Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  Spillane served in the US Air Force during the Second World War and, by his own account, flew fighter missions. In interviews he claimed two bullet wounds and a civilian knife scar sustained while working undercover with the FBI to break up a narcotics ring – but one may be suspicious. On demobilisation he worked in Barnum & Bailey’s circus as a trampoline artist (the setting is used in his 1962 novel, The Girl Hunters). More profitably, he bounced back into writing.

  Spillane himself acknowledged the influence of only one crime writer on his work, Carroll John Daly, creator of the private eye, Race Williams. He flaunted his lack of authorial polish, claiming, mischievously, never to introduce characters with moustaches or who drank cognac because he could not spell those words. I, the Jury introduced the series hero Mike Hammer, whose tough-talking, woman-beating, whisky-swilling machismo answered the needs of the post-war ‘male action’ market and its nervous uncertainties about masculinity now that there weren’t Japs or Krauts to kill. Estimates suggest global sales of around 200 million. By 1980, seven of the top fifteen all-time bestselling fiction titles in America were Hammer novels. ‘People like them,’ Spillane blandly explained. The climax of a Mike Hammer narrative invariably features sadistic execution. The most hilarious is in Vengeance is Mine (1950), which ends with the line (just before she/he gets it in the gut) ‘Juno was a Man!’

  The link was often made between Spillane and Joe McCarthy, and over the years Hammer’s victims were as likely to be ‘reds’ as ‘hoods’. Whatever, they were rubbed out. In One Lonely Night (1951), the hero mows down forty communists with a machine-gun. Originally there were eighty, but the publishers ‘thought that was too gory’. Spillane regarded himself as a super-patriot, and was so regarded by others. John Wayne gave him a Jaguar XK140 in honour of his anti-communism and Ayn Rand (author of Atlas Shrugged) commended his prose style to her neo-con disciples. Spillane’s patriotism was, however, always tinged with a pessimistic, quasi-religious sense of doom. In the early 1960s he predicted a race war in America, although he seems not to have been a racist himself. He was old enough to have experienced anti-Irish prejudice against ‘Micks’.

  The Hammer novels are written as spoken monologue and are stylistically direct. Spillane had great faith in the slam-bang opening, believing that ‘the first page sells the book’. He claimed never to read galleys or rewrite. He had, however, an odd compulsiveness about punctuation, and once insisted that 50,000 copies of Kiss Me, Deadly (1952) be pulped after the comma was left out of the title. The Hammer novels enjoyed new leases of life and income for the author in film, radio, comic-strip and television adaptation. I, the Jury was filmed twice (1953, 1982), as were other Hammer books. The only film that has any distinction is Robert Aldrich’s exaggeratedly noir, Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Spillane disliked it – not least because of the missing comma. Possessed of rugged good looks, he played Hammer himself in the film of The Girl Hunters (1963), turning in a commendable performance.

  As an author of pulp, Spillane’s guiding principle was that ‘violence will outsell sex every time’, but combined they will outsell everything. As part of the promotion for his novels he adopted a Hammeresque persona, which was transparently an act. He once told a British interviewer, ‘I always say never hit a woman when you can kick her.’ When asked ‘Is that the treatment you give Mrs Spillane?,’ he primly replied, ‘We’re talking about fiction.’ There were two long gaps in Spillane’s career. The first followed his conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1952, which led to a ten-year hiatus in novel-writing. He returned to form in 1961 with the best of the Hammer novels, The Deep. There was another gap, between 1973 and 1989, during which he again wrote no full-length fiction, though he did try his hand (as a dare with his publisher) at two, well-received, children’s books. During this period he was famous to the American television-watching public for his appearance in Miller Lite beer commercials, though he was reported not to be a heavy drinker. Over his last decades, to his disgust, Spillane received increasing critical respect for his contributions to the idiom of crime fiction, and for having played a pioneer’s role in the postwar paperback revolution.

  FN

  Mickey Spillane (born Frank Morrison Spillane)

  MRT

  I, The Jury

  Biog

  M. A. Collins and J. L. Taylor, One Lonely Knight: Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1984)

  POSTSCRIPT

  214. Carroll John Daly 1889–1958

  My conscience is clear; I never shot anybody that didn’t need to die.

  Daly’s PI, Race Williams

  Daly is plausibly credited with inventing – or, at least, pioneering – the hard-boiled, PI (Private Investigator/Private Eye) detective genre, rendered classic in the Black Mask magazine, with his 1922 story ‘The False Burton Combs’. He can also be said, not least by the man himself, to have invented Mickey Spillane. Daly was born in Yonkers, New York, and educated, with a stage career in mind, at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He started at the bottom of his chosen profession as an usher and rose to be manager of a theatre in Atlantic City. He was not, it would appear, successful in this line of work – although it was in these years, presumably, that he picked up his facility with vernacular American idiom.

  In 1913, he married Margaret G. Blakely. Little else is known of his personal life, other than anecdotal fragments, but he was apparently agoraphobic and dentist phobic. Fear of open places (and, perhaps, predatory orthodontists) led him to isolate himself as an eccentric recluse in White Plains, on the outskirts of New York. Once, it is recorded, he did venture into the metropolitan wilds of Manhattan, only to forget where his house was on his return. A neighbour had to point it out to him. ‘Once,’ another anecdote goes, ‘for the sake of research, Daly decided that maybe he should get to know what it was like to handle a gun. Daly, leaving his temperature-controlled home, went and bought a gun only to be arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. As one friend observed, “That was the end of Carroll John Daly’s research.”’ He had a wealthy uncle who put funds his way with which he could sit at home and spin out his tough-guy fantasies. He finally made it into print in Black Mask, aged thirty-three, preceding Dashiell Hammett’s first ‘Continental Op’ story in the magazine’s pages by a few months. Daly’s most significant literary creation was his thuggish Private Eye, Race Williams, whose ‘ethic’, as Daly called it, is summed up in boasts such as the following, in The Snarl of the Beast (1927):

  It’s the point of view in life that counts. For an ordinary man to get a bullet through his hat as he walked home at night would be something to talk about for years. Now, with me; just the price of a new hat – nothing more. The only surprise would be for the lad who fired the gun. He and his relatives would come in for a slow ride, with a shovel-ful of dirt at the end of it.

  A beastly snarl indeed.

  Daly’s star sank at Black Mask with the appointment of the magazine’s influential editor, Joe ‘Cap’ Shaw, who despised the artless crudity of Daly’s literary style. It showed up badly against the felicities of Hammett, or Chandler. Daly’s connection with Black Mask, having served its purpose by pioneering a genre in which he no longer excelled, ended in 1934. Thereafter he simply fed the country’s pulp fiction and comic-book industry with low-grade product. Daly was, however, yanked back into the public eye by Mickey Spillane. In interviews given in the late 1940s, when he was the bestselling novelist in America, the creator of Mike Hammer acknowledged that Daly was the only novelist who had ever influenced him. Spillane dutifully wrote to Daly (whose address he had, with difficulty, discovered) to say: ‘Yours was the first and only style of writing that ever influenced me in any way. Race was the model for Mike; and I can’t say more in this case than imitation being the most sincere form of flattery. The public in accepting my books were in reality accepting the kind of work you have done.’

  It was graciously done. But when Daly’s literary agent was shown the letter she promptly set about suing the mult
i-millionaire Spillane for self-confessed plagiarism. Daly as promptly fired her, with the rueful comment that Spillane’s was the only fan letter he had ever received.

  FN

  Carroll John Daly

  MRT

  The Snarl of the Beast

  Biog

  W. F. Nolan, The Black Mask Boys (1985)

  215. Jacqueline Susann 1918–1974

  Way back then, they didn’t think Shakespeare was a good writer.

  Jacqueline Susan (Jackie added the final ‘n’ to clarify the pronunciation) was born in 1918, the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. In the complex caste system of their Philadelphia community, the Susans ranked aristocratically high. Jackie’s conversion to Catholicism in the late 1950s was less a religious thing than a hankering for ‘class’. Her father, Bob Susan, had lots of class. He was a sought-after painter of society portraits and sophisticated nudes. Handsome Bob was also a philanderer. ‘I could have had all the women whose portraits I painted,’ he boasted, ‘plus all their mothers and their daughters.’ It was no idle boast. Jackie learned the ‘facts of life’ when, aged four, she blundered into her father’s studio and found him ‘humping’ (her word) one of his sitters. She remained incurably curious about ‘humping’ all her life. When she threw away her diaphragm thirty years later to give her husband Irving the child he craved, she set up full-length mirrors in the bedroom so as to observe ‘the miracle of conception’.

  A bright schoolgirl with a mind of her own, Jackie decided against college (although in later life she would claim an Ivy League background when it suited her). Like Anne Welles in Valley of the Dolls (1966), Jackie found freedom in New York: here she could ‘breathe’. She arrived there at eighteen years old in 1936 and (like Anne Welles again) gravitated straight to Broadway and café society. The Stork Club, Copacabana, El Morocco, and the 21 club called irresistibly to her. But stardom as an actress and cover fame as a model eluded the young Jackie. She was tall, had wonderful legs, a lion’s mane of black hair and good facial bones, but her ‘pores’ were too big: film close-ups magnified them into craters. Nor could she sing. And, as a fashion model, there was the boobs and waistline problem. Diet pills, which she popped by the bottle-full, handled the weight, but not those little but all-important imperfections of shape. Jackie had lots of bit parts, a few supporting roles, was featured in fashion magazines, but never achieved the celebrity she craved. The star was stubbornly not born. As she said, no one would turn and say, ‘Isn’t that Jacqueline Susann?’ when she walked into 21. Of course, she tried the casting couch – any couch. To use one of her own phrases, she was a love machine. One of her friends suggested she should install a revolving door and a cloakroom checkout service outside her bedroom.

  Jackie slept with anyone who might help, even after her marriage in 1939 to the complaisant press agent (and her benign Svengali), Irving Mansfield. Coco Chanel, it is said, had a fling with the young Jackie. If true, the bit about the ‘little black dress’ never quite got through to her: Jackie always wore clothes that could blind you close-up and deafen you at ten yards. One persistent rumour was that to pay for those clothes (loud, she may have been, cheap never), Jackie did some discreet high-paid call-girl work in the 1940s. However, making love was in itself of no intrinsic interest to her. One of her intimates recorded that she claimed never in her life to have had an orgasm. The most she ever got out of sex physically was ‘body warmth’; and she probably took more than she gave of that.

  In late 1962 she was diagnosed as having cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy. It was to be one of her two best-kept secrets. The other was that her only child, Guy (born 1946), was institutionalised with irreversible autism. She put away the full-length bedroom mirrors and redirected her maternal feelings to her poodle. Jackie, who firmly believed that ‘women own the world only when they are very young’ and that ‘40 is Hiroshima’, felt she was on the terrible brink of menopause – if she were to live that long. A year before her mastectomy, aged forty-three, she had undergone her first face-lift (‘I’m a realist’). Her ‘good years’ had gone: what could she do in the bad years to come? In Valley of the Dolls, Jennifer North kills herself with an overdose of ‘dolls’ rather than face a one-breasted middle age. Doubtless the thought crossed Jackie’s mind – to go out like Marilyn (one of the inspirations for Jennifer, along with Carole Landis).

  Wisely, in Valley of the Dolls, she wrote about what she knew best: Manhattan, show business and, above all, pills. She was a long-time unrepentant prescription junkie. She took ‘tranks’ (Librium by choice) to get through the day; amphetamines (Preludin) to clear the day’s hurdles and suppress the appetite; and to get to sleep at night, lots of barbiturates, or ‘barbies’ (hence ‘dolls’). Jackie’s first thought was to call her novel ‘The Pink Dolls’. The eventual title was a private joke. Although you would never guess it from the book, the author’s favoured form of ‘doll’ was the suppository. It is not difficult to imagine what the ‘doll valley’ is.

  Her views on the art of fiction were refreshingly primitive: ‘I don’t think any novelist should be concerned with literature. Literature should be left to the essayists.’ Essayist Gore Vidal famously remarked on reading Valley of the Dolls, ‘She doesn’t write, she types!’ But Jackie was not even much of a typist. The first draft of the novel, as one of the publisher’s rewrite team recalled, was ‘hardly written in English’ and it took a lot of labour to bring it up to a standard of ‘readable mediocrity’. Jackie toughed out the snide criticisms as she toughed out everything and by 1967, Susann had made it, at last. People did indeed turn around in 21 and say, ‘Look, there’s Jackie Susann.’ It must have been sweet, but it was as short-lived as her remission from cancer. There were three more novels, written under increasing pressure. They were all bestsellers, but nothing to equal Valley of the Dolls, boosted as it was by the 1967 blockbuster film, starring Sharon Tate.

  Nobody knew she was ill. The ‘dolls’ helped, but mainly it was willpower and vanity that kept her secret. She died in 1974. On the urn containing her ashes, Irving gallantly took three years off her age. No need to let everyone know.

  FN

  Jacqueline Susann (born Jacqueline Susan)

  MRT

  Valley of the Dolls

  Biog

  B. Seaman, Lovely Me: The Life of Jacqueline Susann (1987)

  216. Iris Murdoch 1919–1999

  I knew it was going to be bad getting old … I didn’t know it was going to be this bad.

  Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

  Anyone who cares to do the demographic stats on this book will note that as the centuries pass the novelists live longer. And long lives mean late-life novels which, in many cases, meditate just that fact – longevity and what it means. Iris Murdoch, the distinguished philosopher and rather more distinguished Booker Prize-winning novelist, was born in Dublin in 1919. The Sea, The Sea, her actual Booker Prizewinning novel, was published in 1978. A literary critic putting those dates together, along with the fact that The Sea, The Sea was Murdoch’s nineteenth novel and her most widely applauded, will conclude, sagely, that this is to be approached as fruit of the author’s maturity – the crest of her creative wave. An actuary would see it differently. In her sixtieth year, Miss Murdoch was facing state-ordained retirement from the national workforce (men, in those unregenerate days, had to labour another five years to earn their gold watch). Fancifully, if one wanted an alternative title for The Sea, The Sea, one could call it ‘Retirement, Retirement’. Not very catchy, one grants, but apropos. The novelist’s life, like drama, has its fifth act.

  Retirement – as those who have crossed the actuarial line will attest – is a paradoxical threshold. Viewed from one angle (through the rosy lens of Saga company brochures, for example), retirement is the gateway to a new life. At last the senior citizen will have time to do all those things which have been put off over the years. One is free to enjoy ‘the remains of the day’, as Kazuo Ishiguro puts
it, in his Booker Prize-winning novel about retirement (written, the date-conscious will note, when that event was a long way off for him). The sun is at its most lustrously golden before nightfall. But retirement – the last ‘vita nuova’ – is also the prelude to death. How much time will one have? When will the reaper strike? This is the theme in Kingsley Amis’s (yes, another) Booker Prize-winning novel about retirement. The Old Devils (1986) opens, darkly and comically, not with the hero serenely contemplating a glorious sunset, but nervously scrutinising his morning stools in the lavatory pan for the tell-tale flecks of blood, harbingers of cancer. It’s an ironic allusion to the white-haired Falstaff, as we encounter the retired hero in Henry IV Part 2, anxiously awaiting the medical report on his urine sample. The smart-mouthed little page who took the flask to the dispensary reports that the surgeon thought it was excellent urine – but he would hate to be the man who passed it. Few golden years in prospect for this old devil, one apprehends.