Word: novelists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...then Mickey Spillane, who died this week at 88, was not your typical novelist. He had the burly look of a longshoreman; his face was meaty, like his prose style. And Mickey - that's a name to put in a cartoon, not on august hard covers. He also slipped a Mickey to the image of the serious fiction writer, showing a brisk contempt for the elevated anguish of creating literature. In just five years, between 1947 and 1952, he served up seven novels: I, the Jury; My Gun Is Quick; Vengeance Is Mine!; One Lonely Night; The Big Kill; Kiss...
...argument can be made that he was the most influential writer of the mid-20th century. I won't, but I don't have to, since more knowledgeable writers have. Start with Collins, the crime novelist (Road to Perdition) who is the Mick's most assiduous champion: he collaborated with Spillane on several anthologies, cast him as a featured player in two movies. Collins directed and co-authored One Lonely Knight, the only book-length study of Spillane. Collins credits Spillane with creating, in Hammer "the template for James Bond, Dirty Harry, Billy Jack, Rambo, John Shaft, and countless other...
...frontier justice, a vigilante who spared the courts the trouble of a trial by executing the villain himself." The jolt this character gave to literature, by being both so brutal and so popular, was immediate and lasting. "We were a very puritan nation right up through the 1950s," says novelist Loren Estleman. "I think it was people like Mickey Spillane, getting out there and effectively butting his head against the wall that made those walls collapse...
...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...
...connection not lost on some of Spillane's excoriators. Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent was an indictment of comic books and their supposedly toxic influence on kids; the only novelist Wertham mentioned was Spillane. In a way, that was acute. The kids who read comics before World War II were ready for stronger stuff, but with the same bold, obvious, shall we say cartoonish verve. And Wertham was right in fearing that the comic-book worldview was one that would not fade, like acne, as the kids grew up. They would demand adolescent popular art forever...