our country that it can support and applaud these attitudes toward our common life as a country? Have we in fact become so impatient with due process of law, which is inevitably slow both in its creation, its interpretation, and its execution, that we are willing to abandon ourselves to the apparent quick curative of the Vigilante, the One Man in Power, for whom all laws with their checks and balances are ultimately suspended? Is this what the popularity of Hammerism and McCarthyism point to? If so, we had better realize it before their popularity is shared by a majority of our citizens, who can make valid their system of government by men. McCarthy is a fact. Mike Hammer is but fiction. Yet even as fiction his popularity, his acceptance point to something we would do well to reckon with, and soon. Eternal vigilance, goes the saying, is the price of liberty. It would be disastrous to change the word vigilance to vigilante.
What a pity it is that Mike Hammer and Mr. McCarthy cannot appear on the same television program and swap reminiscences during the Children's Hour!
Christopher La Farge, "Mickey Spillane and His Bloody Hammer," in
Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular
Arts in America (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957), 176-185. Reprinted
by permission of The Saturday Review, © 1954, General Media International,
Inc.