BOOKS

BOOKS

Power Hungry Dinosaur Gets His Lumps

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF MICKEY SPILLANE

Signet Books

On order of importance)

THE BODY LOVERS KISS ME, DEADLY VElSIGEANCE IS MINE SURVIVAL . .. ZERO! THE TWISTED THING MY GUN IS QUICK THE GIRL HUNTERS ONE LONELY NIGHT THE SNAKE THE ERECTION SET THE DAY OF THE GUNS I, THE JURY THE BIG KILL THE DEATH DEALERS THE LONG WAIT BLOODY SUNRISE THE DEEP THE DELTA FACTOR KILLER MINE THE BY-PASS CONTROL THE TOUGH GUYS ME, HOOD

There used to be this twerp in my high school gym class who would constantly follow me around, and every time I’d squat down during exercises he’d reach under between my legs and start twisting my nuts. I’d always try to get loose, but he’d whisper something in my ear like: “Don’t make nary a move, buddy, or I’ll cut off your testicles in the locker room and rub the blood all over your face.” So I steered clear of that dude, and even went so far as to hire a couple of tuff-bastard bodyguards.

Mickey 'Spillane has the same fascination with balls. All his characters mutter things like, “I’m gonna roll your nuts across the floor,” or “Balls to you, fella,” or “Lick my lumps and I’ll love you forever.” Mickey Spillane’s a power-hungry dinosaur and your masculine strength is in your balls. Without ’em, you just ain’t a man.

That’s why most people are scared to read Spillane’s stuff. Not because he deals only with the brutal nightmare world of corrupt cops, strungout hookers, drag queens, tit-twisting thugs, con artists, vengeful rats, junkie punks, etc. or because his mangled corpses are so detailed in hauntingly descriptive terms or even because it’s all ‘Kick It or Kill.” It’s primarily because of this ball factor. Spillane’s novels are all holding back, as if the author were scratching his nuts ever so slowly, until blam-blam - the last line pokes out like an erect prick — and the whole book explodes into a power punch.

A good example of this can be seen in Vengeance is Mine, wherein Mike Hammer pursues this beautiful piece of cunt throughout the narrative, but it’s not until the last line of the book that he actually discovers she’s really a man.

And the main characters — they’re all lusty ballsy detectives or ex-GI’s or counterspies or tuff hoods. Yeah, Tiger Mann and Mike Hammer and Regan and Johnny McBride and Dog Kelly have all got nothing on their minds but churning up the juices in their nuts. They’re tigers of the world, and they make their own laws and if anybody gets in their way, well, here’s the spiel:

1 want somebody’s skin, and the first time they get rough they’ll catch a slug in the front or the back or even in the top of the head. I don’t care. where I shoot them.I play it their way, only worse.

Tiger Mann smashes a Communist conspiracy and an ex-Nazi spy ring in The Day of the Guns, or Mike Hammer tries to capture the kidnapper of a 14-yearold genius in The Twisted Thing or combats a gigantic plot to destroy the USA in Survival. .. Zero! and Dog Kelly attempts to regain his inheritance while fighting an international dope syndicate in Spillane’s largest and most complicated blockbuster ever, The Erection Set. But no matter what these characters are doing, their most vital motivation is to get into some girl’s pants or smash somebody’s head in. Their hardons never are allowed to shrivel.

Other than all the violence, tho, what throws most counter-culture creeps off the scent of Spillane fiction is simply his attitude towards America. Certainly Spillane is just itching to drop the bomb on the chinks and plow into all those Latin American troublemakers, and he don’t hide it none either. Consider this dedication in the front of one of his works:

To Nat Drutman and the days of the Kaydets and the AAF when the blue yonder was really wild and even wilder when you got shot out of it.

War is the epitome of blood-gushing violence, and so obviously Spillane would be for it in any form or for any reason. It has nothing to do with politics, though, and I seriously doubt whether Spillane feels any sort of moral patriotism. He identifies with the lone wolves and the rebels and the what’s-init-for-me syndrome.

Nevertheless, this still ain’t counterculture reading material. They find it much too difficult to examine this junk with any sense of detached amusement. Mickey Spillane may very well be the greatest hack writer of all time, but he still has a crewcut and that leaves ’em cold.

That’s too bad, too, ’cause some of Spillane’s devices are the shoddiest since Burroughs peaked with his fragmentary dribble\ frame-shots. For example, there’s the usual sudden appearance of a long-lost lover or an arch-enemy who was thought dead or a blind gimp who turns out to be a stoolie. In The Girl Hunters, Mike Hammer turned into a booze hound and had already made the gutters his home, for he sent a girl he was really serious about out on a job and she never returned. He drowned his sorrows in whiskey and almost died, but the girl suddenly returned and rescues the poor helpless private eye from his depressive state.

' But the melodramatic flavor is never spiced with any sort of abstract description. All description is stripped to its bare essentials, and the naked passages are then connected by lotsa conjunctions and plenty of thought tangents. In fact, Spillane’s novels are composed of only dialogue and long rambling paragraphs which never go anywhere until the final last words in which all restlessness settles and curls into a dirty womb. Lotsa repetition like in rock lyrics, and mostly very little amplification.

Yet, the best eye-catching device of all is the way Spillane has his publishers package his books. Usually there’s some girl on the cover with a gun gripped between her lips, and she’s always in some sort of fuck-position. Then the title is in blaring caps with lotsa critical acclaim sprinkled all over the place saying as how this is the biggest and best Spillane novel yet (each book is supposed to be his best yet, get it?) plus there’s always some idea of how much the particular book has sold. But it’s the poetry on the outside which really dazzles ya. They gotta catch your attention somehow and clue you in on what’s inside at the same time, right? So here’s the beautiful way they do it, which is sheer Ferlinghetti if you ask me:

The Guns, The Punks, The Whores Were Dying Too Fast.

Right then and there you start slobbering cause not even the prose inside can touch that sensitivity.

The best way, though, to get some idea of this man’s imaginative guts is to look at a passage from one of his works. I’ve chosen the best example I could find from Spillane’s most recent work, The Erection Set, because it contains all the ingredients and gritty feel I’ve been discussing here. Likewise, cause it especially deals with the ball factor that dangles in every one of his fictional sagas. (Dog Kelly is talking; all of Spillane’s works are told from the viewpoint of his main character.)

He tried one lunge with the ice pick and I broke his wrist with the barrel of the .38 then laid it across the side of his head before he could let out a scream. He went down in a heap like dropping an old laundry bag, the pick rolling from his fingers. It was a nice new sliver of steel, that pick. You could buy them in any dime store and when you loosened the handle and sunk it into somebody you pulled back all your fingerprints and left pain and slow death behind. Voorhies and Brown had gone that way. Bridey had given it to Bud Healey in the spine and Bud had been a paralytic from the waist down ever since, vegetating in that cottage outside of Brussels.

So I broke every finger of Bridey’s hands, too, then stitched him up the side of each cheek so he’d never be invisible in a crowd again. I opened his belt, pulled his pants and shorts down and waited the two minutes until he started to wake up, holding the point of the pick right over the two goodie sacs, and just as a groan wheezed through his lips and his eyes opened and rolled toward, mine I drove the ice pick through those lumps of tissue into the rubbertiled floor and the frenzied yell of horror he started never got past the sharp hiss of his sucked-in breath before he fainted.

Unless it’s getting your tongue slit with a razor blade, I can’t imagine anything more painful than having an ice pick rammed thru your balls.

As you can see, this stuff ain’t for babies. Plot-wise it all stinks. I have yet to understand a single solitary Spillane plot, and that’s because each novel is too jumbled and rambling to keep up with things. All you’re really interested in is the descriptions of violence and the fuck scenes and the characters’ snappy comebacks and watching Spillane wreck havoc outa the American moral code and sitting on the toilet looking at the picture of the girl on the book’s cover.

Take my advice, though — if you’re a John Sebastian-type who’s hitchhiking to Canada to find peace and contentment and sniffling bearded comrades, this ballsy trash ain’t for you. Like, you best go read Richard Brautigan or something, you know.

Robot A. Hull