Mickey Spillane, writer of sexist, violent pulp thrillers, is still in action at age 81. He spoke to Peter Lennon
Mickey Spillane says he will pick me up at his local airport at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. And here he is:in a sweatshirt; 5ft 8, the stoop of a stevedore, knuckles hanging towards his knees, gimlet grey-blue eyes. The face is like a boulder trying to express something but not trying too hard. He grabs my suitcase with one hand and slings it into the back of his Ford truck. I get the messsage: there will be no polite blather about gummy grandpas of 81 and how well preserved they are. This guy is still in action.
We stop at a supermarket where the checkout girls greet him with pleasure: “And how are you today, Mr Spillane?” “I’m in fine shape for the shape I’m in,” he says. “You know,” he says to me, “people come up to me and say: ‘Mickey Spillane! I thought you were dead!’ ‘How would you like a smack in the mouth?’ I tell them.”
As we barrel along the freeway he says: “I’m a writer, not an author.”
“What’s the distinction?”
“A writer makes money.”
Although he has lived for 46 years at Murrell’s Inlet, South Carolina, he was brought up in New Jersey. It would be politically incorrect for me to present his speech phonetically, but you can get the effect for yourselves by clipping your nose, tightening your lips and speaking from a hole in the corner of the mouth.
We aren’t far along the road when he shows me a card: a permit to carry a concealed weapon. “What do you need to carry a concealed weapon for?” I ask.
“In case I need to shoot someone … Aye, that’s a joke.”
“What reason do you have to give to get the licence?”
“You don’t have to have a reason. I had military training so that helps. You have to show proficiency.”
“You mean they have to be sure you can kill someone?”
“Sure.”
But there was a twist in the story: if he was going to shoot someone in this state it would probably be a cop. “This is a strange state. Recently we have had very corrupt police. The strange thing is if a cop draws on you and you outdraw him and kill him you are in the clear. He is not supposed to pull a gun on you. So when you register for a concealed weapon they all know you are carrying a gun and they say: ‘That guy could kill me.’ So they leave you alone.”
Some time later we are sitting on the veranda of his spacious clapboard home chatting, looking out across the sandbars; chimes by our ear tinkling in the wind, speedboats occasionally snarling past. At this point his wife, Jane, his third, appears. He has told me he had four children – “Five if you include my wife.”
She is 30 years younger. She came sashaying out in shorts, curled up like a kitten in a swinging sun hammock, stretching out her bare legs. I remembered a Mike Hammer line: “She walked towards me, her hips waving a happy hello.”
But, as I was to repeatedly discover, many things are not as they seem chez Spillane. “She’s an intellectual,” he told me in the car, disgruntled. “She loves politics. I married her on Hallowe’en. Still don’t know if it was a trick or treat.” They have been married 16 years. Jane Spillane is involved in her second campaign against an alleged miscarriage of justice and recently she ran for district attorney on an anti-corruption ticket.
Mickey hates politics; he’d rather talk about fishing. Jane and I began talking politics. “I hate the Clintons,” she said. “I am part of the rightwing international conspiracy.”
“People ask me how I like being married to a male chauvinist pig,” Jane says. “And I say: ‘I love every minute of it.'”
He sends her off to the movies – Eyes Wide Shut.
He tells how he “went professional” at 14 while still at high school, writing for the Elizabeth Daily Journal, Jersey. “I don’t write for posterity,” he says. “Posterity is now. I write to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney. But I’m not money- hungry. Sure, I sold over 200 000 copies over the year, but most of them were 25c paperbacks. I have this place I bought for $15 000, 46 years ago. It’s now worth a million and a half. I don’t owe anyone a cent.”
Ten years ago, while they were away, Hurricane Hugo picked up his neighbours’ houses, tossed them into his garden and wiped out his house. A whole library of his old paperbacks went with it. He rebuilt. He is now working on what he claims will be his last Mike Hammer book, the 14th, he thinks. He has turned out about 40 books in all, including two successful children’s books: The Day the Sea Rolled Back and The Ship That Never Was.
He has knocked around a lot; had some unsatisfactory experience in Hollywood; his Eighties television series were more successful. He worked in a circus for years (it provided the background for Ring of Fear). He joined the airforce the day after Pearl Harbour.
We watch on TV the frantic attempts around Martha’s Vineyard to find John Kennedy’s body. “He was just what we call a Junior Birdman,” Spillane says with disgust. “He wasn’t qualified to fly on instruments only without an instructor.”
Spillane claims 11 000 hours of flying. “I just passed my medical again recently,” he says.
Following such a gentleman as Raymond Chandler, Spillane introduced gory violence into private eye literature. Hammer does not just shoot Dr Soberin in Kiss Me Deadly: he shoots him in the eye.
In The Lady Hunters (shot on the cheap in London in 1963; Spillane played the lead), Hammer warns a society dame what will happen if she ever tries to fire her shotgun, which is blocked with heavy clay. “The barrel would unpeel like a tangerine and you’d get the whole charge down your lovely throat. They’d have to scrape your brains up and pick your skull up off the woodwork with needle-nose pliers. Your eyeballs would be stuck to the wall.”
Later, when she is in the shower, he repacks the barrels with heavy clay. When she tries to bump him off with the gun he just says: “So long, baby!” (What’s a guy supposed to do? She was a dirty, rotten commie.)
Why the sledgehammer violence? “It was just after the war and there was rough stuff all around,” he says.
”But why did you do it that way?”
“I didn’t do it that way. That was the way I was.”
It wasn’t the war which gave him first- hand experience of violence (he only flew his planes around the American coastline) but some murky involvement with the police. That’s how he saw heads blown off. “I was involved with the police for a long time. I won’t tell you how. Just involved.”
He tells me he hates the French because they hate Americans, and he does not like to travel anyway. He does not feel indebted to the French for giving him honorary intellectual status. “They only like one film, Kiss Me Deadly,” he says.
We shoot the breeze for a long time, about his old Hollywood friends such as John “Duke” Wayne who gave him “a Hollywood thank-you card” – a 1956 Jaguar roadster, still in prime condition.
It is all very nice; the chimes still tinkle in the breeze as we sit on the porch and the air is warm and perfumed. But what is with the bourbon? What is with the bourbon is there is no bourbon. Nor is there beer, although he made a packet playing Mike Hammer for Miller Lite for years. As a cunning way to introduce my thirst, I say: “Weren’t you a heavy drinker one time?”
“Naw,” he says. “I never drank. A beer maybe, sometimes. Never liked hanging around bars. I don’t smoke either.” He even hates the city he sets the Hammer books in, New York. But he has to go occasionally for research.
>From there on the dismantling of the tough-guy boozer and broad-chaser disintegrates at a vertiginous pace. I had occasionally responded to his tall stories with an admiring “Shit!” But it soon became clear he preferred the more sedate version, “Shoot!” He does not really approve of bad language.
The final shock is that he has got religion in a big way. He is an active Jehovah’s Witness and does house-to-house visits. (I imagined the scene: a knock on the door and there’s Spillane saying, “I’m Mickey Spillane and I am a Witness.” And the guy babbles: “I swear to Gawd it wasn’t me Mickey! It was my brudder!”)
Mickey promises he will give me “a rough cut of what it was all about” before I left.
Next morning he calls at my hotel after a prayer meeting. “Gee,” squeals the girl in reception, “I’ve never seen Mickey in a suit ‘n’tie.” But there he is, suited and tied and bearing gifts, The Watchtower and a booklet: KNOWLEDGE That Leads to Everlasting Life. “My wife thinks I’m nuts,” he says.
But I appreciate the gesture. When a guy knows that Armageddon is nigh it’s only natural he wants to tip off a new pal. And we have had a nice time, sitting on the porch, playing with his gun collection. His pride is a pump-action Winchester which he points at tourists snooping over his house in helicopters. We even take a spin in Duke’s roadster and have beefsteak at Drunken Jack’s in the harbour.
On the last day he refuses to let me take a taxi to the airport, calling for me in his truck. At the airport he gives me a paper bag of doughnuts. But he also gives me a Mafia promise. “The Witness boys will be calling on you in London,” he says.
Thanks a million, Mickey. But did I forget to tell you about my concealed, anti- proselytising pump-action weapon, guaranteed to leave doorsteppers’ eyeballs pasted to the garden gate?