The Crime of Our Lives

by Lawrence Block

  Which is fine with me, as I’d always rather have a living friend than a subject for a column. But this month it leaves me looking to write something about a man I didn’t know all that well.

  I certainly didn’t know him nearly as well, or for nearly as long, as Max Allan Collins, who idolized Mickey Spillane the writer and became a very close friend of Mickey Spillane the man; since Mickey’s death in 2006, Al has served as Mickey’s literary executor, skillfully and sensitively preparing some unfinished manuscripts for publication, starting with a final Mike Hammer novel, The Goliath Bone, in 2008. (Since then we’ve had The Big Bang, with Kiss Her Goodbye and The Consummata due this year.)

  Al’s recollections of Mickey would very likely fill a book, and I can only hope that someday they do just that. But perhaps mine, fleshed out with some thoughts and observations, may at least fill a column.

  My favorite Mickey Spillane story is one I heard a year or two before I ever met the man. More than twenty years ago, several crime novelists were invited to appear for a radio panel discussion of their craft. I wasn’t one of them, but Donald E. Westlake was, and it was he who told me the story. Whoever the panelists were, they nattered back and forth until their hour was up, and then, when they were off the air, Spillane said, “You know what? We never talked about money.”

  If I remember correctly, Long John Nebel was the host. Whoever the lucky fellow was, he winced at this, and steeled himself to explain to the creator of Mike Hammer that there was no money budgeted to pay the panelists.

  But that wasn’t what Mickey was getting at.

  “We didn’t talk about money,” he said, “and money’s very important. Let me give you an example. Back when we first moved down to South Carolina, I just relaxed and took it easy for a while, and every now and then it would occur to me that it would be fun to write a story. But I didn’t have any ideas. I would take long walks on the beach, I would sit and think, but I could never manage to come up with an idea.

  “Then one day I got a call from my accountant. ‘Mickey,’ he said, ‘it’s not desperate or anything, but the money’s starting to run low. It might be a good idea to generate some income.’

  “So I thanked him and hung up the phone, and I took a walk on the beach, and bang! Just like that, I started getting ideas!”

  Mickey wasn’t being cynical. What he was doing, it seems to me, was telling a plain truth about the mechanics of artistic creativity. Necessity, for the writer as for anyone else, is very much the mother of invention. We get ideas because we feel a need for ideas, and when that need vanishes the well of ideas goes dry—until it’s needed once again.

  This is not to say that it’s only money that makes the mare go. When I began writing I certainly hoped to get paid for it, but self-expression and ego gratification were far more powerful motivators. And I’d guess that was true at least in part for Mickey—for a certain number of years. And then it wasn’t.

  Mickey published I, the Jury, in 1947. It didn’t do much as a Dutton hardcover, but sold like crazy once it went into paperback. Then he wrote and published six more novels between 1950 and 1952—My Gun Is Quick, Vengeance Is Mine!, The Big Kill, The Long Wait, One Lonely Night, and Kiss Me, Deadly. All but The Long Wait feature Mike Hammer, and it’s these seven books that (at least as of 1980) were among the fifteen bestselling American novels of all time.

  Mickey would tell you that he wrote the books for money, and I’m sure he did. But those first seven books had a drive and energy he never entirely recaptured in later years, even as his later books never matched them in popularity. I think it’s safe to say they came out of his inner self in a way that later books did not, that he needed to write them for reasons having little to do with dollars and cents.

  Then he moved to Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, and stopped writing. Then the accountant called and he started in again.

  I was probably in Mickey’s company half a dozen times over the last ten or twelve years of his life. On several of those occasions I heard him say the same thing: “I’m not an author. I’m a writer.”

  I wanted to ask him what the hell he meant. The distinction he drew was clearly not out of a dictionary. I knew what he was getting at, that author implied some sort of lah-di-dah ivory-tower full-of-oneself attitude, while a writer could be free of pretense, a solid regular-guy craftsman producing something for ordinary folks to read. Velvet collar versus blue collar, if you will.

  Well, okay. The guy was Mickey Spillane, so I figured he could get away with saying something like that if he wanted to. But there was a chip-on-the-shoulder thuggishness to it that I found off-putting. It seemed a curious attitude for a guy who made a living making up stories and writing them down.

  Maybe the critics’ barbs hurt, and this was his response.

  Then a couple of weeks ago I found a quote from Colette, who was hardly a sterile academician herself, and I just loved the way it worked in juxtaposition with Mickey’s oft-repeated line. So for a while I used them both as a subscript for my email correspondence, and here’s how they look together:

  “I’m not an author. I’m a writer.”

  —Mickey Spillane

  “Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.”

  —Colette

  I don’t know that I read all of Mickey’s first seven books, but it’s possible. I was in high school when the Signet paperbacks came out, and that’s when I read them.

  I thought they were okay. At the time a lot of my reading was in search of sexual excitement and information, and Mickey Spillane had a reputation in that area, but even then it seemed a stretch to call the work erotic. There was sometimes a sexual aspect to the stories and situations, and Mike Hammer surely had an eye for the dames, but it never got all that hot.

  I never read Mickey after high school. There was a gap there, nothing came out between 1952 and 1961. I did pick up one or two of the later books, but found them tedious, and not worth finishing.

  With the early books, you finished them. You might or might not like them, might or might not admire the way they were written. But you finished them.

  Q: What do you get if you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with an agnostic?

  A: Someone who rings your doorbell for no apparent reason.

  It’s hard not to equate the diminished impact of the later work with Mickey’s emergence as a Jehovah’s Witness. He was converted sometime in the 1950s by someone who did indeed come to his door, and remained devoutly committed to the faith throughout his life.

  He always denied that the books changed as a result of his religion. And indeed Mike Hammer’s code remains about the same, and the world of Spillane’s fiction is still divided into good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys deserve what’s coming to them, and damn well get it.

  But something’s different.

  And why did those first books hit readers as hard as they did? We can talk about their energy, and how they had more drive than later Spillane, but lots of Mickey’s contemporaries wrote tough books about driven, energetic characters. Many of them were superior stylists, too—for all that Ayn Rand, bless her heart, found a way to prove that Mickey was a better writer than Thomas Wolfe.

  I keep coming back to a point I mentioned earlier, in my introduction to the Dutton omnibus. Spillane, whose first prose fiction was short-short stories for the comics, emerged as a novelist writing prose comic books for grown-ups. His readers had read comic books before they read novels, and they were predisposed to appreciate what he gave them. They responded full-out to the pace, the immediacy, even the lack of nuance.

  Mickey was made a Grand Master of Mystery Writers of America in 1995.

  Sixteen years later, it seems surprising that MWA waited so long. But that’s not how it looked at the time. The notion of giving him this award was hugely controversial, and a substantial proportion of MWA’s activ
e membership regarded the whole notion as a travesty.

  I was at a meeting, probably in the fall of 1994, probably at Bouchercon. If I remember correctly, it was an unofficial gathering of MWA people to consider the question. On one side, the pro-Spillane contingent argued that Mickey was enormously influential, that he had not only brought a whole generation of new readers to crime fiction but that in so doing he had spawned the whole world of hardboiled paperback original fiction. Gold Medal Originals, it was suggested, owed their very existence to the new market Mickey and Mike Hammer had called into existence.

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  On the other side, the anti-Spillane crowd pointed out that, influential though they might well be, Mickey’s books were essentially crap. The plots were dumb, the characters lacked any semblance of depth, the underlying philosophy was brutish, and the writing itself was heavy-handed and crude. Yes, the books were popular—or had been, decades ago. But it was not MWA’s business to reward popularity. The marketplace did that. Our august organization gave out Edgars and designated Grand Masters in order to celebrate excellence, and these days it was hard to pick up a Mike Hammer novel and read it, let alone applaud its excellence.

  I couldn’t argue with that, either.

  The debate, as I remember it, was surprisingly reasonable and well-mannered. The nays didn’t shout too loud, because when all was said and done they liked Mickey, however little they thought of his work. And the yeas weren’t that boisterous, either; while one or two might have concurred with Ayn Rand, most seemed to be arguing that Mickey should get the award irrespective of the quality of his work.

  Well, come April he showed up at the annual dinner and was made a Grand Master. And all the anti-Spillane arguments were like snow in an Arctic summer; they didn’t stop to melt, but sublimated, passing directly from a solid to a gaseous state. What, not give it to him? Who ever could have had an idea like that?

  And I have to say he appreciated the honor. Well, why not? It came, after all, from the Mystery Writers of America.

  If we’d been the Mystery Authors of America, it might have been a different story.

  He was a hell of a nice guy. Did I mention that? It shouldn’t go unsaid. One hell of a nice guy.

  * * *

  After the column ran in Mystery Scene, I got an angry and bitter response from Mickey’s widow, who felt I’d desecrated the corpse of a man who’d been a friend to me. I would not have written thus, she said, had Mickey still been alive.

  I assume what riled her was my account of the ambivalence preceding Mickey’s Grand Master award—and it’s true, I would not have reported it if Mickey were around to read it, for fear that he might find it hurtful.

  When you’re dead, you’re past having your feelings hurt. I was there in 1994, and the report’s accurate.

  Ross Thomas

  * * *

  Ross died in 1995, two months before his 70th birthday. I found this first piece on my hard drive; it’s clearly a eulogy I must have written at the time, but I have no idea where it may have appeared, though Mystery Scene’s a possibility. I did fly out to L.A. for his memorial service, but my remarks were extemporaneous.

  I first met Ross Thomas through his work. Sometime in the late ’60s I picked up Cast a Yellow Shadow, the second novel about Padillo and McCorkle. I had somehow missed his stunning debut, The Cold War Swap, but I went out and fixed that at once. Not long afterward I got hold of a copy of the first of his books as Oliver Bleeck, The Brass Go-Between. On the jacket flap it said that Bleeck was a pseudonym. By the time I hit the third chapter I knew whose pseudonym it was. The Ross Thomas style was unmistakable.

  Style’s a hard thing to define. As the senator said of pornography, I may not be able to tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it. If pressed for a definition, I suppose I’d say that a writer’s style is that stamp of his own personality borne by his writing.

  Ross had style in abundance, and a splendid style it has always been. He never wrote a graceless sentence, never failed to present even the least significant of minor characters and bit players as a distinctive three-dimensional being. His stories are as tough-minded and cynical as anything on the dark side of noir, yet at the same time they positively sparkle with wit and humor.

  We became acquainted in 1970 or ’71. I sent him a book, and we discovered that each of us had been reading the other for a while. Nothing I know of bonds two writers as quickly as this mutual recognition. I saw Ross once or twice in Washington, and a couple of times in New York. I spent half a year in California after he and Rosalie had moved to Malibu, and I visited them there several times. In recent years we mostly encountered each other far from home—at Bouchercons and on book tours, and on foreign soil at conferences of the International Association of Crime Writers, in Spain and Cuba and the Yucatan.

  In all, I don’t suppose we met twenty times over twenty-five years, nor did we correspond or keep in touch by telephone. Yet I recognized Ross as a friend at our first meeting, and I always took delight every time we met, in person or in print.

  His books, every single one of them, are of that small company of volumes one may read over and over and over, with no loss of pleasure in the repetition. I have them all and I will treasure them. But there won’t be any more, and that saddens me. I miss the ones he didn’t live to write, even as I will miss the dear sweet man himself.

  * * *

  Several years after Ross’s death, Ruth Cavin at St. Martin’s began reissuing his novels in handsome trade paperback editions, each with a foreword by an admiring writer. She was good enough to invite me to the party, and the novel I picked was Briarpatch. It was published in 2003:

  Three or four times over the years, I got to hear Ross Thomas tell how he got started in the writing game. It was a pretty good story all by itself, but the best part about it for me was watching the faces of the wannabes in the audience.

  Ross would explain that he’d been at loose ends after a job ended—maybe he’d just finished running a political campaign for a friend in Jamestown, North Dakota, or maybe he had recently returned from Africa—and he’d decided to try his hand at a novel. So he sat down and wrote one, and after a month or two he was done. It occurred to him that it might be nice to have it published, but he wasn’t sure how to proceed. So he called up a knowledgeable friend.

  “I’ve written a book,” he said, “and wondered what I ought to do next.”

  “Have a drink,” the friend suggested. “Take an aspirin. Lie down, put your feet up.”

  “I thought I’d try to have it published,” Ross told him.

  “It has to be typewritten. And double-spaced.”

  It already was, Ross said. Whereupon, he told his listeners, the fellow told him how to proceed. He was to get some brown wrapping paper, wrap the manuscript neatly in it, and send it to a particular editor at a particular publishing house.

  So he did.

  And, two weeks later, there was a letter in his mailbox, from the editor to whom he’d sent the manuscript in its plain brown wrapper. “He said they would like to publish my novel,” Ross reported, “and that they would be sending a contract.”

  No wannabe wants to hear a story like that. If you want to win the hearts and minds of struggling writers, you’re better advised to tell them of your own struggles—the failures and false starts, the endless parade of rejections, the paralyzing bouts with writer’s block and alcoholism and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Finally, against long odds, after enduring and somehow surviving more perils than Pauline and more tsuris than Job, finally the writer prevails, the book is published, and can’t you hear the violins?

  Well, tough. Ross told it as it happened, and he could have been a lot harder on them. He could have gone on to say that the manuscript in question was published as The Cold War Swap, that it was widely praised and won the Edgar Allan Poe award as best first novel of the year, and that it launched a career that brought him no end of awards, an army of fiercely
loyal readers, and a whole shelf of books with his name on them, in none of which one will ever encounter an ill-chosen word, an infelicitous phrase, or a clunky sentence.

  Because Ross was far too modest to say any of that, some of those wannabes shook their heads and told themselves how lucky he’d been. Yeah, right. The way Ted Williams was lucky at baseball, or Nijinsky at ballet. Lucky bastards, the lot of them.

  When Ross died, many years sooner than anyone would have wished, one of the things we told each other at his memorial service was that, while we wouldn’t have the presence of this dear friend, wouldn’t have a new book to look forward to each year, we’d still have the books he’d written.

  I suppose we always say that when a writer dies, and, while it’s as inarguable as that Bogie and Bergman will always have Paris, it’s generally about as much comfort. Because most books, however enjoyable and compulsively readable as they are first time around, don’t offer that much when reread.

  But there are exceptions. I’m not sure what it is that makes a writer rereadable, but I do know that I especially cherish those writers whose books I can read with pleasure over and over and over. There aren’t many of them, and I’m grateful for every one.

  Ross Thomas is high on that short list. I’ve read some of his books three and four times, and expect to read them again.

  Briarpatch, as it happens, was one I’d read only once. It was published in 1984, and I bought it as soon as it came out, and must have read it as soon as I had an uninterrupted evening. My library has been purged several times since then, in the course of several relocations, but I always kept all of Ross’s books, so my copy was on the shelf when Ruth Cavin invited me to write an introduction for it. (The opportunity to read it again was not the least of my reasons for agreeing.)