Mickey Spillane

There are a number of stories he asked be off the record, and a couple of them then popped up a few nights later during his Guardian Lecture, but I've kept to his request. I've also had to leave out Mickey's instructions on how to kiss a duck's tail without ruffling the feathers, mostly because there's no way I can describe it in prose. Mickey's persona is that of a tough guy who doesn't really care about his art, but as this interview makes clear, good story telling grows from understanding people, and Spillane has a PhD in people...

Q: I told my mother I was interviewing Mickey Spillane and she said 'You make sure you tell him I named you after Mike Hammer, because she was 19 and reading I The Jury while she was pregnant and decided she liked the name Michael.

Spillane: I got a kid named Mike...jeez, the names they gave ME. My father was Catholic, my mother was Protestant, and because of that I got Christened in both churches, so I've got all these names...but my Dad always called me Mick. My mother called me Babe, and Babe is not a nice name for a guy, unless you're Babe Ruth.

Q: A lot of writers don't write under their given names.

Spillane: Yeah most of them. People are always surprised to find out my name is Spillane. I was the first one probably in writing to use a nickname, Mickey, and it stuck. You see, in all my titles I used to use the personal pronoun: I The Jury, Kiss Me, Deadly, My Gun is Quick, Vengeance is Mine... They stuck...they were important to use, it gives you a personal introduction. Now I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am. Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney.

Q: Why are a majority of your books out of print?

Spillane: I'll tell you why. They have these corporate turnovers and they say 'I think he's old and passe' but they never look at the sales! On top of that they never look at all the other things that're going on - I'm 82 years old, wherever I go everybody knows me, but here's why - I'm a merchandiser, I'm not just a writer, I stay in every avenue you can think of.

Q: You wrote I, the Jury very quickly...

Spillane: In 9 days. It was either 9 or 19.

Q: You knew it was going to be a huge hit?

Spillane: I knew a couple of things...during the war years they came out with reprints of all the Dumas novels, Moby Dick, for the servicement, and I saw this and believe me I'm a very sharp merchandiser, and I say this is the new marketplace for writing, original paperback books. Now at that time you had to go through hardback. So I wrote I the Jury and turned it in to EP Dutton, it had been rejected by four different publishers, saying no no this is too violent, too dirty...and it was finally picked up by Roscoe Fawcett, Fawcett Publications, and he was a distributor, doing comic books, but he saw the potential and he went to New American Library, which was Signet Books, and he said 'if you print this book I'll distrubute it'. Now they can't get distribution, so it's a win-win thing for them, but they have to get it published in hardback, so they go to Dutton and say if you print this, we'll do the paperback, so now it's win-win-win, and they offer me $250 and I say no, I need a thousand dollars to build a house in Newburgh, so I get a $1,000 advance, which was unheard of. So Roscoe ordered a million copies, and THAT was unheard of! So somebody in his outfit says, oh that wasn't what he meant, he must've meant a quarter million. So they bring out a quarter of a million at the wrong time, cause books sell great at Christmas time, but my book came out between Christmas and New Year, which is death, and it went straight to the top, because it was word of mouth, and it's sold out and Fawcett says get the rest of them out, and the guy says there aren't any more and Roscoe says whaddaya mean, I ordered a million, and a guy got fired!

Q: And then you took a long time on your next book, which was rejected...

Spillane: The Twisted Thing, yeah, that was rejected...editors are funny, they were still old time editors and they didn't like this new-style stuff...there's too much sex, too much violence...but actually, it's a true story, the story it was based on was true...and when I finally turned it in...wow, it went right to the top. I held it for 18 years, they were desperate for something new...finally I said, yeah, how about this one. (Laughs) I got one like that now. I turned a book into Dutton, not a Mike Hammer, and they're holding because the editor doesn't like it. I don't care what the editor likes or dislikes, I care what the people like. I don't want that editor to tell me what the people want.

Q: Before that you'd written comic books for Martin Goodman.

Spillane: Oh yeah, I was one of the first guys writing comic books, I wrote Captain America, with guys like Stan Lee. Stan could write on three typewriters at once! I wrote The Human Torch, Submariner. I worked my way down. I started off at the high level, in the slick magazines, but they didn't use my name, they used house names. Anyway, then I went downhill to the pulps, then downhill further to the comics. I went downhill class-wise, but I went uphill, money-wise! I was making more money in the comics. I wrote the original Mike Hammer as a comic, Mike Danger.

[After the first boom in Hammer novels, Spillane wrote one story for Manhunt, a men's magazine]

Lemme tell you how that happened. I had this story I'd written for Colliers, but the editor there was a woman, and she said, 'as long as I'm editor here there'll never be a story by Mickey Spillane here' so I turned in a short-short, which they bought, and St. John, the editor of Manhunt, came up on day and asked me about the story I wrote for Colliers and he said 'I'd be interested in buying that from you.' Now I wasn't thinking fast enough, cause they've always got more than one check already written in their pockets, but that story didn't take me long to write, and he said, 'would you accept $25,000 for it' and I said sure, and he pulls this check out.

Q: Did you get the feeling Mike Hammer was right all the time?

Spillane: See, heroes never die. John Wayne isn't dead, Elvis isn't dead. Otherwise you don't have a hero. You can't kill a hero. That's why I never let him get older.

Q: He doesn't get older, but does he change with the world...?

Spillane: Remember the elephant says, 'if only I knew then what I know now'. So now when I write about Mike Hammer, he looks at a girl, he KNOWS now...you know what, he's got all this information about age, that would be me, but he's still a young guy, he can use that.

Q: Would he still put Velda on a pedastal?

Spillane: Oh yeah. People still come up to me and say 'she walked towards me, her hips waving a happy hello', things I wrote. They remember this stuff. "On some people skin is skin, on you it's an opportunity to dine."

Sex isn't like it used to be though...I've got a great line I use. I get asked it all the time, someone comes up and says 'how could Mike Hammer have possibly shot that naked broad right in it belly button'? I say 'he missed'. (Laughs).

Q: He shot high?

Spillane: No, I just said he missed. I didn't say one thing wrong, there's nothing dirty about that...THEY were the dirty ones. There was another there, this girl is giving Mike information, and he's opening a suitcase, and she wants him to look at her. She's just given him this big piece of information and she says "MIKE!!!,' and she's taken this housecoat and spread it open and she's naked and he says 'my beautiful blonde had a brunette base'. Interesting. Only place you see a beautiful blonde is you go to Sweden or someplace. She might've had her roots showing, but everybody's got another thought. But these are the little things that work their way into a story.

Q: Let's talk about your influences. I know Carroll John Daly must've been a big one.

Spillane: Oh he was a great writer for the pulps...Tyne Daly from Cagney and Lacey, she's his niece you know, but Daly was a great story writer, but he couldn't write long books. He was my favourite, and after I was a big writer I wrote a fan letter to John, saying how much I admired him when I was young, and wanted to write like him, and how I thought of Race Williams when I created Mike Hammer, and I got a letter back from his agent saying they were gonna sue me for stealing his character! So I got in touch with John and he was angry, this was his first fan letter in years! and he fired his agent!

Q: What about Chandler? There's that famous scene where Marlowe throws what's pretty obviously a Mike Hammer book into the garbage.

Spillane: I know. I think it's pretty stupid. Did I tell you the Hemingway story?

Q: No.

Spillane: Hemingway hated me. I outsell him and he was steamed. One day he wrote a story for Bluebook berating me. So I'm going on a big TV show in Chicago and I don't get it, that's sour grapes...I mean if you can't say something nice about someone why say anything at all? So I go on this show and the host says 'did you see what Hemingway said about you in Bluebook?' and I say "Hemingway who?"

That killed him

Every summer I went down to Florida on treasure hunts, and there's this great restaurant called the Chesapeake and they had a picture of Hemingway behind the bar. So one day the owner asks if she could have a picture of me to put up there, and she puts one there. One day Hemingway comes in and sees my picture and says 'what's he doing next to me? Either take his down or take mine down, so they took his down and he never came back to that restaurant (Laughs).

Q: The word apocalyptic keeps coming up in criticism of your work. Do you believe in the second coming?

Spillane: The word 'coming' is a misnomer. The word used is 'parousia' in Greek, and it means 'presence.' Take the president for example. Do you know him? No. But you feel his presence, all the taxes he lays on you. We feel his presence because we have to live under his direction. So when these things were asked of Jesus they asked 'what will be the sign of your presence, and the end of the system of things...now that was translated in the King James Bible as the end of the world. Now the word 'world' and the word 'earth' are two different things...the Bible says the earth abides forever. It's the simplicity of it, religion has turned everything inside out!

Q: Did you ever write anything in the Hammer books to specifically answer criticisms?

Spillane: I don't pay any attention to them. Those guys, they get free books and then they try to tear you down. Critics themselves, they used to tear me up. One time I had the whole New York Times bestseller list, then the Godfather came along, pushed me out...here's something funny, Hy Gardner gave me this...at one point I was the fifth most translated writer in world. Ahead of me were Lenin, Gorky, Tolstoy, and Jules Verne. (Laughs) It doesn't mean anything, but it's a funny thing to bring up. One day this little prissy guy, I'm at a tea party, if you can picture me at a tea party, and this guy comes up to me and says 'what a horrible commentary on the reading habits on Americans to think that you have seven of the top ten bestsellers of all time" and I looked at him at I said "You're lucky I don't write three more books."

Q: Who would've been the best guy to play Mike Hammer?

Spillane: Jack Stang, if he could act. He was a tough Marine. He went into one Japanese island in the Pacific, with 240 men, he was one of four came out.

I always wanted to have Mike Mazurki play Hammer....too bad he couldn't act. Remember when Dick Powell played Marlowe? Well Mike Mazurki is playing Moose Malloy, a big guy, he's 6-6, and Chandler said he wore this outlandish plaid jacket, 'it was so big it had golf balls for buttons'. Comes time to make the movie, they didn't use that line! He was big enough. It was like hitting Hammer over the head with a coathanger.

Q: Your second wife helped promote your books by posing naked on the covers.

Spillane: She wanted to do that. I fondly refer to her as 'the snake'. She liked the publicity, the big time, she went Hollywood, in a bad way.

Q: You never went Hollywood...?

Spillane: Me? Shoot...I go into Hollywood, do my business, and get out. That's not my lifestyle. And their lifestyle is terrible. They don't live too long. You know how old Hitler was when he died? 59?

Q: But that wasn't natural causes!

Spillane: He would've died younger in Hollywood! Erroll Flynn, 53 he was. Gee. You look at him and you say, 'what happened?" I don't want to be like that. But I don't care about posterity. I say "Now!"