What We Read in the Fifties: "I, the Jury" and "The Kid from Tompkinsville"

Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury (1947) is a loathsome novel. It makes me gag to remember that it was wildly popular in the P.S. 217 schoolyard -- passed from hand to hand in lurid 25-cent paperback editions. Spillane's hero, the crudely-monikered private investigator Mike Hammer, lives in a world in which guns are "rods," bullets are "slugs," cars are "heaps," a policeman is a "flatfoot," gays are "queers" and "pansies," and people of any color other than white are "jigs," "bogies," or "darkies." His is a horrible, amoral universe of bigotry and violence. Mike Hammer, nominally an officer of the law, makes no effort to bring criminals to justice -- he prefers to kill them. "I'm going to enjoy putting a bullet into that crazy son of a bitch more than I enjoy eating. I'd sooner work him over with a knife first." He's a sadistic vigilante who beats up suspects and bystanders indifferently: "my fist went in up to the wrist in his stomach."

Charlotte Manning, the beautiful uptown "dame" whom he thinks he loves, tells him what he wants to hear (and what the novel endorses) -- that he's a "a real man -- no inhibitions." Of course, he doesn't go to bed with Charlotte Manning -- he only traffics with women who are those he derides as "nymphos." At the climax of the novel, Hammer discovers -- a surprise to no one but himself! -- that the killer for whom he's searching is Charlotte herself. As he fingers his .45 caliber pistol, she slowly disrobes. When she's entirely naked, Hammer shoots her in the stomach. "'H-how could you,' she gasps. Hammer: "It was easy." Was it difficult, even in 1953, to understand such perverse, misogynistic symbolism?

Mickey Spillane left his native Brooklyn to go to serve as a soldier; what a shame that he returned as a fascist.

For all I know, I might have read I, the Jury during the same week that I read John R. Tunis's The Kid from Tompkinsville. As degraded as is the one novel, so the other is otherworldly and pure. The "kid" is Roy Tucker, a simple country boy who tries out for the Brooklyn Dodgers, wins a place on the team, and is pitching shutout after shutout when he trips in the shower and injures his throwing arm.  A few weeks later, mirabile dictu, he returns as an outfielder and leads his team to a pennant with his hitting. It's a heckuva lot of drama for one short season, but Tunis makes it credible  -- well, at least, it seemed credible to youthful me back in 1953.

Tunis takes his baseball seriously and he never patronizes his young readership. Like most of Tunis's novels (The Kid Comes Back, Young Razzle, Iron Duke), all of which I swallowed in single gulps, The Kid from Tompkinsville extols the virtues of integrity, effort, and teamwork. Was I astute enough to notice that there was no drinking, no staying out late, and not a hint of desire for women in Roy Tucker's life? I don't believe I was.   

While nasty old Mike Hammer asked us to wallow in a swinish world, upstanding Roy Tucker lifted us from the mire. There could hardly be a better illustration of Shakespeare's observation that "the web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together." I'd like to believe that Tunis was a greater influence on me (as he was certainly a greater source of pleasure) than Spillane -- even though, as I recently discovered, Mickey Spillane (Frank Morrison Spillane) was a fellow graduate of "good-and-ill-together" Erasmus Hall High School.

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

So here is where Tunis was hiding. Absolutely loved the Tunis books, partly because they used the Brooklyn Dodgers as Roy Tucker's team. The author probably did not have to pay for the privilege of using the name. He certainly would be paying a large fee to the NL LA team today. It was a little disturbing, however, to see another Tunis hero (I think it was young Razzle) playing for the hated Yankees. I found myself rooting against the hero just so the Dodgers would win, and that is definitely not what the author wanted his reader to do. However, I never read a Tunis book that I did not enjoy.

As for Spillane, you can't blame Erasmus for him. A school can do just so much. But this awful writer and person, Mickey Spillane, was the most popular crime fiction writer of them all, outselling even Agatha Christie. Writers like Fritz Leiber would parody him but could never outsell him. The commercial success of Spillane reveals something awful and frightening about the intelligence and sensitivity of this country.

I recall a scene from a Spillane movie where the author himself plays Hammer. In one scene in a waterfront bar, Spillane sits down next to a monstrous thug, throws a bullet onto the table, and tells him to eat it. After a sweatful hesitation, the thug does.

I don't think the scene is played for laughs.