The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in popular fiction, American literature, criminology, detective stories, gender studies, and related fields.
Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction is a biography by Max Allan Collins, an American mystery writer noted for his graphic novels.
Mickey Spillane was a crime novelist born in Brooklyn, New York, the United States of America.
He was known as the king of pulp fiction.
Pulp fiction is a type of story featuring lurid, often violent narratives, which were sold in book and magazine form from the late 1940s through the early 1960s.
His stories often feature his tough-guy detective character, Mike Hammer, who appears to be so macho that he may seem like a caricature to readers today.
Reportedly over 225 million copies of Spillane’s books were sold internationally.
Mickey Spillane’s character Mike Hammer fits the category of hardboiled detective, who typically fights violent lawbreakers while dealing with a legal system that has become as corrupt as the organized crime itself.
Cynical and often unsympathetic, the detectives of hardboiled fiction are often antiheroes. They include such fictional characters as Dick Tracy, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and Lew Archer.
The TU Library collection owns many other books by and about Mickey Spillane.
A number of other hardboiled detectives are featured in crime fiction donated to the TU Library by Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri and the late historian Benedict Anderson.
These books are available for loan to students, shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room on Underground 1 level of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.
Here are some examples of Mickey Spillane’s prose style which shows his exaggerated tough guy persona:
The cops aren’t exactly dumb, you know. We can get our own answers.
Not like I can. That’s why you buzzed me so fast. You can figure things out as quickly as I can, but you haven’t got the ways and means of doing the dirty work. That’s where I come in. You’ll be right behind me every inch of the way, but when the pinch comes I’ll get shoved aside and you slap the cuffs on. That is, if you can shove me aside. I don’t think you can.
- I, the Jury (1947)
When you sit at home comfortably folded up in a chair beside a fire, have you ever thought what goes on outside there? Probably not. You pick up a book and read about things and stuff, getting a vicarious kick from people and events that never happened. You’re doing it now, getting ready to fill in a normal life with the details of someone else’s experiences.
Fun, isn’t it? You read about life on the outside thinking about how maybe you’d like it to happen to you, or at least how you’d like to watch it. Even the old Romans did it, spiced their life with action when they sat in the Coliseum and watched wild animals rip a bunch of humans apart, reveling in the sight of blood and terror.
They screamed for joy and slapped each other on the back when murderous claws tore into the live flesh of slaves and cheered when the kill was made. Oh, it’s great to watch, all right. Life through a keyhole.
But day after day goes by and nothing like that ever happens to you so you think that it’s all in books and not in reality at all and that’s that. Still good reading, though. Tomorrow night you’ll find another book, forgetting what was in the last and live some more in your imagination.
But remember this: there are things happening out there. They go on every day and night making Roman holidays look like school picnics. They go on right under your very nose and you never know about them. Oh yes, you can find them all right. All you have to do is look for them. But I wouldn’t if I were you because you won’t like what you’ll find.
Then again, I’m not you and looking for those things is my job. They aren’t nice things to see because they show people up for what they are. There isn’t a coliseum any more, but the city is a bigger bowl, and it seats more people.
The razor-sharp claws aren’t those of wild animals but man’s can be just as sharp and twice as vicious. You have to be quick, and you have to be able, or you become one of the devoured, and if you can kill first, no matter how and no matter who, you can live and return to the comfortable chair and the comfortable fire. But you have to be quick. And able. Or you’ll be dead.
- My Gun is Quick (1950)
I couldn’t think. I couldn’t remember. I was wound up like a spring and ready to bust. All I could see was the dead guy in the middle of the room and my gun. My gun! Somebody grabbed at my arm and hauled me upright and the questions started again. That was as much as I could take. I gave a hell of a kick and a fat face in a fedora pulled back out of focus and started to groan, all doubled up. Maybe I laughed, I don’t know.
- Vengeance is Mine! (1950)
Nobody ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost fog-like, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy, yellow lights off in the distance.
Some place over there I had left my car and started walking, burying my head in the collar of my raincoat, with the night pulled in around me like a blanket. I walked and I smoked and I flipped the spent butts ahead of me and watched them arch to the pavement and fizzle out with one last wink. If there was life behind the windows of the buildings on either side of me, I didn’t notice it. The street was mine, all mine. They gave it to me gladly and wondered why I wanted it so nice and all alone.
There were others like me, sharing the dark and the solitude, but they were huddled in the recessions of the doorways not wanting to share the wet and the cold. I could feel their eyes follow me briefly before they turned inward to their thoughts again.
So I followed the hard concrete footpaths of the city through the towering canyons of the buildings and never noticed when the sheer cliffs of brick and masonry diminished and disappeared altogether, and the footpath led into a ramp then on to the spidery steel skeleton that was the bridge linking two states.
- One Lonely Night (1951)
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)