I see him writing these novels, anger boiling out of him,
slamming the
typewriter with
every keystroke, sweat pouring off his brow, getting up every
15 minutes to
slam
his hand against the wall, (lit cigarette dangling ash over
the
typewriter), the pure anger
and frustration of it all just too much for him. Here is a
man with too
much anger inside
him to write clean, crisp dialogue - this dialogue flows from
the well of
his soul.
Or maybe I'm dreaming. Maybe he worked 3 hours each night
after watching
My Three Sons re-runs. Sigh.
Cheers,
Matthew
jblukin @ acsu.buffalo.edu
07/10/98 12:33 AM
Please respond to rara-avis@icomm.ca
To: rara-avis @ icomm.ca
cc: (bcc: Matthew Harding/scnm/Stentor)
Subject: Re: RARA-AVIS: Spillane - what's up with that?
Dear Matthew,
My guess would be that unlike that of Ayn Rand, who came
from Russia,
Spillane had no personal axe to grind on behalf of
McCarthyism but simply
saw the Commies as efffective villains. Although historians
seem to agree
that there was no Communist threat to the American Way of
Life after 1949
(or possibly ever), the Red Scare of the fifties resulted in
27,000,000
Americans having to sign loyalty oaths as a condition of
keeping their
jobs, hundreds of imprisonments, at least a dozen suicides,
and many
mental illnesses. Take a look at Jim Thompson's
_A_Swell-Looking_Babe_
for a fictional account of how, in paranoid fifties society,
the
accusation of communism could destroy a person. For an easy
introduction
to the tenor of the times, try Michael Barson's
_Better_Dead_Than_Red_.
One of the earliest critiques of the phenomenon is Richard
Hofstader's
_The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics_. Within the context
of the
fifties, Mike Hammer is simply being an all-Amurrican
patriot.
Hope this helps,
Josh
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