Graham Spence

Some years back I subscribed to a writing magazine, believing it would hone my word craft to semi-sophisticated levels.
It was my first and last foray into the arty ‘literary world’, and after my six-month subscription ran out, I binned the idea.
For never before had I come across a more pretentious bunch of twits, wittering on about ‘creativity’ or ‘metaphysics’ or ‘enlightenment’.
Almost all the sages sermonising on their ‘art’ came from middle class backgrounds, and almost all their politically correct manuscripts ‘explored’ how mean spirited the middle class was.
Heroes, in their novels, came from the noble working class, who despite prejudice and bourgeois barriers overcame all odds.
Not one seemed to grasp that in Europe today there are just two classes; the working class – who work – and the welfare class – who don’t.
There was no discussion whatsoever on how literature planned to tackle the great theme of this century; the clash between civilisation and medieval fundamentalism. And as writing is my stock-in-trade (the market for B-grade fishing guides being somewhat sparse at the moment), this depressed me profoundly.
Then it hit me what was fundamentally wrong with the so-called literary world. They simply cannot comprehend that writing is a trade, not some God-given mystery that only the chosen few can unravel. That’s why Mickey Spillane, who died last month at the age of 88, was to me a true hero of prose. He was a breath of absolute fresh air; a writer who wrote what he liked, not what sniffy critics liked, and found that was also what readers liked. Sure it was pulp fiction, but it was fun.
The difference between Spillane and the pontificating literary twerps that sneered at him was that he came from the real world. After leaving school during the Depression, he survived by odd jobbing as a lifeguard, stock-car racer, parachutist, shark-fisherman, treasure-hunter and circus trampolinist. His first foray into writing was churning out plots for penny-horrible comics like Captain Marvel where he let his fertile imagination run riot.
While serving as a pilot during World War 2, he noticed thousands of off-duty soldiers ploughing through hardback classics such as Moby Dick, because nothing else was on offer. A shrewd wheeler-dealer, he decided there was a market begging for cheap, action-packed paperbacks aimed at non-university professors. In other words, most of us. He decided to go for broke, banging out his first Mike Hammer thriller, ‘I the Jury’ in just three weeks. Although editors initially were reluctant to take on the book due to its preponderance of sex and violence (tame by today’s standards), Spillane persevered – and changed the face of publishing forever. As he predicted, Spillane’s sledgehammer style had massive popular appeal. ‘I the Jury’ sold six million copies and enabled him to buy a piece of rural beachfront in North Carolina, where as a true ‘roughneck’ he felt most at home. His study was a dilapidated shack on stilts overlooking the Atlantic, from which he cranked out his staccato prose on a battered Smith-Corona typewriter. ‘I don't write for posterity,’ he often remarked,
‘I write to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney.’ True to form, the critics loathed him. As one wrote in the influential Village Voice: ‘Spillane is like eating takeout fried chicken: so much fun to consume, but you can feel those lowlife grease-induced zits rising before you've finished the first drumstick.’ That was one of the kinder comments.
Spillane merely laughed. Barrel-chested and weather-beaten, he was rather like the hard-boiled men he wrote about and certainly never took himself seriously. ‘Nobody in my books drinks cognac because I can’t spell the word,’ he told one disdainful critic.
Money, he said, was ‘the greatest inspiration in the world’. The advance for his final Mike Hammer book in 1989, ‘The Killing Man’, was 1.5-million dollars.
But although he didn’t write for posterity, his exuberant legacy lives on. Mike Hammer was the forerunner of Dirty Harry and every tough cop movie ever made. Spillane not only changed the publishing world, he single-handedly created a new Hollywood genre.
And he had the last word. When accused of writing garbage, he chuckled: ‘Yeah – but its good garbage.’