Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction by Max Allan Collins & James L. Traylor

Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction
by Max Allan Collins and James L. Traylor
Mysterious Press, 2023

For Mickey Spillane, the extraordinarily popular novelist who called his readers loyal “customers,” the only thing better than selling lots of books was the fame that accompanied his dominance of the postwar crime-fiction market. As Max Allan Collins and James L. Traylor note in their new biography, Spillane parlayed his renown—the product of brisk, violent tales starring hard-ass private investigator Mike Hammer—into endorsement deals, celebrity friendships and a fleeting film career. He judged beauty contests, hosted a celebrity fishing tournament and played a murder victim on Columbo—all while tracking and touting his sales figures. “Mine sold four million,” he telegrammed Peter Benchley, whose novel The Deep (1976) had the same title as a 1961 Spillane novel. “Hope yours does as well.”

Though Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction is a short book for such a rich life—the text is less than 300 pages—Collins and Traylor do a first-rate job of explaining what distinguished the author from his peers on the page and especially at the cash register, where Spillane’s novels have sold an astounding 200 million copies.

But this is a book with obvious shortcomings, most of which stem from the coauthors’ reverence for their subject. Collins, an established novelist, and Traylor, a genre-fiction scholar, are unabashed fans who have collaborated on previous laudatory books about Spillane. Collins became a friend of Spillane’s—late in the book, he recalls exchanging “I love yous” with his aging pal—and he’s completed and published some of the late writer’s unfinished manuscripts. This gives him a financial stake in Spillane’s continued relevance. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, but it results in an unusually gentle biography.

Spillane’s distinctively American ascent began in the 1940s. After serving as a flight instructor in Mississippi during the Second World War, the Brooklyn native fell in some writers supplying dialog and scenarios for the growing comic-book market. Per Collins and Traylor, Spillane scripted a bit of Captain America, wrote “‘filler’ short stories needed to satisfy postal regulations” and, working under strict word-count constraints, forged a lean narrative voice.

His first novel, I, The Jury (1947), introduced readers to Mike Hammer, a psychologically damaged, self-righteous war veteran working as a Manhattan private eye. “There are ten thousand mugs that hate me and you know it,” Hammer tells a cop. “They hate me because if they mess with me I shoot their damn heads off. I’ve done it and I’ll do it again.” Indeed, Spillane’s debut ends with Hammer shooting a woman who has killed one of his friends. “How c-could you?” the wounded woman asks. Hammer answers, “It was easy.” Hammer’s terse reply, Collins and Traylor write, is “a metaphor for the lost innocence of postwar America, and one of the most famous last lines in fiction.”

With their “brutal vengeance and sexual promiscuity,” Collins and Traylor write, the 13 Hammer novels Spillane published before he died in 2006 were often ripped by critics; one labeled him “an inept vulgarian,” and many suggested he was a misogynist. The accusation didn’t materialize from nowhere. Playing Hammer in the film The Girl Hunters (1962), Spillane tells a woman he won’t punch her: “Hell, I never hit dames…I always kick ‘em.” It’s idiotic to scold a dead writer from another era for putting ugly dialog in the mouth of a made-up character. But given today’s heightened sensitives, Collins and Traylor feel the need to defend Spillane from such criticisms. Unfortunately, their efforts are clumsy—after hurriedly citing the intellectual credentials of one of Spillane’s fictional women, they make an abrupt turn, admiring how another character, as played by Margaret Sheridan in I, The Jury (1953), “sanctions her savior’s sadism with a toss of her hair.”

To be sure, Collins and Traylor do some solid writing. They’re very good on Spillane’s seminal role in the postwar “paperback boom,” which was spurred by the many millions of free books publishers and the government shipped to soldiers. His popularity, boosted by impulse buys from “the spinner racks of drug stores and tobacco shops,” resulted in “a record-breaking first printing of 2.5 million” paperback copies of The Big Kill, first published as a hardcover in 1951. Likewise, the coauthors helpfully contextualize Spillane’s narrative tactics, chief among them his focus on Hammer’s weakness for vengeance. This surely resonated with disillusioned veterans and men who, like Spillane, served stateside and perhaps felt some guilt about it. “The retribution aspect of” Spillane’s work “is what truly set author and character apart. So had the unusual near-psychotic ravings of the antihero on the rampage,” they write. “This was all new.” Astutely, the novels “never gave a description of Hammer,” enabling, in Spillane’s words, “a guy that’s short and fat” to imagine himself in Hammer’s place.

Frequently, though, Collins and Traylor write like adoring fans. Mike Hammer, they claim, was “as well-known in the second half of the twentieth century” as Batman, and Spillane, a patently hopeless actor, was “as comfortable on-screen as Robert Mitchum.” These aren’t the only bits that feel specious or punched-up. Spillane is depicted as a film-editing savant giving advice to Oscar-winning director William Wellman and a preternaturally cool performer who, without preparation, steps onto a live TV set and rescues Milton Berle’s sinking holiday broadcast.

Collins and Traylor close their book with a flimsy anecdote about an elderly Spillane. Believing that two strangers were about to rob a gas station near his South Carolina home, he makes it known that he’s carrying a pistol, foiling the crime before it even gets started. Wearing a trench coat like the one worn by his famed character, Spillane “had become…an eighty-year-old Mike Hammer.” This may be accurate—or just as likely, Spillane mistook the strangers’ intentions and prevented a crime that was never going to occur.

On several occasions, Collins and Traylor refer to Spillane as his character’s father—he’s “Mike Hammer’s papa” and “Mike Hammer’s daddy.” While most biographers wouldn’t dream of using such cloying terms, they’re in keeping with the predominant tone of this book, which treats its subject like a beloved member of the family.

Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York City.