Spurred by the happy accident that came out of my paperback hunting a few weeks back—and in anticipation of two Spillane reviews that'll be going live shortly (covering the controversial 1982 adaptation of I, THE JURY and the first, best Stacy Keach telefilm, 1983's MURDER ME, MURDER YOU)—I thought I'd post about my next round of paperback (re)discoveries. Not only to appreciate the particular pleasures of their cover art and design, but also to log a few thoughts re: the books themselves.
As I mentioned in the John D. MacDonald post, I basically exhausted my options with that only (and anemic) used bookstore in my town. But about an hour and a half away, there was a well-known shop that I hadn't visited in probably five years, one that used to boast a second-floor "Mystery Room" where the paperbacks were stuffed like insulation. I decided to take off work early one afternoon and make the trek, on the off-chance that there'd be some worthwhile editions still to be found. What I did find: The "Mystery Room" remained, but the condition of its stock (not to mention the dust) suggested it probably hadn't been restocked in my five of years not visiting it. Nevertheless, there were a few worth pocketing:
[007 JAMES BOND: A REPORT (O.F. Snelling; 1965 edition)]
Having worked my way through half a dozen of Fleming's Bond novels last year, I was curious what this "dossier on Bond" by O.F. Snelling might entail. Lee Howard, in the Movie Matters podcast covering the Bond films, mentioned how the Daniel Craig films seemed at least partially concerned with redeeming, in the latest reboot of the character, some of "Bond's more undesirable qualities". E.g., starting the reboot with an adaptation of the origin story book, whose death of Vesper is meant, on at least one level, to "explain" the reason why Bond becomes so flippant and disrespectful in his relationships with all the women after.
(This is generally true of the movies at least—the roguish, devil-may-care, different-bikini-clad-woman-in-his-bed-each-week characterization templated by Connery; in the books, as with all matters of characterization, there's a lot more nuance, many more competing urges and explanations, when it comes to Bond and what makes him tick. I'm thinking esp. of how felt and developed his relationship with Gala Brand is in the book version of MOONRAKER—complete with him being "let down easy" by her at the end, when he expects them to go deeper into an actual relationship, and she reveals that she's instead happily engaged to another man. The fact that her character doesn't even *exist* in the screen adaptation of the story tells you all you need to know, really, about the actual relationship that the average Bond film holds to its source material.)
I skimmed Snelling's slim, tie-in volume, and found this startlingly unredeemed p.o.v., in a section entitled "His Women":
"Offhand, I can think of no character in fiction so lucky in love as James Bond. Almost every personable female he meets seems more than ready to hop into bed with him at his merest nod. Waitresses brush against him provocatively, married women appear to be his for the asking, other men's mistresses forget their lovers when they see him, and even expensive whores [his word, not mine] are willing to bestow their favours pour amour ... We enjoy reading our favourite spy's affairs because this side of his life is what each of us, in his heart, would like ours to be. Man is polygamous, perhaps promiscuous, even if only in the mind."Later, in the section called "His Adversaries," he has this to say about the "unattractive" female characters in the books:
"If it weren't for the fact that he is such a terror with the women, there would have been one or two femmes fatale, too. But any girl who might be opposing him at the start very soon comes over to his side. I'm not counting Rosa Klebb and Irma Bunt. They were cows anyway."Not only is this a generally asinine position to take, I'd also argue (as touched on above) that it actually misrepresents Bond's interactions with major female characters in the books. Granted, I still have half of them to read, but I could populate an essay with passages from those I *have* read that present a more-attached, more-invested, more-complicated emotional state when it comes to Bond's wants and needs "in relationship". (Though these book covers, great as they are, wouldn't give you much idea that such could be true.) I can only guess that Snelling dutifully carries this, ah, "misunderstanding" through the rest of the book.
[THE GIRL HUNTERS (Mickey Spillane; 1963 edition)]
My new-found discovery (and love) of THE GIRL HUNTERS has been documented (though I've yet to write a proper review of the book here), so it was great to find it in a cover I didn't own. The modern, omnibus trade paperback edition that I read it in, in the past month or so, is good as far as it goes, but mostly lacks the distinctive, time-capsuled flair of covers such as the one above.
What remains most compelling about THE GIRL HUNTERS in particular (and Spillane's work in general) is the still-bracing nature of the violence and sex (in most instances so seeped into each other that it's impossible to experience one without the other). Take, for instance, this passage from GH:
"It was like when the guy in the porkpie hat had her strung from the rafters and the whip in his hand had stripped her naked flesh with bright red welts, the force of each lash stroke making her spin so that the lush beauty of her body and the deep-space blackness of her hair and the wide sweep of her breasts made an obscene kaleidoscope and then I shot his arm off with the tommy gun and it dropped with a wet thud in the puddle of clothes around her feet like a pagan sacrifice and while he was dying I killed the rest of them, all of them, twenty of them, wasn't it? And they called me those terrible names, the judge and jury did."This is in reference to a scene in one of the books I haven't read, but it is—in its imagery, in its sexualized violence, in its breathless prose—compelling whether you know the context or not.
Further, the infamous final scene in GH recalls the equally well-known "corker" that comes at the end of Spillane's debut, I, THE JURY. Both involve a climactic "reveal" that unmasks Mike Hammer's primary love interest as, also, his primary adversary. Both also involve Hammer ruthlessly murdering those women when the depth and breadth of their callous betrayal comes to light. The murder at the end of GH is only implied (already preloaded, as it were, in the reader's mind, by foreshadowing done by Spillane several chapters back), but the build-up is typically graphic:
"I slept for a while. I felt the sun travel across my body from one side to the other, then I awoke abruptly because events had compacted themselves into my thoughts and I knew that there was still that one thing more to do.
"Laura said, 'You were talking in your sleep, Mike.'
"She had changed back into that black bikini and it was wet like her skin so she must have just come from the water. The tight band of black at her loins had rolled down some from the swim and fitted tightly into the crevasses of her body. The top half was like an artist's brush stroke, a quick motion of impatience at a critical sex-conscious world that concealed by reason of design only. She was nearly more naked dressed than nude."
[SO MOVE THE BODY (Carter Brown; 1973 edition)]
I've not yet read any Carter Brown, but this one caught my eye, first because of how similar the composition and design sense is to the GIRL HUNTERS cover. And second, because the title is so deadpan and direct.
Beyond having my eye caught by the fact that it was a Robert McGinnis cover, seeing "Mike Shayne" reminded me of the intertextual connections between that hard-boiled detective and Spillane's Mike Hammer:
In the 1963 film version of GIRL HUNTERS, Lloyd Nolan plays the role of taciturn, single-minded, long-suffering government agent Art Rickerby (whose name Hammer/Spillane playfully butchers from scene to scene). What I didn't realize until after rewatching the film is that Nolan played none other than Mike Shayne in a series of 1940s screen adaptations of Halliday's books. Each time Nolan and Spillane share screen time in GH, it's us witnessing the collision of two detective traditions—not just the ficitonal worlds of the original novels, but the additional, creative layers growing out of TV rights, movie rights, pop culture's popular opinions. The Pulp Art Idea Mill at its best.**
Leonard Jacobs
May, 2015
**ps. For a regularly updated world of pulp rediscovery, check out the coverage of past editions / covers / authors over at Killer Covers.
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