, which contains the first three Mike Hammer novels. I decided this because the book was only one dollar (as part of a book club offer), because I was looking for an entertaining page-turner of a diversion, and because I was curious. After all, the Mike Hammer novels have sold millions of copies over the last sixty years, were made into movies and television shows, and have loyal fans even today. I wanted to know what all the fuss was about.
For a period of a few years I was a literary snob, looking down on genre books and most bestsellers. Probably this was caused by taking so many literature courses and going for the MFA degree. Fortunately, I've been mostly cured of that snobbery. While I think that plenty of genre books are formulaic and not well-written, with little point to them, I have no love of "literary" books that are apparently intended to be read only by graduate students. What matters — nearly all that matters — is if a book is good, regardless of how publishers and academics and retailers choose to categorize them. Many genre books are well-crafted and compelling. I bring this up to assure you that I had a positive attitude when I started the first Mike Hammer novel,
. I was looking forward to a fun read to end my winter vacation.
is a very bad book.
It is an awful, amateurish, bad book. The characters are cardboard. The dialogue is false and pointless. The fight scenes are unbelievable. The plot, such as it is (and it isn't much), moves very slowly, and we are given far too many details about every irrelevant action — when the phone rings, when Mike Hammer picks up the phone, when he shaves, and how he cooks his breakfast. The pacing is slow. The author is determined to tell us every last thought of his narrator and every last detail of his day-to-day activities. Maybe some of this can be chalked up to the book being published in 1947 and the audience at the time having different expectations or more patience, but some of it is just bad writing and a self-absorbed narrator (and maybe author).
The narrator, Mike Hammer, has the mentality of a 15-year-old. An immature 15-year-old who talks in cliches and has to constantly brag about how tough he is. His self-aggrandizing narration reminds me of a rap song. If Spillane were starting out today, maybe he would be a rapper, so he could tell us how badass he is, how many hos he's banged, how he'll bust a cap in our ass if we disrespect him. Hammer trashes people's rights — not just the criminals (or those he suspects of being criminals), but innocent bystanders, whom he frequently threatens with physical violence.
Mike Hammer's high opinion of himself is on display on almost every page: how brilliant he is, tough he is, famous he is. Hammer is far from brilliant. When I was a kid, I liked reading Encyclopedia Brown stories. The fun was in seeing how, after the young detective has discovered the guilty party and uncovered the facts of the case, all the pieces fit together. I would look back at the story and, knowing how it ended, see how logical and perceptive Encyclopedia Brown was. That's part of the pleasure of reading Sherlock Holmes and all detective stories.
At the end of
I, The Jury, Hammer discovers who the murderer is. And it makes no sense. There's no realization on the part of the reader. No "a-ha!" moment. It's completely arbitrary. Hammer just concocts an explanation that bears little connection to the events and details that came before. He simply somehow knows who the murderer is. What a sham. Maybe there's a detail or two in the book that point to the murderer. There's something about a character having a firm grip, that in retrospect indicates that that character was stronger than people might think, hint-hint, and could pull a trigger. Maybe there are other details like this. I was so bored by the posing of the narrator and the amateurish writing, I must have missed them. Even as Hammer was confronting the murderer and explaining the case at the end, the "a-ha!" moment, I didn't care to pay much attention. It all seemed artificial.
Max Allan Collins, in the collection's introduction, writes:
I started reading Mickey's Mike Hammer novels when I was thirteen — and that's the age I revert to whenever I read a Spillane novel. I had already read Hammett and Chandler, and Spillane seemed to me their peer. I still feel that way today, and it still gets me into trouble. For over four decades now, I have found myself in the unlikely position of being perhaps the chief defender of one of the most popular writers of all time.
This says a great deal about the power of nostalgia. Talk to a child of the 1970s about Star Wars and you'll know what I mean, though you probably have examples from your own life and times. We tend to overestimate the quality of whatever we loved as children. I understand why Collins has an emotional attachment to Mike Hammer. Many books, songs, movies, and TV shows allow me to revert back to my childhood, remind me of my youth, and I have feelings associated with these works sometimes far out of proportion to the quality of the works themselves. Recapturing our past is practically a national obsession and the nostaligia market has never been bigger.
Nevertheless, Spillane is no Hammett. I haven't yet read Chandler and hardly consider myself even close to being an expert in the genre, but Hammett can really write. I read Hammett when I was an adult, not a 13-year-old. In
The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade is a tough guy who possesses a keen mind and quick fists that he is willing to use. He does not seem like a child. Mike Hammer does. Unlike
I, The Jury, Hammett's novels (at least the two I've read,
The Maltese Falcon and
The Thin Man) are coherent and actually make sense at the end. The detectives are witty and say clever things. They are page-turners in the best sense. I wanted to find out what happened next because I was sucked into the stories and believed the characters. I can't say the same for
I, The Jury.
Let me give just one example of how amateurish and careless
I, The Jury is. On page 48, Mike Hammer is sitting down and a man sneaks from behind and places a knife to his neck. Then there is a big fight and of course Hammer beats up the knife-guy and another guy, too. But before the ass-kicking, while the knife is still at Hammer's throat and he has not been able to move, he narrates the following:
The knife went under my chin very slowly. It was held loosely enough, but the slim fingers that held it were ready to tighten up the second I moved. Along the blade were the marks of a whetstone, so I knew it had been sharpened recently. The forefinger was laid on the top of the four-inch blade in proper cutting position. Here was a lug that knew what it was all about.
Try this experiment (if you can do so safely): Put a knife to your throat (or use a spoon). Can you see it? No? I didn't think so. Can you see or feel the fingers holding the knife? Probably not. Maybe you can feel the thumb, or a finger. Enough to determine whether or not the fingers are slim? No? That could be because you're not a great detective. Even were we to grant that Hammer is the greatest private detective there is and is such a badass that he can somehow tell that the knife is being held by a man with slim fingers, how would he know about the marks of a whetstone? He couldn't.
Spillane wants so much for Hammer to be tough and cool, he does this sort of thing (not always this obvious), in a variety of ways, throughout the novel. Most of it feels fake. I am used to seeing this in student writing in undergraduate fiction workshops. But, whatever one might think about the merits of popular genre works, professional writers and their editors are supposed to do better. And I believe that most of them do.
I won't try to figure out here why these books sold so many copies and were so popular. Something to do with the time and place, the cultural moment, whatever. I don't begrudge Spillane his millions of books sold or his fans their enjoyment. To each his own and all. And maybe Spillane became a better writer as his career progressed and he wrote some good books. I've only read
I, The Jury, and it's the only one I can judge. It isn't good.
