Someone in this room is overdrawn

Last week I finally got around to doing something that I’ve been meaning to do for about 45 years. I cracked open a novel by Mickey Spillane, a writer in the pulp-fiction end of the private-eye genre.

Spillane was born March 9, 1918, so the 100th anniversary of his birth has just crossed paths with our calendars. Born in Brooklyn, he eventually moved to South Carolina, where he passed away in 2006. It’s said that over 200 million copies of his books sold. His claim to fame was a series of novels featuring Mike Hammer, a pugnacious, street-savvy P.I. who was often motivated more by vengeance than money.

When I was a kid, battered old copies of Mike Hammer paperbacks were always making the rounds. I never managed to get my mitts on a copy, though. As soon as somebody had a book to lend, somebody else snapped it up. You’d have better luck catching a neutrino with a baseball mitt than trying to find an unclaimed copy of a Mike Hammer novel.

More recently, the pulp fiction genre in general, and Mickey Spillane’s legacy in particular, have gelled into literary lore, part of Americana every bit as much as film noir is. So I wanted to read some Mike Hammer material to see what made it tick and to ponder what accounted for its popularity.

I read three such books, actually, since the modern reprints often come in three-in-one-volumes.

Spillane completed 13 books in the Mike Hammer series. He left behind a number of uncompleted manuscripts that were published after someone else finished writing them. Spillane also wrote books outside of the Mike Hammer series, including a couple of children’s books.

I’m no authority on the detective genre, but my take is that it broadly offers a few flavors. One flavor, such as the Mike Hammer series, is fast-moving stories that involve a lot of fights, interactions with seductive damsels, and, well, that’s pretty much it: blood and lipstick. So what was the raw appeal to the masses? Hey, I just told you. Raw, indeed.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the chin-pullers, stories in which intellectual power, not brute force, is on display. There’s more thought than action. The caper might even be cracked from the confines of an overstuffed armchair in a well-appointed study.

“Someone in this room,” the sleuth will declare to all assembled therein, “is a murderer.”

Yeah, and someone else in this room doesn’t care. Namely, me. This stuff could never hold my attention. If I want a puzzle to solve from the confines of my study, I’ll try to balance my checkbook.

Anyway, back in my beach chair world, where I’m arbitrarily making up literary distinctions, I’ve got another notion to offer: There’s a fertile swath of turf between the blood-and-lipstick fare and the chin-pulling fare. This middle ground is not raw and visceral, but it’s not dry and priggish, either.

And here I’ll submit that a detective story is often just a convenient way to frame a narrative. After all, a hero has to do something for a living, and needs some excuse to go nose-poking into affairs better left alone. What better excuse than to be a detective, or private eye, or investigator, or even, in the case of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, a “salvage expert” who salvages money that people were swindled out of?

I’ll offer that last one as a case in point, since it’s the spot in this genre that I’m most familiar with. My motivation for joining McGee on his adventures isn’t so I can try to match wits with him and solve the caper before he does. I’m not that ambitious. No, it’s because whatever he’s up to is more interesting than what I’m up to. That’s not a hard standard to meet, I’ll admit. Anyway, I also like the way McGee phrases his observations about life. Overall, then, I’m just happy to join him because he’s good company.

Would Mike Hammer be good company? The character doesn’t really lend itself to that kind of question in these fast-paced novels. Readers join the action to ride along with Hammer during a car chase, not to hear a soliloquy on labor economics.

Me, I’m probably more of a soliloquy guy, but at least I don’t have to wonder what I was missing all those years ago when I couldn’t get my hands on a Mike Hammer novel. So that’s one mystery that has been solved.

While I’m solving mysteries, I will further practice my detective skills by making a bold accusation:

Someone in this room is going to have a cheeseburger for lunch.

Oh, and fries, too.