Quotes of the Day

"The monicker is Mike Hammer, kid. I'm a private eye."

Mike Hammer was not your typical gumshoe — at least, not when he made his debut, in I, the Jury, in 1947. A hero with thug tendencies, or a sociopath who fancied himself a hero, Hammer beat up people who got in his way, consistently misled his protector on the police force and, rather than turn the murderer over to the authorities, killed first and asked questions never. He was the bane of civilized society, in books that described his trespasses in lurid detail and shocked nearly as many millions as savored them.

But then Mickey Spillane, who died this week at 88, was not your typical novelist. He had the burly look of a longshoreman; his face was meaty, like his prose style. And Mickey — that's a name to put in a cartoon, not on august hard covers. He also slipped a Mickey to the image of the serious fiction writer, showing a brisk contempt for the elevated anguish of creating literature. In just five years, between 1947 and 1952, he served up seven novels: I, the Jury; My Gun Is Quick; Vengeance Is Mine!; One Lonely Night; The Big Kill; Kiss Me, Deadly; and the non-Hammer story The Long Wait. (The six Hammers are collected in two volumes of The Mike Hammer Collection.) By the mid-50s, those seven titles were among the ten all-time best-sellers. When his critics deplored this stat, Spillane riposted, "Aaah, you're lucky I didn't write three more."

In his self-assessment, Spillane — whose The Long Wait sold three million copies in a single week, and whose worldwide total is in the 140-million range — was also far more blue-collar than tweed-jacket. He wasn't an "author," he said, rejecting the mustiness of the word; he was a "writer." He did his job for money, not recognition by his peers (which came his way late in life). He claimed he banged out I, the Jury in nine days, to which the literary establishment would say, "Really? It took that long?" And he claimed he didn't have "readers" but "customers," who were much more reliable. His writing credo also had a mercenary tinge to it: "The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book." Hook the sucker quick, then make him come back for more.

Spillane's critics thought he typed with his fists: TIME in 1952 called his stuff "sexy drivel." But anyone could see that the man's books had socko starts and knockout endings. I, the Jury begins with Hammer finding his best war buddy, who had literally (everything's literal in Spillane) given his right arm to save Mike, dead on his apartment floor with a grapefruit-size hole in his gut. Hammer swears revenge. But first, for purposes of evidence or exercise or fun, he beats up a plethora of punks, the bouts described with a grisly precision and brio that still startle. ("I swung on him with all of my hundred and ninety pounds. My fist went up to the wrist in his stomach. He flopped to the floor vomiting his lungs out, his face gradually turning purple.") On the last page, he corrals the villain, a gorgeous blond he'd been in love with. and plugs her with a .45. Then comes one of the most pungent windups in pulp lit:

"Her eyes had pain in them now, the pain preceding death. Pain and unbelief.
"'How c-could you?' she gasped.
"I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
"'It was easy,' I said."

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and parody the comic's way of showing envy, then Spillane was a signal success. A Life cover line on Spillane read: "13,000,000 Books of Sex and Slaughter." He didn't exactly invent the paperback market, but he certified their status as the main format for popular fiction. "Mickey Spillane's contribution is far beyond mystery or crime writing," crime-book editor Martin Greenberg says in the affectionate and impressive documentary Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane (available as part of the three-disc set Max Allan Collins' Black Box). "I think he's a phenomenon in regard to the whole explosion of the mass-market paperback, and was probably its first great star." Spillane's popularity spawned a generation of tough-guy, "paperback-original" novelists — Jim Thompson, Charles Williams and a raft of others whose works were filmed by the French New Wave directors.

Spillane was more famous, more notorious, than any of those writers; for a time, he was the Elvis of fiction. His blockbuster status, along with his sex-and-violence plots and the muscular, almost steroidal, power of his imagery, made him ripe for satire. Sid Caesar played a Hammer character on Your Show of Shows. Al Feldstein led off the first issue of Panic, the sibling of Mad comic book, with a story called "Me, the Verdict," an acute burlesque of Spillane tropes. The highest compliment was paid by Fred Astaire, who in 1953's The Band Wagon devoted an entire ballet, called "The Girl Hunt," to the Hammer mystique. (A decade later, Spillane tipped his fedora to Astaire by titling a Hammer novel The Girl Hunters.)

BUT DID HE MATTER?

The severest take on Spillane is that he was a period wonder, of slightly more than the nine days it took to write a book, with no current relevance. A half-century later, people may be puzzled by his impact, and the society that devoured or derided his work. (Trust me: 50 years from now some aged critic will be asked to explain the long-ago popularity of Adam Sandler. Good luck.) That may explain why Spillane's death didn't make the front page of the New York Times.

Yet an argument can be made that he was the most influential writer of the mid-20th century. I won't, but I don't have to, since more knowledgeable writers have. Start with Collins, the crime novelist (Road to Perdition) who is the Mick's most assiduous champion: he collaborated with Spillane on several anthologies, cast him as a featured player in two movies. Collins directed and co-authored One Lonely Knight, the only book-length study of Spillane. Collins credits Spillane with creating, in Hammer "the template for James Bond, Dirty Harry, Billy Jack, Rambo, John Shaft, and countless other fictional tough guys." (When TIME reviewed Casino Royale, it praised Bond as "Mike Hammer in gentleman's clothing.")

Hammer, Collins argues, was "perhaps the first widely popular antihero: a good guy who used the methods of the bad guy in pursuit of frontier justice, a vigilante who spared the courts the trouble of a trial by executing the villain himself." The jolt this character gave to literature, by being both so brutal and so popular, was immediate and lasting. "We were a very puritan nation right up through the 1950s," says novelist Loren Estleman. "I think it was people like Mickey Spillane, getting out there and effectively butting his head against the wall that made those walls collapse."

Crime writer Lawrence Block believes Spillane did more than spice up a genre; he created a format that bridged midcult and low art, print and picture. Block notes that Hammer "was originally intended as a comic-strip hero. The fast cuts, the in-your-face immediacy, and the clear-cut, no-shades-of-gray, good-versus-evil story lines of the Mike Hammer novels come straight out of the comic-book world. Mickey Spillane was writing something else — comic books for grown-ups." I, the Jury, then, can lay claim to being the first graphic novel, just without illustrations.

It was a connection not lost on some of Spillane's excoriators. Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent was an indictment of comic books and their supposedly toxic influence on kids; the only novelist Wertham mentioned was Spillane. In a way, that was acute. The kids who read comics before World War II were ready for stronger stuff, but with the same bold, obvious, shall we say cartoonish verve. And Wertham was right in fearing that the comic-book worldview was one that would not fade, like acne, as the kids grew up. They would demand adolescent popular art forever.

That came from Spillane. His influence is everywhere evident in the popular culture that followed him. I've written before that the 20th century can be neatly divided in halves: for the first 50 years, middle-class pop culture imitated the upper class; in the next 50, it aped the underclass. (Still does.) The first period tried for elegance, the second for outlawry. Astaire; Spillane. This change could be gauged seismographically in the movies, music and comic books of the 1950s. But Spillane was there first, as pioneer or prime corrupter.

The Spillane obsession with spectacularly cantilevered women finds its modern expression in the gargantuan, silicon-sweetened contours of Pamela Anderson and her pin-up siblings. As for Spillane's attention to the particulars of violence, it has pretty much taken over action films, including the most ambitious ones. It's in the acrobattles of Sin City and the blood-love of Quentin Tarantino. The crimson orgasms that Sam Peckinpah brought to the screen in The Wild Bunch, Spillane had put on the page 20 years earlier, and reaped much the same condemnation.

The difference is that, in the late '40s and early '50s, mainstream culture was still defined by the standards of good taste, whatever that is. Usually it meant congratulating a work of fiction for its modernist notions and humanist politics. That wouldn't fit Spillane at all; his novels were, arguably, post-humanist. No tastemaker admitted to enjoying the pulps, though they contained some of the most vigorous writing around. Few critics defended Spillane, even to establish their contrarian credentials by going against the genteel grain. (Spillane's one cheerleader among serious novelists was Ayn Rand, a dogmatic right-winger. That didn't help sway the establishment.) Hammer, who dominated the mass book market in the early '50s as monopolistically as Harry Potter did a half-century later, couldn't be ignored and, dammit, wouldn't be praised. He was both unavoidable and indefensible.

Remember that even Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, though they were published by the most reputable house (Knopf) and wrote popular books that became hit movies, weren't considered the equals of "serious" novelists. They wrote genre fiction. The New Yorker critic (and novelist) Edmund Wilson could find "the boys in the back room" lacking. Then came another irony. Later generations of critics threw off their pretensions and mined the gritty glories of pulp fiction; they cogently argued that Hammett and Chandler, and Thompson and David Goodis and others, were worth cherishing (and that writers like Wilson, who's forgotten today as a novelist, weren't.) Yet in this rush to validate the pulps, Spillane was curiously forgotten — a prophet without honor. But with profit. Those royalties kept rolling in.

WHO WAS MICKEY SPILLANE?

He was born Frank Morrison Spillane, the son of a Brooklyn barkeep. Raised on the wrong (indeed, only) side of the tracks in Ellzabeth, N.J., he wrote for slick magazines, then shifted to comics, composing the two-page prose fillers that were oddly required by law. During the war he spend four years teaching pilots how to fly and left a Captain, returning to New York. Before the war he had peddled a comic-book character named Mike Danger, the Hammer prototype. Now he updated it, fleshing it out with traits of a Marine friend, Jack Stang (whom he later proposed should star as Hammer, even directing a short film with Stang in the role, but it didn't take.) He also gave Hammer a contact in the police force, Captain Pat Chambers, to serve as go-between, confidant and stooge; and a girl-Friday, the voluptuous, resourceful, loyal Velda — based, Spillane says, on Wilma, "an old girlfriend of mine, a long time ago, before the war."

That gave him the makings, and suddenly he had a motive. "I had to get out of New York City," he says in Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane. "I couldn't stand that place." So he moved up to Newburgh and, when told a home he wanted to build would cost $1,000, speed-wrote I, the Jury. The hardback version, published by E.P. Dutton, sold OK, nothing special, about 20,000 copies. But when issued in paperback in late 1948, the book stoked a furor. (The year's other literary sensation that year was Spillane's polar opposite, the lounge kitten Truman Capote.)

After that five-year spurt, Spillane took himself out of the novelist's game. He franchised the Hammer character to a radio show, a TV series, a comic strip and three movies. He found new appetites: race-car driving, for one (he stank at it). He did a hitch with Clyde Beatty's circus, where, on the receiving end of artillery for once, he would be shot out of a cannon. He also acted in a Beatty movie, Ring of Fear, and did a rewrite of the script. Most astonishing, he joined the Christian sect Jehovah's Witnesses, proselytizing from door to door. And when one of those doors was slammed in his face, did Spillane put his knuckles through it?

After nine years he went back to writing, though without the same dominance of the market. Now, his books sold only a couple million copies. For a while he retired again from writing, while earning new name recognition in a 16-year gig as the grizzled but twinkly spokesman for Miller Lite Beer. In his eighth decade he dropped the age level of his target audience by about five years and wrote award-winning books for children.

MIKE AND MICKEY

Crime novelists define their heroes by their names. Hammett's Sam Spade digs for the truth; Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason builds a case for his client's innocence; Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer shoots arrows of inquiry; and Mike Hammer... pounds.

Sherlock Holmes' deductions relied on a familiarity with the social conventions of the Victorian England of which he was a part. Hammer, who seems to be the most brutal of city street kids, proceeds from some of the same assumptions about postwar New York: it's smart and lethal, and so big almost any criminal can lose himself in it (till Hammer tracks him down). But Hammer's New York was an extension of his suspicions about anybody who wasn't him.

There are other differences, plenty. Holmes was all brain, pure reason. Hammer's intelligence is physical; he impresses people by hurting them or threatening to. He's a New York Stanley Kowalski, or a shark with a few scruples. Also, Holmes was known to us through the admiring, often puzzled perception of his friend Dr. Watson. Hammer, without friends or partners to write his biography, always spoke in the first person. Not only that, they paraded that writer-hero-reader identification in the titles: I, My, Mine, Me.

Mike was the sole witness, yet we were expected to take his testimony on faith: that every man blanched at his approach, and every woman swooned. The power, if not plausibility, of Spillane's writing can't obliterate the inference that his hero was delusional. Hammer could be a Nabokov hero, confessing his sins by boasting of them, constructing an elaborate alternate reality to blot out the one he's stuck with.

But just because Hammer tells the tale — and because Spillane has publicly identified himself with his character, playing it tough in a trenchcoat in movies and TV commercials — doesn't mean the reader has to take Mike, or Mickey, at face value. Spillane said Hammer was less a person than "a state of mind." A reading of the first six Hammer suggests that the sleuth was a complicated and unstable soul.

WHAT IS MIKE HAMMER?

Mike Hammer, a grunt in WWII, works as a private eye, based in the Hackard Building in Manhattan. He smokes Luckies, drinks beer, or rye and soda, does home cooking (steak) in his shorts. For someone so proudly obsessed with money, Spillane spent little effort explaining how Hammer made a living. As Joe Gores says in the Collins doc, "Mike Hammer forgets to get paid most of the time." But that's because, unlike most previous detective novels, in which the hero is brought into a case involving people he doesn't know, and which he can solve without much expenditure of passion, the murder that sets most Hammer novels in motion is the death of an old friend (I, the Jury) or a new acquaintance (My Gun Is Quick, The Big Kill, Kiss Me, Deadly). He works on these cases pro bono, and post mortem. That made Mike the first revenge private eye, the first one who took murder personally.

Hammer thinks of himself as loyal to his few friends. He helps those he pities: halfwit Bobo in I, the Jury, the doomed women he briefly befriends at the beginnings of My Gun Is Quick and Kiss Me, Deadly; and, most implausibly and hokily, an orphaned infant in The Big Kill. But he's better at hating. "I hate hard," he brags. He does a lot of hating, and each time it's like the first time: "I could feel the mad running right down into my shoes." (He needs Depends for his temper.) Though he doesn't flee the city, as Spillane did, Hammer hates a lot about it. "I hate the lice that run the streets without even being scratched," he says in My Gun Is Quick. I'm the guy with the spray gun..."

In fact, Mike loves to hate, to beat, to kill. From Mi>Vengeance Is Mine!: "I loved to shoot killers. I couldn't think of anything I'd rather do than shoot a killer and watch his blood trace a slimy path across the floor." The fights he gets into are manuals for barroom brawlers. Here's a how-to from My Gun Is Quick: "I jammed four big, stiff fingers into his gut right above the navel and he snapped shut like a jackknife. I opened him up again with an openhanded slap that left a blush across his mouth that was going to stay for a while." Mike unholsters his .45 and "just for effect I stuck it up against his forehead and thumbed back the hammer. It made a sharp click in the silence."

Anything short of execution is excusable. "I didn't kill him," he says after one encounter. "All I did was shoot him in the leg a little bit." (In Hammer's world, that's a towel slap.) Sometimes he imagines the awful-delicious retribution. "If anything happened to Velda I'd tear the guts out of some son-of-a-bitch!" he muses in One Lonely Night. "I'd nail him to a wall and take his skin off him in inch-wide strips!" Other times, he keeps the violence strictly verbal, on the level of threat: "It's not easy to talk when you've just choked on your own teeth." And once in a while he gets to do it: "I only gave him a second to realize what it was like to die then I blew the expression clean off his face."

HATE HARD

In the Collins doc, Spillane defends the pugnacity of his alter ego (alter libido, more likely). "If anybody kicks my cat," he explains, "I'm gonna whack him on the ear, see? It's somewhat like kickin' his [Hammer's]cat, so to speak." Actually, it's more like someone's saying, "That's not much of a cat you got," and Mike pulls the guy's guts through his nose. In Spillane, nearly every charged conversation between males escalates pronto into a fight. Hammer hits first. And, as J. Kenneth Van Dover notes in his astute, fairly critical Murder in the Millions (about Gardner, Hammett and Fleming), Hammer's pugilistic repertoire relies as much on his knees and his feet as on his fists. That's sensible, since the hand is more vulnerable to breaking. But it's also, in the Marquis of Queensberry sense that defined detective-story fights before Spillane, dirty dealing.

The tough guy before whom all other tough guys go soft, Hammer is also an adolescent boy's dream of the total he-man package. He's also a magnet for all comers. Gangsters and glamorous women fall at Mike's feet, from the impact of his blows or the surly machismo of his swagger. Of course there's a darker view of this unchecked brutality, this out-lawman with a feudal ethical code. That's that Hammer is a bully with a grudge — a one-man fascist state, and I don't mean Italy.

One thing that estranged Spillane from the literati was their disdain for the politics of his books. No question, he was right-wing. Each novel had a different conspiracy for Hammer to expose: drugs in I, the Jury, the call-girl racket in My Gun Is Quick, a blackmail ring in Vengeance Is Mine!, illegal gambling in The Big Kill, the Mafia in Kiss Me. Deadly. But it was the enemy in One Lonely Night — the U.S. Communist Party — and his gunning down of 100 of them, that soldered liberal horror of Spillane.

Truth is, Hammer never pretends to be a political sophisticate. "I haven't voted since they dissolved the Whig Party," he says in One Lonely Night. And his agenda is at least as much anarchist as it is fascist. He's against all the big people who prey on the little people, and has elected himself to wipe out the scourge. His tone is not so much political as Biblical — Old Testament. He's the cleansing plague.

In the first three Spillane titles, Hammer graduates from being the legal system (I the Jury) to the police force (My Gun Is Quick) to God Almighty (Vengeance Is Mine). But Mike doesn't think he's God. And the Devil he often wrestles with is himself. As the series of novels wore on, and Spillane perhaps winced at the criticism of them, Hammer occasionally goes into auto-critique mode. What has he become? What made him that way?

In One Lonely Night, Hammer is brought into court before a judge, who, Mike says, wants only to "drag my soul out where everybody could see it and slap it with another coat of black paint." The judge blames Hammer's antisocial attitude on his military service: that, as Mike paraphrases, "it took a war to show me the power of the gun and the obscene pleasure that was brutality and force, the spicy sweetness of murder sanctified by law."

Hammer is forced to agree. "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 that I could never again eat the fruits of a normal civilization.... Maybe it did happen to me over there.... Maybe I was twisted and rotten inside. Maybe I would be washed down the sewer with the rest of the rottenness sometime."

Don't think of Hammer as a cop without a badge. Think of him as a discharged, displaced soldier, perhaps with a case of post-traumatic stress syndrome. As the Mick said about the men who came home from World War II, "They knew what a person's mind could do to him." Hammer's belligerence might seem neolithic to civilians, but to young men who had survived the horror of war, and knew many who didn't, his advance-guard wariness on New York's mean streets was nothing less than a life skill.

LOVE HARD

"You love hard too," a dangerous blond tells Mike before surrendering to his Neander-thrills. (And after a rough night in Kiss Me, Deadly, he says, "I slept hard." Mike does everything but think hard.) He's a hard man the ladies fall hard for.

Mike can appreciate female beauty, especially when it's coming on to him. "With her head tilted back like that she gave me the full view of her breasts. They were as alive as she was." (They shouldn't be less so.) "A statue with dark, blazing eyes and jaunty breasts that spoke of the passion that lay within." (Hmmm: jaunty and chatty.) Everyone's favorite Spillane "babe" line is this one: "She walked toward me, her hips waving a happy hello."

In those first years after the war, first base was as far as an American novelist could safely go. Spillane made the most of what little sexual license he had. Of a brief encounter with Lola in My Gun Is Quick Hammer rhapsodizes, "Her mouth was a soft bed of fire, her tongue a searching thing asking questions I had to answer greedily." In French kissing, as in all other aspects of a Hammer courtship, the woman is the aggressor. In the movies of I, the Jury and The Girl Hunters, the actor playing Hammer (Biff Elliot in the first, then Spillane himself) reclines on a couch while the female amorously advances on him.

Mike is constantly fighting off gorgeous babes. "Damn you," says Connie in Vengeance Is Mine!, "I never tried so hard to make a guy who won't be made." Or else he's engaging in foreplay and deferring the climactic act. "'You're even better than I thought,' she said. 'You're a man with the instincts of some jungle animal. It has to be when you say so, doesn't it?' ... 'Not before,' I told her." The plot logic is twofold: that Hammer can't have sex with the woman he's going to kill on the last page, and that is trying to be faithful to his ever-lovin' Velda. But the way it plays is that Mike is less turned on by women who show they're turned on to him; maybe he thinks they've cheapened themselves. Or maybe he's just shy of sex. (In the Collins film, Jane Rodgers Spillane, Mickey's third and last wife, recalled with a smile that "Sex was taboo with him until we were married.")

Sex and violence are incestuously twinned in Hammer's mind. For him, every encounter is intimate. He gets in the faces both of his adversaries and of his for-the-moment girlfriends. Both forms of intervention involve a sock in the mouth, leading Mike to one of two responses: kiss or kill. And every smooch is a heavyweight event. ("I kissed her so hard I hurt my mouth this time.") Sex is violent, and violence sexy. They are the two things that give him a thrill. And once in a while he can combine the two. "I don't hit women," he genially assures pearly Shirley Eaton In The Girl Hunters. "I always kick 'em."

As a man's man, Hammer knows the code of brawling; he can instinctively anticipate a man's moves. He initiates contact with men. But women initiate it with him. (He's the female to their sexually avaricious male.) Being on the receiving end makes women a mystery to him. He can joke about it, saying, of lipstick, "I could never figure out why the stuff came off women so easy and off the men so hard." Other times he's just perplexed: "What is it that gives them that look as if they know the problem and the answer too, yet hold it back because it's something you have to discover yourself?" Poor Mike: he thinks that if he doesn't know something it's not worth knowing. So he's forever lumbering into the traps, innocent or near-fatal, that women set for him. And when another man dares to claim the sexual prize Hammer keeps turning down, he gets in a competitive fury. Mike put the lousy in jealousy.

MIKE AT THE MOVIES

In I, the Jury, Hammer takes Charlotte to the movies: "...we sat through two and a half hours of a fantastic murder mystery that had more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese and a Western that moved as slowly as the Long Island Railroad in a snowstorm. When we got out I thought I had blisters on my butt."

Spillane didn't have much more luck with the films made from his novels than Hammer did that afternoon with Charlotte. He sold his movie rights to the English director-producer Victor Saville. "I always thought that Saville would have the sense to do what was right," Spillane told Collins. "He never did." The result was four '50s big-screen adaptations: three cheap little dogs (I, the Jury, The Long Night and My Gun Is Quick) and one large, strange, rabid animal (Kiss Me Deadly).

Hammett, Chandler and James M. Cain all wrote novels that were turned into A pictures (respectively, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep and Double Indemnity) that still play well today. Spillane, who outsold them all, and I mean all together, should have got some sharp films made from his work, through his power or the law of averages. But the very elements that made him a hot property on the paperback market — the sex and violence — made him too hot for '50s Hollywood. If the studio bosses didn't exactly blacklist Spillane, they didn't rush to film his books.

I, the Jury was written and directed by Harry Essex, a specialist in science-fiction screenplays (It Came from Outer Space, The Creature from the Black Lagoon) who had no notion of alchemizing menace from pictures and performances. Shot in 3D by noir whiz John Alton, and featuring occasional thrusts into the camera (a rifle, a dying man's hand, the pointed bra worn under a satiny blouse by Peggie Castle as Charlotte), the movie stays perfunctorily faithful to the book, including the use of a few famous lines. "Act like a clam or I'll open ya up like one" is there, and of course the final fatal dialogue.

The most obvious failure was in casting Elliot as Hammer. A shortish guy with a strident, high-pitched voice, he's like a teenager playing Hammer in a school pageant, and he's dressed in a trenchcoat so oversize, it seems to be holding Chuck Bednarik's shoulder pads. Elliot is further undercut by the dialogue. "I like to stick my neck out," he tells Charlotte, "Makes me think I'm tough." (Mike can't have the pretense of toughness; he's got to exude it.) In one scene, Elliot's Mike is knocked out cold when bad-guy Paul Dubov hits him with ... a coat hanger. What a wuss!

The Long Night, with Anthony Quinn as a non-Hammer hero with amnesia, is a drab affair, and My Gun Is Quick buried its chance at B-minus competence with another unknown, inapt Hammer, Robert Bray. You might say that Spillane should always have played him, as he does in the 1963 The Girl Hunters. (Richard Wright, of Native Son fame, is the only other best-selling novelist I know who played his own major character in a movie. Anyone know others?) But that would be to overrate Spillane's hulking amateurism. He has fun in the movie, but maneuvers only on the surface of Hammer's tortured meanness.

That leaves Kiss Me Deadly, a film not quite meriting its latter cult eminence. The movie so stresses its characters stereotypes (the comic Italians and wasted dames) and facile aural editorializing (braying trombones, in case you didn't catch the blatant ironies in the dialogue) that the exaggeration almost becomes a style, as it surely does in Spillane's writing. This was 1955, when director Robert Aldrich's consistent coarseness was brave and bracing in Hollywood, rather than routine.

Some things Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides kept from the book: a secret message from a dead woman; a scene where Mike slams a desk drawer shut on the fingers of a suspect; the slapping around of an Athletic Club guard; and the ultimate villain (who goes up in flames). But they changed the Mafia to an, I don't know, atomic-weapons gang. It's as if the Rosenbergs didn't give the Russians the plans for a bomb but the bomb itself. They also perverted the relationship of Hammer and his police buddy, Pat Chambers. Wesley Addy's Pat is so drawling and insinuating in his banter with Hammer, he might be making a gay play for him.

The Hammer personality got an overhaul too. This Mike isn't a lonely knight, or even a psycho with a hero complex. He's a sleazy guy in a slimy business — his specialty is divorce cases — who does mean things for fun. I still remember, from seeing the film 51 years ago, a scene where Hammer picks up a man's beloved old Caruso record and snaps it in two. (The same year I'd seen Blackboard Jungle, where the vicious high-school punks smash a teacher's Bix Beiderbecke records. So I knew Mike was a bad guy.) The music plays up his thug character as well. When Mike shows up in a doorway, we hear the clanging chords that usually greet the first appearance of a monster. This isn't a private eye film; it's a Hammer horror movie.

A film of winding stairways and furtive descents into darkness (and a final cauterizing blast of light), Kiss Me Deadly does its coarsely artful best to lure viewers into the lurid. What movies can't do that fiction can is chain you to the power of first-person narrative. Spillane puts you inside the thick, teeming skull of some modern-medieval creature — part Galahad, part dragon — and locks you there. You may want out, but you also want to stay, if only to see how similar Mike Hammer's atavistic codes and instincts are to yours, and how swiftly and deftly Spillane etches this urban underworld. (As novelist Mirian Ann Moore says, "Nobody ever hit a noun against a verb like Mickey Spillane.")

It's primal therapy through fiction, and the book releases you only at the last page from the awful fascination of its grip. A thrilling or sickening ordeal for you, dear reader. But for Mickey Spillane... it was easy.

• Richard Corliss