Word: novelists
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...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...
...those first years after the war, first base was as far as an American novelist could safely go. Spillane made the most of what little sexual license he had. Of a brief encounter with Lola in My Gun Is Quick Hammer rhapsodizes, "Her mouth was a soft bed of fire, her tongue a searching thing asking questions I had to answer greedily." In French kissing, as in all other aspects of a Hammer courtship, the woman is the aggressor. In the movies of I, the Jury and The Girl Hunters, the actor playing Hammer (Biff Elliot in the first, then...
...Quick buried its chance at B-minus competence with another unknown, inapt Hammer, Robert Bray. You might say that Spillane should always have played him, as he does in the 1963 The Girl Hunters. (Richard Wright, of Native Son fame, is the only other best-selling novelist I know who played his own major character in a movie. Anyone know others?) But that would be to overrate Spillane's hulking amateurism. He has fun in the movie, but maneuvers only on the surface of Hammer's tortured meanness...