Year Of The Month
“Listen, pimple face. Don’t go playing man when you’re only a boy."
“Women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake. But I… I do deny them my essence.”
– General Jack D. Ripper, Dr. Strangelove
NOTE: This review discusses the entire plot of I, The Jury
Mike Hammer fucks. He wouldn’t say the word “fuck,” certainly not in 1947, when he burst onto the literary scene and kicked its teeth in with I, The Jury, but his debut novel makes sure to include scenes of him banging one of the many ladies looking to get him in the sack. But while Hammer hammers her twice, she’s the one who initially puts the moves on Hammer both times. She’s explicitly characterized as a nympho, which makes her horniness impersonal — if it isn’t Hammer now, it’ll be someone else soon enough — so denying her won’t give Hammer any power. So sooner, rather than later or not at all, they bone. The other women could have more meaning, so Mike Hammer denies them his essence.
What is the essence of Mike Hammer? It is potent, crude, violent. I, The Jury is about Hammer investigating the gut-shooting murder of his old cop and army buddy and Hammer immediately vows to kill the killer in the same way:
“I hate hard, Pat. When I latch on to the one behind this they’re going to wish they hadn’t started it. Some day, before long, I’m going to have my rod in my mitt and the killer in front of me. I’m going to watch the killer’s face. I’m going to plunk one right in his gut, and when he’s dying on the floor I may kick his teeth out.”
Throughout the book Hammer beats the shit out of people non-stop, pushing the weak around and breaking bones of those who try to push him. But he also has friends all over town — there’s the aforementioned Pat, his police pal and source for info on the investigation; the plucky mob gofer Bobo; and various black acquaintances. In servile roles, of course, and Hammer’s friendliness is not going to stop him from casually tossing slurs like “darky” around, but the casual racism and condescension points to Hammer’s weird charisma binary. He is hated by crooks and hates them back, but non-crooks are allowed to admire him, to bask in that essence. A psychiatrist lands somewhere between flattery and truth, a character reading the mind of the author, with her take on Hammer: “I diagnosed you the moment you set foot in my office. I saw a man who was used to living and could make life obey the rules he set down. Your body is huge, your mind is the same. No repressions.”
Hammer knows that banging his hot secretary who also takes care of him, let alone forming a meaningful relationship with her, will trip him up.
Mike Hammer can fight all day, drink all night and wake up the next morning ready to do it again with no hangover and no compunctions. And aside from the various sniveling effetes and goon stereotypes, everyone is enthralled by this. In a very weird way he is not as similar to Philip Marlowe as he is to Bella Swan, the heroine of Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight. Bella also narrates her action-packed and lusty adventure, her first-person tale giving a narrative thrust to a wish-fulfillment stand-in. And while she is constantly running herself down in a very un-Hammer way, she has everyone else in the narrative to tell her that she’s great, actually. She’s beautiful and perfect, so perfect the horniest supernatural being of them all is willing to restrain himself in order to gain her love. He represses himself while making sure life obeys the rule he sets down, that Bella must be venerated above all, and aside from some various sniveling vampires and goon students everyone is more than willing to go along. Bella has to be told she is special, Mike Hammer just knows this. And while Bella’s VFF tells her she was so desirable he wanted to kill her — I need you! But I must stay away! — Hammer keeps promising his secretary Velda that he’ll marry her before finding a way to break the deal.
Every time Hammer and Manning are about to bang, he is the one who walks away.
This reads very oddly after a while; Spillane gives Hammer a jokey tone but no screwball snap of real emotions redirected toward combat. And Hammer’s ongoing rueful realizations that he’s leaving something pretty good on the table feel off too. “Can’t afford to trip myself up; though with Velda maybe it wouldn’t be so bad at that” Hammer muses, and the second part of that sentence is smothered by the first. Hammer knows that banging his hot secretary who also takes care of him, let alone forming a meaningful relationship with her, will trip him up, throw off the balance of power he uses to overwhelm everyone in the book.
He falls harder for Charlotte Manning (an interesting last name there), the psychiatrist mentioned earlier. She’s beautiful and smart and besotted with Hammer, and he is in turn captivated by her. The heavy petting and intellectual stimulation (he goes over a lot of the case with her) is pretty great, but she really wins his heart at dinner:
“The table was laid out for two. On the table was a big pile of fried chicken and another equally large basket of French fries. …I was dumbfounded. Either she kept a complete file of my likes and dislikes or she was clairvoyant. Chicken was my specialty.”
This is absolutely hysterical. She’s giving you the kid’s menu, Hammer! Fucking chicken tendies and fries, all that’s missing is a placemat with a maze on it. And he literally eats it up. But Charlotte’s diagnosis quoted earlier — which she gives during that dinner — is tied to her cooking. Because in so many ways, Mike Hammer is a child’s fantasy, of being super strong and tough, of being feared and loved and fulfilled. Spillane’s blunt style perfectly realizes this and more than anything that unification creates the momentum that is the book’s biggest strength, the sense of being swept along in this brutal guy’s story, feeling every broken bone and caressed throat and savage threat:
“Listen, pimple face. Just for the fun of it I ought to slap your fuzzy chin all around this room, but I got things to do. Don’t go playing man when you’re only a boy. You’re pretty big, but I’m three sizes bigger and a hell of a lot tougher and I’ll beat the living daylights out of you if you try anything funny again. Now sit down over there.”
Feeling the thrill every time Mike Hammer gets what he wants from whoever he wants it, and above that, feeling the power of being the final arbiter, even if that means Hammer doesn’t get something. Because he denied it to someone else. Every time Hammer and Manning are about to bang, he is the one who walks away. “I’m going now,” he tells her after some tonsil hockey following the great chicken chow-down of 1947. “If I don’t, I’ll never leave. The next time I’ll stay longer. I don’t want to do this wrong. I will if you keep me here.”
“I won’t play the sap for you,” Sam Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, rejecting the possibility of love for the certainty of rough justice. But this is a refusal, not the superior denial of another hiding in the moralistic self-denial of “I don’t want to do this wrong. I will if you keep me here.” Mike Hammer is putting this dame in her place. And he is right to! Unsurprisingly, the woman who seems perfect for our hero turns out to be a megalomaniacal drug-dealing supercriminal whose depravity is only matched by her sadism. Hammer figures this out, though. He runs through the time-honored reveal of the entire scheme as Charlotte slowly strips, attempting to use her last and best resource to distract him, to trip him up:
“Lovely legs that started from a flat stomach and rounded themselves into thighs that belonged more in the imagination than reality. Beautiful calves. Heavier than those you see in the movies. Passionate legs. All that was left were the transparent panties. And she was a real blonde.”
And then she has a real big hole in her belly when Mike Hammer blows her away with his .45, just like he promised to do to his friend’s murderer in I,The Jury’s first chapter. He never gave into her charms and never fully gave her his own. If denying true intimacy gives Mike Hammer a child’s sensibility and a child’s selfishness, it also gives him a child’s ruthlessness and a child’s sense of fairness and that gets results, you stupid chief. In the end, Charlotte Manning finds out Mike Hammer’s essence is not a hot load in the pants but hot lead in the gut, and a final denial that she ever would’ve gotten something besides his cold judgment:
“How c-could you?” she gasped.
I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
“It was easy,” I said.
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Department of
Conversation
The first time I heard about I, the Jury was on a M*A*S*H where Klinger saves Winchester’s life and the latter is asked to read from the book while the former recuperates. I thought the turgid dialogue (interpreted by a disgusted Charles) was a put on. Surely this wasn’t real.
My entire knowledge of Mike Hammer is: there were a lot of popular books; there was a TV show that was as poorly received as the books, and also less successful; and that Max Allan Collins’s premise for Ms Tree was “Mike finally marries Velda but is murdered on their wedding night and she seeks revenge.”
I know about it because of a MAD parody I read back in the ‘80’s. I think it was Jack Davis.
Edit: No, I looked it up. It was in Panic, which I read maybe 20 years ago, not 40.
I only know the film Kiss Me Deadly besides this and that movie despises Mike Hammer. Great flick but mean as hell.
What did we watch?
M*A*S*H, Season One, Episode Eight, “Cowboy”
This is a good showcase for McLean Stevenson as Henry, even if his section of the episode is really only the middle act, when he’s attacked by an unknown assailant through multiple bombs. I always liked that Stevenson sold that Henry wasn’t so much dumb as out of his element – he’s a competent doctor and a reasonable guy, he’s just nervous about committing to big decisions and has no basis for what he’s doing. Stevenson also has some fun with the slapstick elements, like the multiple explosions.
We also have Hawkeye having no fear of being thought a coward – when Henry irritably asks if he’s asking Henry to walk away from his command, Hawkeye clarifies he meant run away from his command. I always liked that Hawk’s problems were very practical, with him aiming to fix guys up first and send them home second.
This has one of the first cases of Father Mulcahey doing someone else’s religion (a Jewish man, in this case). Probably the ultimate example of his pragmatism.
Live Music – in-store acoustic album launch mini-gig by Anna B Savage, who does good dark, poetic indie-folk kinda stuff. She was funny and charming between her pretty serious songs which is always a dynamic I enjoy, need to give the new album some more listens because there were some really interesting lyrics that I picked up on more from hearing the songs live.
Justified, S3 finale – good ending, tense and exciting and a guy’s arm got cut off. Shame this season didn’t impress me as a whole but at least it went out on a high. I’ll be back after a break to check something else out. Probably.
The S3 finale does have one of my favorite quietly brutal bits:
“Why did Art think you’d be upset?”
“Well, I think it was why Arlo shot Bergen. … He didn’t know he was a state trooper. Just saw a man in a hat pointing a gun at Boyd.”
“Man in a hat?”
Oof yeah. Real gut-punch moment right there.
Woooo live music!
Woooooo live acoustic music!!
One of the funniest moments in the entire show is Raylan, on instinct, cutting Quarles’ arm off, realizing what he is holding, and punching Quarles in the face *with his own arm*. Just spectacular.
Haha yes. “Stop hitting yourself!” taken to its brutal conclusion
Kojak, “The Best War in Town” – A rookie cop stumbles onto an attempted gangland hit, and gets sucked into helping Kojak prevent a mob war. 3/4ths of this is Kojak managing to manipulate the mob bosses into ratting on each other so he can arrest everyone, the rest is the rookie feeling overwhelmed and almost quitting before Kojak talks him out of it. Richard Donner directs again, and has a lot of interesting shots, most notably a scene where the rookie is talking to his mother and we see all of it in a mirror, plus a great scene on a rooftop. Guests include David Doyle.
The Avengers, “Forget-Me-Knot” – The bad guys have a mole in “the organization” and the one man who knows this has been given an amnesia drug. Soon enough, so have Steed and Peel. But fear not as young trainee Tara King is on the job. Included on Amazon as the finale for the fifth season, but in fact the premiere for the sixth, where Diana Rigg leaves and Linda Thorson arrives, along with a slight revamp of the show as we meet “Mother,” the wheelchair bound but capable head of the organization. I haven’t been watching these in order so it’s not my farewell to Rigg yet, but I can immediately say that the 25 year gap in ages between Macnee and Thorson is not a good thing, even if I like Tara.
Frasier, “You Can’t Tell a Crook by His Cover” – Martin bets Frasier than he can’t figure which poker buddy is not an ex-cop but an ex-con. Frasier of course can’t, but neither can Daphne, who agrees to go on a date with the ex-con. The first half is entirely about the limits of Frasier’s ability to understand human behavior, but the second becomes a very fun spotlight on Daphne. Who can play pool like whoa.
National Anthem – There should be a Spirit Award category for “okay indie movies featuring people in cowboy hats.”
Quiz Lady – Fun comedy with a great contrasting duo in Awkwafina and Sandra Oh as her older sister (extra hilarious as there’s a 17 year age gap between the actresses which is barely commented on). It feels like either could have played the others’ role, and I think they picked the right combo, with Awkwafina’s slumped and dowdy introversion bouncing off Oh’s manic spiritualism and our expectations of their personas. Will Ferrell holds down the familiar role of gentle gameshow host and displays his maturity as a performer, doing a character rather than finding a route to Ferrellesque schtick (don’t worry, he’s allowed a few funny riffs, but he’s consciously creating a distinct character, this isn’t another edition of his beleaguered Alex Trebek). Jason Schwartzman is one of our finest smarmy bastards. It feels good to watch a comedy with an actual script!
Really enjoyed Quiz Lady. Funny, charming, feels like it should have had a decent chance at being a breakout comedy hit but it was released in the wrong era, direct to streaming with little fanfare. Shrug.
I’m just glad Awkwafina is making, if not Farewell-quality movies, at least making her way back into that ballpark.
Quiz Lady was on my list just for the Awkwafina-Oh combo, but I’d heard so little about it that I hadn’t pulled the trigger yet. Now I’m thinking I will this weekend.
The Sympathizer also reminds us that Sandra Oh can be a super fun, flirty, charismatic actress (and is devastating at one point). Should watch this, heard Ferrell is terrific from multiple people.
It’s mostly that he has the perfect avenue to do Ron Burgundy again and he instead puts in the work to do a character. Nothing revolutionary, but it goes along with what’s appealing about a movie that finds its jokes within the characters rather than in the actors breaking from them.
The rest of Shōgun S1
SPOILERS
I actually finished this on Tuesday, but I hadn’t had a chance to write it up. Phenomenal season. (I had a huge overview of the last two-thirds of the show written up, and then I somehow switched from the comments tab to the bio tab, which ate all of it. Uh, let me try to reassemble a briefer version.)
– I love that you can see the show choosing not to make Toranaga into a kind of mystery box. Yes, the exact nature of his strategy doesn’t come out all at once (it wouldn’t make sense for him to make it explicit), but as soon as he starts ostensibly fucking up or carrying out a straightforward surrender, we get other characters speculating that this is all part of a grand plan. The show lets its characters act plausibly and intelligently rather than bending them out of shape to try to get a bigger “gasp!” reveal, and I really appreciate that. Big reveals can be fun and memorable, but being invited along for the action is much more involving.
– TV romances can be hit-or-miss, but Mariko/Blackthorne is ALL HIT, at least for me. They have incredible chemistry whether they’re conflicted, engaged in fraught pining, or actually getting to have a good time with each other. It helps that they have real, legitimate obstacles in the way of them simply making a go of it, but I think the best part of their relationship is that all their Big Moments are incredibly specific to them and their context. Mariko’s translation in the willow world—an ecstatic, erotic payoff for all the translation before, like it was all a Chekhov’s gun on the mantelpiece and now it’s being fired—is incredible and incredibly staged, and Blackthorne agreeing to be her second (to support her in a plan he’s viscerally opposed to, to console her in a religion he’s viscerally opposed to, and to break his own heart in the process) is a fantastic gut-punch of romance.
– Speaking of which … Anna Sawai! The entire cast is outstanding, but I think Sawai steadily stole the show for me. Mariko’s deeply held sense of honor and passion and loyalty, her absolute willingness to pursue those traits at all costs, her heartbreak, her capacity for violence and verbal devastation … I love her so much. Some great moments: her stillness during her husband’s drunken abuse, her luminous yearning at the willow world, her attempted exit from Osaka, the diamond-bright clarity of her loathing when she rejects Buntaro’s offer of suicide, weeping with Father Alvito, etc.
– Yabushige’s death poem is A+, the perfect final, funny, vicious rejection of the idea that this struggle—and even his death as part of it—has any sense of meaning or honor at all. Yabushige burns off his previous selves on his way to the finale—can’t be a sadist when you no longer have power over anyone, can’t be a survivor when you’re out of time, options, and allies—and winds up with a peculiar sense of grace when there’s nothing else left. He even ends up with a qualified win, knowing that he has a fundamental kinship with Toranaga, as little as Toranaga would like to admit it. Tadanobu Asano is fantastic: he has a real Toshiro Mifune-style presence, which is not something I thought the world would ever see again.
– More highlights, aside from what I’ve already mentioned: BOOM, CANNONED; Mariko’s secret smile when she placidly talks about the “courtesan” they hired; Fuji with the guns (Fuji’s another major highlight overall); Buntaro forcing Mariko to tell Blackthorne her family history (and Blackthorne trying to convince her to say anything else instead, and her simply going on); Ochiba’s initial return to Osaka, where her absolute control and aura of serenely disappointed menace makes her feel like she’s straight out of a horror movie; the willow world madam being one of the first to recognize Toranaga’s maneuverings and getting her requested land because of it; Saeki adding hints of the Red Wedding (okay, technically I think this would be better if we’d had a little more setup with him, but it still hits); Hiromatsu’s game-changing seppuku (“Osaka has to believe my defeat is real”); basically the entirety of “Crimson Sky”; Yabushige making a last-ditch attempt to create a spinoff where he and Blackthorne go to England; Fuji and Blackthorne out on the water, achieving some complicated peace with their grief; Toranaga and Yabushige on the cliff; Buntaro showing up to help raise the Erasmus.
Terrific stuff.
The Shield, “Pilot,” “Our Gang,” and “The Spread”
I’ll save most of my comments about this for later, because after I kicked off this rewatch, I asked my wife is she was sure she didn’t want to join me for it. She weighed the emotional devastation against the undeniable pleasures and decided she did want a rewatch after all. We’re still going through Seinfeld and have other things on the docket, too, so we’ve set up a complicated, alternating-seasons rewatch schedule that may involve a flowchart at some point. So I’ll have breaks in between seasons now (until S5-S7, when we’ve already decided that’s just not feasible), but it’ll be worth it, because basking in ownage and the exquisite torment of empathizing with everyone in a tragedy is something we like to do together as a family.
So I’ll save most of my comments on these until I start the rewatch again in a couple of days, but I may watch the commentaries on them in the meantime.
Fuji rules. Major ownage with the pistols. I balled my eyes out at the last scene between her and Blackthorne. I think she is a more tragic character than Mariko and I prefer her arc with Blackthorne.
They have so many great moments together. I love Blackthorne rushing back to her after the earthquake. And the way the show both lets her live through her grief–and even start to rebuild–without forgetting about it or throwing it away is really lovely.
Blackthorne giving her a way to grieve and let go is such a lovely moment among many.
Wooooo!
I gotta watch Shōgun again. It’s too damn good not to go through a second time (although I have seen a lot of the episodes more than once already).
Hiromatsu… man, one thing this show really does well is demonstrate the extremes of commitment these characters have, which makes for great drama. Your oldest friend committing seppuku just to sell a deception… that’s some hardcore shit, man.
I’m so glad your TV write-up gave me the last push I needed to finally watch this!
+1000 to the Hiromatsu scene and the value of going to extremes. It also works so well with the repeated insistence that Toranaga, given his background, is so cautious that he doesn’t truly have any friends–which has already played out well with his acceptance that that means he doesn’t really have a brother, either. Here we see him finally admit that he does have a friend … and it’s in the service of sacrificing that friend for his own goals, knowing that it only works because the love has been real and there all along. Just amazing.
All these grown man openly weeping there also had me going, it’s devastating.
Hey! HEY! Get this “grown men openly weeping” nonsense the hell out of my Mike Hammer article!
Man, what a great show Shogun is. You touch on nearly all of the bases but I wan’t to shout out SPOILERS Toranaga’s son death SPOILERS, which is not part of any plan whatsoever and could have been so easily avoided if not for the kid being who he is. And it does end up strengthening Toranaga’s resolve. It’s also downright slapstick-like in its pointlessness and, if by some chance the viewer has made it that far in without wising up to how anyone and everyone can be offed for any reason, that’s the moment that should make it crystal fucking clear.
SPOILERS
That poor kid, dying by slippery rock. It’s an interesting case where you can kind of get an interpretative double vision on it, too: is the slapstick, unpredictable quality of his death proof of the limits of planning, or is Toranaga’s ability to make use of it proof of the inherent strength and versatility of a well-laid plan? After all, while he couldn’t have known his son would die that way specifically, it’s entirely possible he factored in his son dying as part of some effort to push back against the surrender because, like you said, however randomly implemented, it comes about because of who the kid is. (I’m sure he had an angle on what would’ve happened if the kid’s plan had succeeded, too.)
A buncha Shoresy. I guess the Mrs. has really been feeling it lately, so when she got to season 2, I was like “What the hell, let’s just do season 3 as well, complete the rewatch before starting the new season.” I ended up watching the first three episodes of season 3 again, although I don’t have much comment. Other than, Jory’s interviews with Shoresy crack me up and so does Shoresy and the other players speaking at the school.
Good reminder to watch these seasons.
Forgot to log Super Troopers! Still a fun, very stupid and funny time especially right meow. Everyone is clearly enjoying themselves but Brian Cox is the absolute MVP, Logan Roy except he’s a fun hard-partying Irish trooper, and he really does love these morons (“If you were my son, I’d have suffocated you years ago.”) I almost framed this as copaganda in my head and then immediately gave up – it’s not that this movie’s beyond politics. It is BELOW politics, to paraphrase Mel Brooks.
And, hey, the actual cops are dumb, mean meatheads who are crooked and running protection for drug smugglers! Just like real life!
Accurate, yup!!
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Jan. 30th: Johns Anderson and Bruni: The T Men
Jan. 31st: Pluto’s Blue Note
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Mar. 26th: Sam Scott: Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie
Mar. 31st: John Anderson: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
A beautiful psychiatrist in a pulp crime thriller? Yeah, I’ve seen both versions of Nightmare Alley, I know where this is headed.
“Doctors HATE him!” was originally invented by pulp detectives to describe how lady shrinks view them.
I of course knew you were writing this when I made an I, the Jury crack at you a week or two ago. It wasn’t just coincidence.
There’s no coincidence when MURDER is involved!
I’ve always been torn on whether or not to read this, because generally Hammer feels like he wouldn’t work for me as well as, say, Sam Spade does, but the bleak cruelty of “it was easy,” which I’d known about, is compelling on its own. I think this has pushed me to just go with it already, especially so I can now laugh more directly at the kid’s menu banquet: “all that’s missing is a placemat with a maze on it” absolutely killed me.
I give Spillane a bit of a rough go here — sex hangs over this but so does WWII, Hammer is a vet and Spillane was in the Air Force, and the character’s violent fury makes a lot of sense in this context. And while the writing can be crude and one-dimensional it has a real kick, if nothing else you burn through the book in a day. I goof on some of the writing above but Spillane can also deliver, like when Hammer meets a sex worker caught up in and run down by the game:
“Here was a girl that had seen plenty of life, all raw. Her body was just a shade too thin, well fed, but emotionally starved. Empty, like a dead snail. Her profession
and her past were etched into her eyes. She was a girl you could beat without getting a whimper out of her. Maybe her expression would change, but another beating more or less would mean nothing.”
This is not nice writing but “Empty, like a dead snail” is a hell of an image.
Well, now I know comics really do rot your brain, because the prose looked good to me!
Spillane got his start in comics! I think in a Dick Tracy vein, to your point of violent law-and-order psychos…
I’ve been wanting to write a riff on Batman where his descent from kid-friendly unofficial cop to violent vigilante all happens to one guy in consequence to the real events of the era…anyway, there are a LOT of unofficial stories about popular superheroes, and I’m trying not to fall into the same traps as they tend to by drawing on other genres, and good God, Mike Hammer is just the kind of violent law-and-order psycho I’ve been looking for.
Well, now I have a pretty good idea what’d be near the top of the reading list if Elon Musk ever starts an incel book club.
Perhaps, but I am cheerfully imagining Mike Hammer’s reaction to a strongly accented foreigner with a rocket ship and an electric car, he would stomp the guy on general principles.
John Swartzwelder surely must have had Mike Hammer in mind, at least in name, when he created “Frank Burly.”