The PI Novel After Spillane
Mickey Spillane died last week at the age of 88. The creator of Mike Hammer and author of “I, the Jury,” helped invent a form of literature that tells the story of blue collar men and hard luck women, social novels that distill passion from experience without the overtures and fanfare of mainstream literature. The PI, the private investigator, is always wise in the ways of the street, tough but a sucker for a pretty smile or a good story.
Crime fiction has broadened from the Spillane tradition. PIs come in all shapes and sizes from Sarah Paretsky’s VI Warshawsky to Walter Mosley’s Easy Rollins. While more books are published now than ever before, a shortage has developed on the PI front. There are more procedurals, more cozies, more literary, more romantic suspense, but the traditional PI? They’re scarce: Max Allan Collins’ FADE TO BLONDE from HARD CASE CRIME comes to mind as a classic of recent times, but fewer writers are working the beat. Micheal Koryta’s SORROW’S ANTHEM is an exceptional PI novel. Is this a cyclical thing?
Dennis Lehane moved on, as did Walter Mosley. Jim Fusilli defies convention with his books; Harry Hunsicker has his Lee H. Oswald character working the back streets of Dallas in STILL RIVER. Books have moved with the times into the suburbs ( Harlan Cobain) or across the pond with Lee Child. I’m not complaining about the state of crime fiction just this one little corner of it. Male, female, black, white, who cares? As the Dude once observed, it’s all about attitude.
July 24th, 2006 at 10:37 am
Is this a cyclical thing?
I think it is….and it’s reflected in the T.V. shows and movies as well.
Now we have the CSI’s, Crossing Jordan etc. we have moved to the end of the case. Before we had the case itself and the P.I. was needed to solve it. Rember all the great T.V. P.I.’s.
Marlowe, Mannix, Rockford, Magnum….now it’s in the details not the case and sometimes not even the villian.
Let’s hope the P.I. comeback is sooner rather than later.
July 24th, 2006 at 11:17 am
Lawrence Block on Spillane’s narrative technique (from an old Block essay on the craft of transition):
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If, on the other hand, you want to stress action and pace, you might prefer to make your transitions as abrupt as possible. No one does this better than Mickey Spillane. His detective, Mike Hammer, never spends any time getting from one scene to another. In one sentence he’s stuffing some chap’s head in a men’s room toilet; a sentence later he’s clear across town shooting a girl in the stomach. He may waste time now and then at lovemaking or thinking aloud but he never wastes it getting from place to place, from one piece of action to another.
Spillane started out writing comic books, and I think that’s where he learned to make fast cuts. While I’d personally read the label on the little bottle of Worchestershire sauce than check out Mike Hammer’s adventures, there’s no getting around the fact that Spillane, especially in his early books, had an immediacy and a gut instinct for the dramatic that won him a large and genuinely loyal readership, and there’s a little more to his success than sex and sadism.
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