Word: fictional
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...