The Road to Hammer: Neoliberalist-Masculinity and The

THE ROAD TO HAMMER: NEOLIBERALIST-MASCULINITY AND THE

Marcus Gary Heiligenthal

B.A., University of Wisconsin – Whitewater, 2008

A thesis submitted to the Department of English and Foreign Languages College of Arts and Science The University of West Florida In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of the Arts

2012 The thesis of Marcus Gary Heiligenthal is approved:

______Robert F. Yeager, Ph.D., Committee Member Date

______David M. Earle, Ph.D., Committee Chair Date

Accepted for the Department/Division:

______Robert F. Yeager, Ph.D., Chair Date

Accepted for the University:

______Richard S. Podemski, Ph.D., Dean, Graduate School Date

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My interest in literary and cultural studies grew out of a series of undergraduate courses with Dr. Edie Thornton. The enthusiasm that Dr. Thornton displayed in discussing texts and her unwavering support of my academic pursuits gave me the confidence to pursue a degree in the field of literature.

The guidance of Dr. Robert Yeager has laid the foundation for my achievements at the graduate level. Dr. Yeager’s professional and accessible approach as a professor and an administrator were instrumental in my education and serve as an example of the quality of guidance that should be championed in institutions of higher learning. Dr.

Yeager’s humility, respect, understanding, and humor as an instructor are attributes I strive to emulate in my career going forward.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the continued mentorship and support of Dr.

David M. Earle. As a mentor, Dr. Earle’s work with periodical studies and his innovative approach to modernism guided my scholarship to develop in new and dynamic ways.

Through encouragement, respect, and understanding, he helped foster my love of literary studies and taught me to temper my enthusiasm with rigorous textual research and critical grounding.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

ABSTRACT ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

HARDBOILED-RATIONALITIES AND MIKE HAMMER’S LINEAGE ...... 6

MIKE HAMMER AS SALESMAN FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM ...... 14

MIKE HAMMER AS A RETURN TO SHERLOCK HOLMES ...... 20

THE ME, MYSELF, AND HAYEK OF THE “NEOLIBERAL” SCHOOL OF DETECTIVE FICTION ...... 26

MIKE HAMMER: DESTROYER OF COLLECTIVES, CHAMPION OF THE AMERICAN DREAM ...... 35

THE FAÇADE OF SPILLANE’S POPULAR NEOLIBERALISM ...... 43

WORKS CITED ...... 45

ABSTRACT

THE ROAD TO HAMMER: NEOLIBERALIST-MASCULINITY AND THE POLITICS OF MIKE HAMMER

Marcus Gary Heiligenthal

Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels rank among the most popular texts in

American fiction. Despite Spillane’s enormous popularity, or perhaps because of it, there remains little critical consideration of his works. Spillane’s work has been dismissed as overly simplistic, highly formulaic, and hyper-violent by the literary community. I assert that Spillane’s work serves both as an archive of the popular cultural turmoil of late modernity and as a vehicle to forward Spillane’s own hyper-masculine politics.

Considering Spillane in the context of other hardboiled writers illuminates the ideological nature of Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels. While other writers of the genre used the detective story as a means to articulate nuanced modernist discourses, Spillane flouts this tradition in a dangerously simplistic attempt to forward a highly nationalistic, neoliberalist-masculine ideology.

INTRODUCTION

Ayn Rand was a fan of Mickey Spillane (Corliss 3). Ayn Rand, the highly politicized hyper-capitalist, was a supporter of Mickey Spillane‘s Mike Hammer novels.

Ayn Rand, the dogmatic right-winger whose name is trumpeted at conservative and libertarian gatherings and whose novel Atlas Shrugged is required reading for every staffer of Rep. Paul Ryan (among others1), was Spillane‘s ―one cheerleader amongst serious novelists‖; yet Rand‘s ally, Spillane, is considered apolitical and devoid of critical depth (Corliss 3). Spillane‘s work was detested by critics, who likened his character Mike

Hammer to a ―homicidal maniac with a passion for ripping the clothes from women and shooting them in the abdomen‖ (Cowley 106). Spillane was despised by modernists, who saw Spillane as a figure of artistic betrayal and commercialism because he referred to his readers as ―customers‖ and boasted of ―requiring between three days and two weeks to complete a novel‖ (Van Dover 99). Yet Spillane, an outcast of the literary community, was one the best-selling novelists of the twentieth century and, by 1980, author of seven of the top fifteen all-time best-selling novels in the United States (Sutherland 1).

Spillane‘s neglect left his immensely popular works uninvestigated, texts that present insight into the tumultuous cultural climate of post–World War II America. Returning to

1 Rand continues to emerge as a touchstone in modern Republican and Tea Party politics. Besides Paul Ryan requiring that each staffer read Ayn Rand‘s Atlas Shrugged, Sen. Rand Paul (although denying he was named after her) has professed his admiration for Rand‘s novels and Sen. Ron Johnson called Atlas Shrugged a ―foundational book‖ that serves as ―a warning for what could happen in America‖ (Beam, ―The Trouble with Liberty‖). Furthermore, both Sen. Mike Johanns and Rep. John Kline named Atlas Shrugged as among their favorite summer reads (Koebler, ―Lawmakers Name Their Favorite Summer Reads‖). 1

Spillane‘s novels exposes that Rand‘s fondness for his work was not arbitrary, nor due solely to the famous ―surprise endings,‖ but based upon their similar political ideologies of hyper-capitalism (Collins xi). Ayn Rand loved Mickey Spillane because Mike

Hammer is reminiscent of the same political ethos as her own enigmatic character John

Galt, but with a .45, a flask of rye, and private investigator‘s license.

Spillane is often associated with the hardboiled school of detective fiction, though this relationship demands further elucidation. This subgenre, originating in Black Mask magazine during the 1920s, offered a new, modernist interpretation of detective fiction.

Black Mask became famous for depicting violent realism and shaping ―hardboiled- rationalities‖: new approaches toward masculinity, independence, class, and social standing reshaped in the context of modernity. Notable hardboiled authors like Dashiell

Hammett and Raymond Chandler were sources of popular cultural insight into American society and critically engaged modern anxieties concerning urbanization, industrialization, individualism, masculinity, and the American Dream. While the hardboiled school has been critically reconsidered in recent scholarship, hardboiled fiction was originally dismissed by scholars for being overly formulaic and

―unsophisticated.‖ Yet, unlike Spillane, the hardboiled school was regarded as politically charged. Dashiell Hammett‘s fiction espoused political sentiment that eventually landed him on the blacklist during Joseph McCarthy‘s House Committee on Un-American

Activities (HUAC) trials, and Raymond Chandler‘s Farewell, My Lovely offers scathing criticism of the American Dream. Spillane‘s novels, however, have been noticeably absent from these political, and critical, considerations.

Spillane is championed as the antithesis of the sophisticated aspects of the hardboiled genre. The limited criticism that deals with Spillane describes the Hammer novels as hollow manifestations of the hardboiled school. Spillane has been said to

―[employ] the same mechanics pioneered by Hammett‖ but ―in the service of . . . ferocious sadism‖ and has been lampooned for his seemingly wanton violence (O‘Brien

12). Critics found it ironic that while ―Sam Spade‘s literary descendant Mike Hammer was kicking in the teeth of Commie subversives . . . Sam Spade‘s creator [Hammet] was going to prison for refusing to testify against Leftist acquaintances‖ (O‘Brien 12).

Spillane‘s and Hammett‘s political approaches vary drastically, but Spillane‘s politics are far from absent. Rather, Spillane represents an unconsidered popular form of neoliberalist ideology.

Spillane emerged on the literary scene with I, the Jury in 1947, when American political discourse was concerned with combating the threat of Communism. The political landscape of the early Cold War was rife with fervent nationalism and aggressive masculine attitudes. While Hammer is described as nationalistic and hyper- masculine, these connotations serve to ―sell‖ Spillane‘s individualist ideology as an inextricable extension of nationalism and masculinity. Spillane merges individualism with these discourses to create a social imperative for self-interest: being masculine and nationalistic for Hammer are a priori individualistic pursuits, so a cultural climate that favors masculinity and nationalism must be based on individualism. The amalgamation of these three discourses alters hardboiled traditions to enforce Spillane‘s political ideology.

Hammer is a private detective, unhindered by the ―red tape‖ of police regulations, who acts according to his own interests. Rather than participating in the nuanced discourse of

3 the traditional hardboiled, Spillane‘s fiction pioneers a politically savvy, yet dangerously simplistic, anarcho-capitalist detective fiction.

Spillane‘s cultural impact was the articulation of a popular ideological discourse that pandered to the worst aspects of 1950s culture: intolerant ultranationalism and misogynistic hyper-masculinity. Spillane‘s Hammer novels succeeded in presenting society with the false simplicity of a neoliberalist utopia,2 or a ―shining city upon a hill‖ to use Reagan‘s famous term,3 as the solution to 1950s cultural anxieties. Several of these simplistic tropes are found in the first pages of Spillane‘s One Lonely Night. The novel begins with Hammer walking across a lonely bridge in the middle of a blizzard. An extremely distraught woman runs toward him and collapses in his arms. Following the girl is a ―short, pudgy guy in a heavy belted ulster‖ wearing his hat ―rakishly‖ and sneering (Spillane, Lonely 11). The short man, a communist executioner, points a gun at

Hammer through the pocket of his coat and tells Hammer that ―it is not smart to be a hero

. . . so now they will find the two of you here tomorrow‖ (Spillane, Lonely 11). Hammer, trapped in a situation where he is caught off guard by a man with a gun already aimed at him, reflects that the feminized communist ―was just the type who would go to the trouble of taking the gun out of his pocket instead of ruining a good coat,‖ a trait the hyper-masculine Hammer does not share (Spillane, Lonely 11). Quickly, Hammer grabs his trusty .45 ―before [the communist] had his gun out [of his pocket],‖ only ―giv[ing]

[the communist] a second to realize what it was like to die‖ before Hammer ―blew the expression clean off his face‖ (Spillane, Lonely 11). Hammer kills the communist easily.

2 The use of the term ―neoliberalist utopia‖ is retroactive, as I will make the link more explicit below. 3 In David Harvey‘s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, President Ronald Reagan is referred to as a key figure in shifting American economic policy toward neoliberalism. 4

His only reflection is that the communist ―never figured the hero would have a gun, too,‖ a line analogous to the overarching problem with the utopian political ideology of the

Mike Hammer novels: Mike Hammer always has a gun; the hero always wins. (Spillane,

Lonely 11). The danger of Spillane‘s work is that, only depicting society through

Hammer‘s perspective, it disregards the ill effects of Hammer‘s actions. If the hero,

Hammer, always wins, what is left in his destructive wake for everyone else? What happens when the hero doesn‘t have a gun, too?

Spillane‘s Hammer novels mark an early articulation of a popular form of neoliberalist theory that continues to influence modern political discourse. Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged to convey her political ideology of unrestricted capitalism in an effort to promote political change; Spillane‘s Hammer novels, albeit much more violently, achieve a congruent dynamic. David Harvey asserts that in early neoliberalist texts ―the battle for ideas was key‖ and that ―it would probably take at least a generation for that battle to be won‖ (Harvey 21). In order to understand the context and influence of

Spillane‘s work, a genealogical approach to his effect on political and social rhetoric is necessary. A critical look at Spillane‘s Mike Hammer novels will unveil that one of the first shots in the neoliberalist ―battle for ideas‖ came from Mike Hammer‘s .45.

HARDBOILED-RATIONALITIES AND MIKE HAMMER‘S LINEAGE

The hardboiled school originated in Black Mask magazine. While Spillane never wrote for Black Mask, the magazine was fundamental in articulating the hardboiled stylistics that later influenced his fiction. Black Mask was created, along with several other pulp magazines like Saucy Stories and Parisienne, to financially support The Smart

Set magazine (Nolan 19). The Smart Set was a ―quality‖ magazine designed for a

―sophisticated‖ reader that, although launching the career of F. Scott Fitzgerald among others, was not financially solvent (Nolan 19). George Nathan and H. L. Mencken, the editors of The Smart Set, often used Black Mask (as well as the Parisienne and Saucy

Stories) to publish manuscripts that were deemed too popular or flippant for The Smart

Set.4 Mencken and Nathan originally designed Black Mask after another, highly profitable pulp, Detective Story, but the influences of The Smart Set upon Black Mask are unmistakable: Black Mask‘s name and logo (a ―thin black pirate‘s mask with a dirk and a flintlock pistol crossed behind it‖) are derived from the black mask worn by Satan on each cover of The Smart Set (Nolan 20). The hardboiled style of Black Mask replaced

―the elegant, deductive sleuth, the calm calculating sifter of clues‖ found in the works of

Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle with ―the wary, wisecracking knight of the .45, an often violent, always unpredictable urban vigilante‖ (Nolan 13). Black Mask

4 For further insight into The Smart Set, refer to David M. Earle‘s Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form. 6 became synonymous with this ―hardboiled‖ style and featured giants of the genre:

Dashiell Hammett, Carroll John Daly, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, and

Frederick Nebel.

The cultural sentiments that shaped hardboiled fiction originated from the shift toward modernization and urbanization. Black Mask‘s stories ―were born of adversity, written to dramatize and delineate a nation in flux‖ and depict the changing cultural landscape of the United States (Nolan 13). While the modernist leanings of pulp fiction are often dismissed critically, recent trends in scholarship have recognized pulps as a form of ―popular modernism.‖ The pulps share similar tensions as canonical modernism, notably the dynamics of modernization, but have been dismissed due to preconceived notions of popular, ephemeral literature as unsophisticated. A closer look at the protagonist of hardboiled literature shows a definitively modernist character.

The primary character in most early hardboiled fiction was the private detective.

The style of the hardboiled dick is described by Kingsley Widmer in ―The Way Out:

Some Life-Style Sources of the Literary Tough Guy and the Proletarian Hero‖:

[the hardboiled detective is] an isolato with sneering side-of-mouth cigarette,

bruised felt hat, off-beat dress (e.g., suit jacket with dark colored suit), stubbly

and fist-like face, and defensively terse gestures. His hard drinking, laconically

derisive speech, and hard travelling provide other marks of the kind. Violent, he

also expects violence and endures it with stoicism . . . he displays a

connoisseurship of harsh sensations, the grace of ―being his own man,‖ and the

pride of losing well. Such an outcast understates an heroic effort, however

narrow, for resisting an essentially hostile and cheating world. (Widmer 3)

While Widmer touches only briefly on the hardboiled detective‘s relationship with society, the detective is unhindered by overarching, societal narratives. The ethics of the hardboiled dick, specifically, are strikingly modernist. One of the preeminent hardboiled detectives, Race Williams, holds distinctly personal ethics that evade the dualisms of

―good‖ and ―evil.‖ In Carroll John Daly‘s The Snarl of the Beast, Race Williams describes himself as a ―halfway house between the law and crime‖ and as ―working both ends against the middle‖ to achieve his goals (Daly 12). Williams‘s abandonment of the rigid dichotomies of law and crime as barometers of ethical behavior fractures such narratives along modernist lines: the overarching, grand narratives that dominated

Victorian culture are no longer applicable to the hardboiled Williams. The hardboiled dick chooses his own narrative, is his own man—a tradition that forms a direct lineage to

Spillane‘s Mike Hammer. While Williams utilized this ethical position to comment upon a fracturing of grand narratives in modernity, Spillane‘s Hammer prescribes his distinct narrative as an overarching ideology. In Spillane, the subjective Hammer becomes the solution for the objective whole of society.

The readership of Black Mask provides insight into the cultural moment that gave rise to the magazine and the hardboiled detective as articulator of popular modernism.

Erin A. Smith notes in Hardboiled: Working Class Readers and Pulp Magazines that

Black Mask constructs a space for its readership that eases the chafing of modernity‘s industrialization and urbanization. Smith asserts that pulp fiction was ―less about crime and the process of detection than about the hard-boiled private eye‘s struggles for autonomy at work, his skill at reading class and social position . . . his manly physical and rhetorical prowess, and his tortured relations with women‖ (Smith 17). While Smith

8 generalizes all of pulp fiction (which is highly problematic considering the disparate forms presented among Black Mask, Saucy Stories, Love Stories, The Smart Set, and too many others to list), when limited to Black Mask her assertions pronounce an arresting dynamic in the magazine‘s marketing and reader construction. Black Mask prided itself and its readership on being keen, masculine social climbers. Joseph ―Cap‖ Shaw, editor of Black Mask from 1926 to 1936, said that the ideal reader was ―vigorous-minded . . . hating unfairness, trickery, injustice . . . responsive to the thrill of danger, the stirring exhilaration of clean, swift, hard action . . . knows the song of a bullet, the soft, slithering hiss of a swift-thrown knife, the feel of hands . . . [and] the call of courage‖ (qtd in Nolan

29). Shaw‘s tone is over-dramatized but indicative of the magazine pandering toward the desires and insecurities of its readership. The cultural tensions of urbanization, a diminished independence at work due to Taylorism and Fordism, a striving for social mobility, a self-consciousness of social savvy, and a complication of masculinity in modernity eventually defined Black Mask and the hardboiled genre.

The emergence of industrialization problematized and heightened the reader‘s affinity for the hardboiled hero‘s artisan independence at work. With modernization, the

American working class underwent a vast migration toward the city. The modern city served as the center of industry and the source of chaotic, new experiences for laborers.

Industrial workers were placed into occupations organized according to Fred Taylor‘s rigid system of standardization and Henry Ford‘s assembly lines. Fred Taylor was fundamental in the process of American industrialization by categorizing the process of production at the level of the individual. ―Taylorism‖ as a process dictated which tools, physical movements, and methods were proven to construct a quality product most

9 efficiently. Henry Ford applied a similar methodology to the entirety of the production line. ―Fordism‖ utilized Taylorism‘s rigid adherence to detail but further standardized the component parts of a product so that each product was composed of interchangeable pieces. Fordism resulted in the constructing of the assembly line, a highly regulated system where each worker was assigned to assemble one part of the product rather than the whole. Taylorism and Fordism spread throughout American factories during industrialization, restricting the notion of artisan independence in the workplace through repetitive standardization. The Black Mask readers found refuge in heroes who emblemized the new virtues of modernization by possessing a mastery of the new urban cityscape and the ability to negotiate individual agency in an increasingly regulated workplace.

The cultural anxieties felt by Black Mask‘s readers can be seen as part of a larger crisis of masculinity. Philip C. Cody, one of the first editors of Black Mask, pandered to the machismo of his audience, as in his editorial in the January 1926 issue that ―Black

Mask gives its readers more real, honest-to-Jasper, he-man stuff . . . than any other magazine‖ (qtd. in Nolan 23). Black Mask during the twenties and thirties unveils the cultural nostalgia for a romanticized notion of a supposedly simpler, pre-modern masculinity that was shattered through modernization. While these romanticizations are blatantly false, readers approached Black Mask to reestablish a differently gendered world through its presentation of the violence and savvy of the hardboiled dick. Smith notes that ―hardboiled detective stories participated in the social construction of a class- and race-specific masculinity that was enmeshed with large changes in the economy and the structure of work‖ (Smith 12). Black Mask began to encase other cultural sentiments

10 by articulating these tensions as crises of masculinity: an example of this is found in an electrical training ad that ran in many issues of Black Mask. The ad depicted a standing

―electrical expert,‖ well dressed and in a position of power, ordering his subordinates to repair a machine, the line, ―you, too, can learn to boss this job‖ above the expert‘s head

(Black Mask, June 1926, emphasis added). The advertisement is closely tied with the frustration expressed by the lack of individuality and skill required in Taylorism and

Fordism; the ad sells the idea of artisan independence in the workplace as an issue both of individuality and of masculinity.

The folding of such values as pride for independent, artisan work with masculinity charges hardboiled masculinity with other, normally disparate issues.

Christopher Breu in Hardboiled Masculinities comments on the process of masculinity incorporating these crises of modernity:

The hard-boiled male embodied a thoroughly modernized conception of

masculinity . . . by maintaining a rigorously individualist stance, by being self-

directed, and by rebelling against all forms of authority and social connection . . .

the emergence of hard-boiled masculinity thus needs to be understood as a

retrenchment of cultural conceptions of masculinity as well as a reconfiguration

of the meaning of male identity in the face of new socioeconomic circumstances.

(Breu 5-6)

As Breu notes, the new hardboiled masculinity reframes issues of employment and social mobility as questions of modernization and of manliness. The new, masculine connotations that form around the hardboiled-rationalities of Black Mask heighten the

11 intensity of these anxieties by impacting the pressures of modernity in terms of adeptness, independence, and masculinity.

Black Mask succeeded in constructing the hardboiled detective as an ideal rather than merely a character. The popularity of Black Mask was due to its ability to provide escapism from the cultural traumas of modernization. Black Mask marks the initiation of the hardboiled discourse and charges the hardboiled school with cultural sentiments of masculinity, social mobility, class, and race that can be best described as ―hardboiled- rationalities.‖ The approach of Black Mask to the cultural moment that gave rise to these hardboiled-rationalities would be drastically reformulated in Spillane‘s Hammer novels.

While the hardboiled school uses Black Mask as a popular outlet to describe these hardboiled-rationalities, Spillane utilizes the cultural sentiments at the beginning of the

Cold War to prescribe his own political solutions of hyper-masculine individualism.

Spillane writes and, to an extent, lives as the ultra-competitive, hyper-masculine male through his texts, disregarding the cultural impact of his work by focusing solely on sales as an indicator of quality.5 Spillane‘s texts can be read as a dangerously simplistic, prescriptive response to the beginnings of the Cold War. Spillane uses the crude, ―black and white‖ (or Communist and capitalist) discourse of the Cold War to advocate for a political ideology that directly conflicts with hardboiled-rationalities. Rather than expand upon masculine discourse, Spillane reinforces masculinity‘s borders with ultranationalism and anti-intellectualism to forward his individualist ideology. In such regard, Spillane‘s Hammer novels should not be considered part of the patchwork of the

5 Spillane himself emblemized the hyper-masculine persona which he created for Mike Hammer, starring as Hammer in Roy Rowland‘s 1963 adaptation of The Girl Hunters (The Girl Hunters). Spillane also played himself in an advertisement for Miller Lite in 1982 (Miller Lite Beer). Spillane was one of the many ―masculine‖ faces chosen to encourage men to drink the supposedly feminized ―light‖ beer. 12 modernist, hardboiled school but more closely represent the posturing of Cody‘s ―he- man‖ marketing campaign.

MIKE HAMMER AS SALESMAN FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM

The cultural moment that gave rise to the hardboiled school also led to its realist critique of the American Dream. The consumer culture of the twenties was burgeoning during Black Mask‘s early years, and the advertisements reflected the working-class urge for advancement. Stories in Black Mask often depicted the futility of the American

Dream by showing those who pursued the dream meeting catastrophic ends. This growing dynamic is perfected in Raymond Chandler‘s ―Try the Girl,‖ featured in the

January 1937 issue of Black Mask.

―Try the Girl‖ (one of the three short stories that later became Farewell, My

Lovely) offered a scathing critique of the American Dream. ―Try the Girl‖ traces the search of the recently paroled bank robber Steve Skalla as he looks for his past girlfriend

Beulah, a former night club singer. Skalla is pursued by the police and the protagonist, a hardboiled detective named Carandy, after an altercation at Beulah‘s former night club,

Shamey‘s, results in Skalla murdering the club‘s manager. Chandler‘s introduction of

Skalla‘s pursuit of Beulah charges the story with connotations of the American Dream from the very first pages: Skalla is described as ―the big guy standing in front of

Shamey‘s . . . looking up at the broken stencils in the electric sign, with a sort of rapt expression, like a hunky immigrant looking at the Statue of Liberty, like a man who had waited a long time and come a long way‖ (Chandler, ―Try the Girl‖ 573). Skalla, the

14 culturally unpolished immigrant wearing ―pleated maroon pants, a rough grayish coat with white billiard balls for buttons, brown suede shoes with explosions in white kid on them, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, a large red carnation, and a front-door handkerchief the color of the Irish flag,‖ quickly becomes an allegory for the working-class reader of the pulps, and his pursuit of Beulah is analogous to the pursuit of American prosperity

(Chandler, ―Try the Girl‖ 573). Chandler, accordingly, uses Skalla and Beulah to undermine the notion of the American Dream at every possible turn. Skalla‘s quest for

Beulah is hindered by her passing as Vivian Baring. Beulah has taken a job at the local radio station and has switched names to distance herself from her lower-class past and to better her social standing. While Beulah is seemingly succeeding in improving herself through the glamour of radio, Chandler reveals that fame and celebrity is hollow: regardless of her increased social status, Beulah is still powerless and objectified. Late in the story, Mr. Marineau, Beulah‘s boss, arrives at her apartment in the middle of the night in an attempt to ―blackmail [her]‖ into becoming his mistress (Chandler, ―Try the Girl‖

618). Beulah kills Mr. Marineau during the resulting struggle over the attempted

―something‖ and leaves the apartment intending to abscond to Mexico. Later Skalla, upon finding only Mr. Marineau‘s corpse in the apartment, attempts to dispose of it, only to be shot by Mrs. Marineau (who thinks Skalla has killed Mr. Marineau due to an imagined affair with Beulah). Chandler leaves Beulah and Skalla—and through their relationship, the American Dream—in an incredibly bleak position to finish the story. Beulah is unemployed after Mr. Marineau‘s death and loses her fame and celebrity. Furthermore, she is beaten and bruised by Carandy to provide an alibi for her story regarding killing

Mr. Marineau in self-defense. Skalla is in a worse position, only finally reuniting with

Beulah, his Statue of Liberty, as he lay unaware and incoherent on his deathbed. Plots like ―Try the Girl‖ grounded the stories of Black Mask against the rise of consumer culture. Chandler‘s strong criticism of the American Dream helped temper the growing commoditization of ―upward advancement‖ found in the advertisements of Black Mask.

While the stories in Black Mask were problematizing the hardboiled-rationalities

(criticizing modern notions of independence in the workplace, urban and cultural savvy, social mobility and self-improvement, and masculinity), the advertisements in Black

Mask offered quick-fix solutions to modernization through commodities or services, such as correspondence schools or workout regimes. The ―electrical expert‖ ad discussed previously marketed itself directly at these hardboiled-rationalities, offering social mobility through ―the highest salaries‖ and ―opportunities for advancement‖ while asking of an increasingly standardized workforce ―what‘s your future?‖ (Black Mask, June

1926).6 The same issue of Black Mask features an ad that mirrors the language of the stories in the magazine, asking ―What is a Bootlegger?‖ in bold print before slowly unveiling itself to be selling a workout regime that will ―amaze yourself and impress your friends!‖ (Black Mask, June 1926). While these types of advertisements (known as

―editorial copy‖ for shaping the language to blend into the tonal context of the magazine) are commonplace throughout pulp fiction, an interesting dynamic arises when such editorial copy is placed within the context of Black Mask. The blurring of boundaries between ads and stories causes an ambivalent narrative to arise regarding the hardboiled-

6 It has been noted by David M. Earle in Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form that most ads featured in Black Mask were sold wholesale to many different pulps throughout the 1920s and into the 1940s. This claim is supported through the magazine itself, as underneath each page of advertisements in the June 1926 issue of Black Mask (primarily featured in the front and back of the magazine) appears the contact information for the agency that sold the bundle of advertisements, such as ―The Parisienne” (Black Mask, June 1926). 16 rationalities: the stories destabilize the American Dream as fantasy while the ads rely heavily on the dream‘s promise of advancement. The dual narrative of the American

Dream in Black Mask spanned the entirety of the magazine‘s life, as Smith notes that

―into the 1940s, [Black Mask readers] still hoped to demonstrate physical prowess, patriarchal male supremacy, and free agency of ‗real men,‘ although this feat required an increasing number of purchases‖ (Smith 72). Smith fails to note that the level of sophistication of the ―editorial copy‖ improved as the demand for more purchases rose: by the September 1950 issue of Black Mask, the editorial copy advertisements had progressed from ―What is a Bootlegger?‖ to a full-page comic depicting a secret agent who catches the criminal but only receives the promotion thanks to Gillette‘s new, thin razor blades (Black Mask, September 1950). The ads in Black Mask were selling consumers false solutions to the problems articulated in the stories by Chandler and others in an increasingly hardboiled tone, a trend that Spillane‘s fiction embraced.

The editors of Black Mask also infused the pulp with narratives of upward mobility to improve the social standing of the devalued pulp magazine. During the 1920s, a time of exponential capitalist growth, fiction that dealt with the effects of increased social mobility were common; however, unlike these narratives, Black Mask attempted to market itself as a vehicle of the upwardly mobile. Pulps formed the ―bottom of the cultural hierarchy of the 1920s and 1930s,‖ causing the editors to aggrandize the magazine‘s readership to avoid criticism from ―quality‖ magazines, like Vanity Fair, or their readers (Earle 86). Earle notes that ―the pulps frequently felt the need in editorials to define their audience as being economically mobile, reputable, and of a high cultural position‖ in order to bolster the popular magazine against societal elitists (Earle 86-87).

While such attempts could have been sincere promotions to show that the magazine was read, as former editor A. A. Wynn asserted, by ―bankers and brokers, lawyers and doctors, salesman and Senators,‖ the lingering effect was an attempt to commoditize the magazine itself into a benchmark of success (qtd in Earle 87). The editorial aggrandizements were sold to the reader as ―authentic‖ by attaching the editorials to the stories and writers; Shaw claimed in the October 1929 issue that Black Mask authors

―write from firsthand knowledge and from experience with criminals and their ways and detectives and their methods . . . as they actually are in real life‖ (Black Mask, October

1929 vi). Just as the hardboiled tone of Black Mask was employed in the advertisements, the editorials utilized the stories to claim ―authenticity‖ in their inflated rhetoric. They hollowed out the magazine to be another false regime (like the ads for correspondence school or a workout program) for dealing with the problems of modernization.

The editorials and the advertisements serve to market the characteristics of the hardboiled protagonist as commodities, both materially for hardboiled-style products like the ―genuine German Mauser‖ often advertised in the back of the magazine and culturally in valuing the ability to use it as a masculine imperative (Black Mask, June 1923). The stories serve to counterbalance the aggrandized narrative of the ―he-man‖ editorialized readership and the burgeoning commodity culture of the advertisements. While Skalla‘s downfall in Chandler‘s story offers a problematization of the advertisement for ―success through body-building‖ in the same magazine, these dualistic and opposed narratives of the American Dream are lost in Spillane‘s Mike Hammer novels. Hammer does not resemble the detachment and wit of the hardboiled detective but the wanton aggression of the tragic Skalla (even more so of the character‘s later manifestation, Moose Malloy, in

Farewell My Lovely7), except Hammer achieves the American Dream that eludes Skalla.

In the third Hammer novel, Vengeance is Mine! Hammer asks his secretary, Velda, to go undercover on a date with a possible lead in one of his cases. Velda has been romantically interested in Hammer since the first novel in the series, but their relationship has been platonic up to this point (surprisingly, as most female interactions with Hammer quickly take a sexual turn). Hammer states that ―there was a time when she would have broken any kind of a date to put away a hamburger in a diner with me‖ but ―those times had flown‖ (Spillane, Vengeance 419). While such a reflection by Hammer could set up the longstanding commentary of loss, regret, and desire that is seen in ―Try the Girl,‖ it is quickly abandoned less than a page later. When Hammer makes his feelings known and tells Velda, ―I wish I had seen you like that before,‖ she immediately responds with

―Mike . . . I don‘t have to tell you that you can see me any way you like . . . anytime‖ and kisses him (Spillane, Vengeance 420). The critique of the American Dream, embodied in the doomed pursuit of the female object that was present in Chandler is gone in Spillane, replaced with a narrative of Hammer‘s constant fulfillment. Spillane offers a reading of the American Dream that panders to his reader‘s sense of exceptionalism, just as do the advertisements in Black Mask, and leaves in his cultural wake a text that stifles criticism regarding social mobility in the United States. For Spillane, the American Dream is alive, uncomplicated, and fundamental to his political ideology.

7 The tenderness of Skalla in ―Try the Girl‖ is removed when the story is merged into Farewell, My Lovely and Skalla is replaced by the character, Moose Malloy. While Malloy is earnest in his pursuit of Velma (the Beulah character), he is much less tactful (Chandler, Farewell My Lovely). Moose murders several more people out of ―passion‖ because, according to Megan Abbott in The Street Was Mine, of his ―torch love‖ for Velma (Abbott 109). 19

MIKE HAMMER AS A RETURN TO SHERLOCK HOLMES

The differences between Spillane‘s political ideology and the politics of the hardboiled school only become apparent after investigating the political turn of Black

Mask in contrast to previous detective fiction. Sean McCann offers a reading of traditional detective fiction in Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the

Fall of New Deal Liberalism:

The classic detective story celebrated the victory of public knowledge and civic

solidarity over the dangers of private desire. It registered that victory formally by

bringing the arcane knowledge and peculiar abilities wielded by the detective to

bear on the challenge to the social order represented by the villain, suggesting

thereby that there was no specialized learning that could not prove socially useful

just as there was no strife or dissension that could not be absorbed by a healthy

civil society. (McCann 4)

McCann describes the basis of traditional detective fiction‘s political structure, which, viewed as a point of comparison with hardboiled fiction, begins to establish political differences.

In Dashiell Hammett‘s Red Harvest, the events in Personville flip the dynamics of traditional detective fiction by depicting a corrupt civic society. Personville, referred to as

―Poisonville‖ by its citizens, is beyond the pale of traditional detective fiction in that

20 crime is inextricable from society (Hammett 3). Hammett‘s protagonist, the nameless

Continental Op, is an outside agent who is summoned to cleanse ―Poisonville‖ from itself—rather than from a villain like Professor Moriarty (Sherlock Holmes‘s antagonist).

The Op utilizes the crookedness of ―Poisonville‖ to manipulate the corrupt members of society to eliminate each other. The Op‘s victory, the cleansing of ―Poisonville,‖ is diametrically opposed to the victory of the classic detective as the Op uses criminals to regulate corruption rather than remove a single villain from an otherwise healthy society.

Often, the hardboiled school‘s resolution, or lack thereof, is drastically different from that of classic detective fiction. While classic detective fiction reaffirms the order of a civic society, hardboiled fiction challenges the reader through a lack of resolution. The

Op cleans ―Poisonville,‖ only to return the city to its original corrupter, Elihu Willsson.

Elihu serves as the criminal patriarch of ―Poisonville,‖ a corrupt businessman with political connections who turned to hired thugs to squash the labor movement in

Personville. After breaking the strike, Elihu‘s thugs noticed the profitable setup Elihu had in Personville and opted to stay and share in the criminal wealth. When the Op is eventually called to help rescue ―Poisonville‖ from the criminal element by Elihu‘s son,

Donald, a newspaper editor attempting to expose the corruption, the Op arrives to find

Donald murdered. Elihu hires the Op to have ―Personville emptied of its crooks and grafters‖ only after his own life is threatened (Hammett 43). The Op agrees, but on the condition that he will have ―a free hand—no favors to anybody‖ and be paid from a retainer so Elihu won‘t have the Op ―playing politics [for Elihu]‖ (Hammett 44). The Op does not want to ―help [Elihu] kick [his thugs] back in line—with the job being called off‖ before it is complete (Hammett 44). The Op begins a violent process of manipulating

21 each of Elihu‘s lieutenants into conflict with each other, causing ―Poisonville‖ to devolve into anarchy. In cleansing ―Poisonville,‖ the Op orchestrates murders and betrayals between Elihu and his chief thugs, resulting in only Elihu‘s survival. The effect of the

Op‘s work in ―Poisonville‖ is, however, only a temporary revolution. As he returns the cleansed city back to the corrupt Elihu, he states, ―you‘ll have your city back, all nice and clean and ready to go to the dogs again‖ (Hammett 203). The resolution of the story is held in abeyance; the Op succeeds only temporarily: the city still remains partly corrupted. The Op does not restore order, as the traditional detective would, but serves to regulate the acceptable amount of corruption. The impossibility of complete eradication of corruption throughout many hardboiled novels complicates the model of a healthy civil society presented in traditional detective fiction. Hardboiled fiction presents corruption as a permanent facet of society that is regulated to acceptable levels.

The futility of complete criminal eradication in hardboiled fiction offers insight into the underlying difference in approach between hardboiled and traditional detective fare. The differences are best described through two forms of Foucaultian power: disciplinary power and biopower. Foucault‘s conception of disciplinary power revolves around the close investigation and categorization of a process through intense observation and control. Disciplinary power is concerned with establishing a ―norm‖ and then ―in relation to the training carried out with reference to the norm that the normal could be distinguished from the abnormal‖ (Foucault, Security 63). The traditional detective solves crimes through a disciplinary technique which ―breaks down individuals, places, times, movements, operations . . . into components such that they can be seen‖ and ―modified‖

(Foucault, Security 56). The detective‘s keen sense of observation, emblemized by

Sherlock Holmes‘s famous magnifying glass, is primary to traditional detective fiction as it begins the disciplinary process of identifying the ―abnormal‖ criminal in ―normal‖ civic society and eradicating him. Traditional detective fiction is dedicated to dichotomous narratives of normal and abnormal, or to borrow McCann‘s phrase ―healthy‖ and

―corrupt,‖ to solve the crime.

The shattering of grand narratives, like ―normal‖ and ―abnormal,‖ that occurs in post-enlightenment modernization is reflected in hardboiled fiction. The hardboiled school refuses the totalities of traditional detective fiction‘s dichotomies, rather adhering to a fragmented depiction of corruption in civic society. Corruption is no longer as simple as a sole villain challenging society‘s purity but involves a battle like ―Poisonville,‖ where the Op must choose the level of acceptable crime. While the hardboiled dick utilizes disciplinary techniques, it is localized and subjective. The hardboiled dick embraces the regulatory process of Foucaultian biopower. Foucault‘s biopower is described as ―a plotting of the normal and the abnormal, of different curves of normality, and the operation of normalization consists in establishing an interplay between these different distributions of normality and acting to bring the most unfavorable in line with the more favorable‖ (Foucault, Security 63). The Op regulates the crime in ―Poisonville‖ to the previously stable level of Elihu Willsson, as it represents the most favorable option.

If the Op had arrested Willsson, the result would have been a vacuum of power and further violence on a larger scale. The Op‘s regulation, rather than eradication, of corruption in ―Poisonville‖ is representative of the hardboiled school‘s turn away from simplistic notions of crime toward a modernist, biopower reading.

Spillane‘s Hammer abandons the modernist, hardboiled approach to crime fiction by reasserting his presence as eradicator of all crime. Spillane does not leave the Hammer novels in abeyance like hardboiled fiction but reverts to a similar paradigm as in traditional detective fiction: Hammer removes all corruption and returns society to a completely healthy state. In the Hammer novels, the subjective ethics of the hardboiled fiction are gone in favor of the simplistic dualisms of ―normal‖ and ―abnormal.‖ While

Spillane attempts to blur these boundaries by depicting Hammer as ultra-violent, often preferring fisticuffs to witty rhetoric, closer readings of the texts leave intact the traditional detective narratives of the ―normal‖ Hammer defeating the ―abnormal‖ villain and returning society to a completely ―healthy‖ state.

Spillane‘s return to traditional detective fiction‘s simplistic notions of crime becomes apparent in the very first Hammer novel, I, the Jury. In the novel, Hammer‘s war buddy Jack is murdered by Hammer‘s love interest (and fiancée as the novel progresses), Charlotte Manning. Charlotte kills Jack after he discovers her role as head of a prostitution and heroin syndicate. While Hammer is able to eliminate the syndicate

(with help from Charlotte, who continues to murder those around her in an effort to cover up her scheme), Hammer fails to identify Jack‘s killer. Hammer, and through him the reader, is unaware of Charlotte‘s involvement in Jack‘s murder until the last scene. Until that point, Hammer is left in a position congruent to that of the Op in Red Harvest:

Hammer‘s victory is incomplete because he failed to avenge Jack. Unlike Hammett,

Spillane does not leave the novel with Hammer‘s victory suspended, instead allowing him to discover Charlotte as the murderer. In the final chapter of I, the Jury, Hammer waits for Charlotte in her apartment and confronts her with the truth: she is Jack‘s killer.

While Hammer unveils Charlotte‘s involvement with the syndicate, she attempts to seduce him in an effort to spare her life. During her plea, Hammer explains to Charlotte that her alibis were perfect and that ―no jury would ever convict [her]‖; Hammer, the only person who knows of Charlotte‘s guilt, is ―the jury now, and the judge‖ (Spillane, Jury

146). The scene places Hammer at the precipice between hardboiled and traditional detective fiction: he could flout traditional morality and marry Charlotte or kill the woman he loved, avenge Jack, and return society to a ―healthy‖ state.8 As Charlotte stands before Hammer naked (both figuratively and literally) for the first time, Hammer opts for vengeance, stating ―I have a promise to keep . . . I almost loved you, I sentence you to death‖ (Spillane, Jury 146). After Hammer shoots her in the belly, Charlotte asks him, ―How could you?‖ to which Hammer, ―only a moment before talking to a corpse,‖ replies with famous last words, ―it was easy‖ (Spillane, Jury 147). By killing Charlotte,

Spillane abandons the hardboiled school and returns to a traditional, albeit exponentially more violent, detective model. Killing her was ―easy‖ because it avoided the complications of modernization (even grounding Hammer‘s killing Charlotte as ―self- defense‖ by having him notice that she was secretly reaching for a gun after he kills her).

In his resolutions, Spillane makes Hammer more like Doyle‘s Holmes than Hammett‘s

Op and, by doing so, stifles complication in his fiction in favor of an ideology where

Hammer‘s complete success is unproblematic.

8 Hammer stating he ―almost loved‖ Charlotte is a telling revision, as he has expressed his ―love‖ for her several times throughout the novel and proposes marriage (Spillane, I, the Jury 119). 25

THE ME, MYSELF, AND HAYEK OF THE ―NEOLIBERAL‖ SCHOOL OF

DETECTIVE FICTION

The differences between Spillane and other hardboiled writers like Hammett and

Chandler are insurmountable: in terms of political ideology, it is impossible to include

Spillane in the hardboiled school. Spillane‘s novels revert to a dangerous model of reductive cultural pandering in order to prescribe an overly simplistic ideological solution. Where the hardboiled school complicated cultural discourse with hardboiled- rationalities, Spillane is looking to ―sell‖ his political ideology as the road to the

American Dream. To understand Spillane‘s formulaic, violent writing as intrinsically part of a political ideology, we need to identify the political-economy theory that Spillane‘s hero symbolizes, a theory that develops out of the same cultural moment and attitudes that produced Mike Hammer.

During the Cold War, American masculinity was inscribed with nationalistic and political-economic connotations; manliness in America became synonymous with a nationalism defined against Soviet-style Communism. Accordingly, in American political discourse, Communism and its attributes were culturally feminized. K. A. Cuordileone‘s essay ―Politics in an Age of Anxiety: Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in

American Masculinity‖ touches on the beginnings of this masculine turn:

Many turn-of-the-century men responded by redrawing gender lines and turning

what were once necessary male attributes in need of restraint—aggression,

passion, combativeness, strength—into male virtues in need of cultivation; hence

the vogue of martial arts, competitive athletics, and the warrior ethic.

(Cuordileone 525)

The transformation Cuordileone details results in the nationalization of masculinity during the Cold War. American political rhetoric assigned value in masculine terms: hard or soft. Being ―hard‖ was combating Communism by being stoutly ―American‖ in all pursuits, mainly through an embrace of capitalism and democracy, and was viewed as masculine imperative; ―soft‖ was sympathizing with any aspect of Communism, central- government planning, expansive social policy, or an expanse of government bureaucracy and was feminized (Cuordileone 516). Cuordileone notes that ―political culture . . . put a premium on hard masculine toughness and rendered anything less than that soft and feminine and, as such, a real or potential threat to the security of the nation‖ (Cuordileone

516). The simplification of rhetoric to a hard/soft dichotomy caused the political discourse to grow ―increasingly shrill‖ and regularly ―supplant substantive debate‖

(Cuordileone 516). Out of this political discourse, the same cultural moment that produced Spillane‘s first novel, came a new trend in political-economic theory, known today as neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is an economic school that grew out of, but marks a definitive break with, Adam Smith‘s version of laissez-faire economics. While neoliberalism began to take hold in Europe with the ―ordoliberals‖ before World War II (Foucault notes the

1939 ―Walter Lippmann Colloquium‖ that took place in France as a defining moment for neoliberalism), the transition to American economics departments took slightly longer

(Foucault, Biopolitics 160). The transmission of neoliberalist theory came through certain

27 intermediaries from this conference; most notable of these for American neoliberalism was Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek.

Hayek is considered one of the most important economists and political philosophers of the twentieth century, being awarded the Nobel Prize for Economic

Science in 1974 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George H. W.

Bush in 1991 (Nasar 1). Foucault considers Hayek ―very important for the definition of neo-liberalism‖ and ―one of the inspirations for American . . . anarcho-capitalism‖

(Foucault, Biopolitics 104). Hayek‘s name is still championed among the conservative and libertarian movements in modern politics and recently was featured in several Fox

News stories and on the now defunct Glenn Beck Show (Beck).

Hayek laid the groundwork for the neoliberalist rhetoric still being employed today. In The Road to Serfdom, he argues that the tactics of government intervention and central planning will lead the United States down the path of Nazi Germany and

Communist Russia. Hayek asserts that the individual and his right to unrestricted freedom are challenged by coercive, collectivist policies enacted by the government; in the name of liberty, therefore, these policies should be abolished. Hayek‘s solution to the challenges of government without collectivist coercion is to construct a society based upon the matrix of the free market. In the free market, each individual is a rational enterprise that will pursue the individual-enterprise‘s best interests. The unbiased market will serve as an indicator of quality through economic gain. Hayek asserts, ―Money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man‖ (Hayek, Road 125). He puts forth that competition in a free market should be the primary indicator of quality,

―not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even

28 more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority‖ (Hayek, Road 86). Hayek argues that the government‘s only role should be to safeguard the purity of the market from coercive effects, especially from government itself.

The connections between Hayek‘s work on neoliberalism and Spillane‘s Hammer novels (beyond their mutual hatred of Communists) emerge when focusing on Spillane‘s and Hayek‘s treatment of individualism. Hayek‘s and Spillane‘s texts, conceived in the same cultural moment, arrive at the same individualist solutions, albeit from drastically different approaches: Hayek from a background of economics and Spillane from masculine-nationalism. Spillane, as noted, sees individualism as a priori to a nationalistic-masculinity and key to solving the problems of modernization. Spillane, utilizing the discourse of the Cold War, asserts that individualism is fundamental to masculinity and nationalism and offers the only ―hard‖ defense against the non-American

―other‖ of Communism. Spillane champions the ―hard‖ individual over the ―soft‖ collective throughout his Hammer novels by valuing and rewarding Hammer‘s personal goals, decisions, abilities, and actions over those of society.

In the first scene of the first Mike Hammer novel, I, the Jury, Spillane‘s masculine-individualist ideology begins to unfold. Hammer is introduced entering the crime scene of his murdered war friend, Jack. While police are already investigating the scene, Hammer quickly begins to establish his superiority. After viewing the body,

Hammer describes the cold-blooded motivations of the killer, to the befuddlement of detective Pat Chambers: ―That chair over there by the bed . . . after the killer shot Jack, he pulled himself towards that chair . . . [the killer] stood here and watched Jack grovel on

29 the floor in agony‖ (Spillane, Jury 6). Hammer tells Pat that Jack‘s murder was ―cold- blooded and deliberate‖ and that Hammer wants ―the killer for [himself]‖ (Spillane, Jury

6). While using the police as relief to cast the aptness of the hardboiled protagonist matches the genre, Spillane pushes the passive trope by having Hammer actively challenge the police for supremacy. Hammer dares Chambers, saying ―from now on it‘s a race . . . we‘ll work together as usual, but come the homestretch, I’m going to be the one to pull the trigger‖ (Spillane, Jury 6, emphasis added). Hammer‘s challenge charges the detective versus police dynamic, an allegory that heralds the individual over a group of government officials, with Spillane‘s ideological agenda: Hammer, the individual, is more apt than civic society so his personal desires should be primary. Hammer is not concerned with the societal need for justice, only his own. Hammer wants the satisfaction of ―watch[ing] the killer‘s face‖ as he ―plunk[s] one right in [the killer‘s] gut, and when

[the killer] is dying on the floor . . . kick [the killer‘s] teeth out‖ (Spillane, Jury 8).

Hammer places his individualist desires ahead of the common good, and Spillane rewards his effort.

If the title of the novel, I, the Jury, does not emphasize this process of individual desires replacing the compromise of a jury (symbolic of a random sampling of society),

Spillane comments on the process throughout this and the rest of the Hammer novels. In

I, the Jury Hammer states that juries are ―cold and impartial like they‘re supposed to be,‖ until the killer gets ―the best lawyer there is and screw[s] up the whole thing,‖ eventually

―wind[ing] up a hero!‖ (Spillane, Jury 6-7). Hammer remarks that ―the law is fine‖ but

―this time [Hammer is] the law and [he‘s] not going to be so cold and impartial‖

(Spillane, Jury 7). Hammer‘s statements regarding the judicial system can be expounded

30 to reflect all of American Cold War discourse: the cooperative-based (or Communist) collective‘s consensus tempers American individualism (or capitalist ingenuity). Hammer rejects the process, as he tells the deceased Jack, ―I‘m going to get the louse that killed you. He won‘t sit in the chair. He won‘t hang. He will die exactly as you died, with a .45 slug in the gut, just below the belly button‖ (Spillane, Jury 7). Hammer becomes the instrument of justice in I, the Jury because of his passion for and closeness to the victim.

Spillane uses Hammer to make a neoliberalist critique of civic society as inherently

Communist, lacking the freedom of individual sensations and sentiments to succeed. He becomes a one-man jury to ensure that Jack receives the justice the fervent Hammer, and not an impartial jury, dictates appropriate.

Like Hammer, Hayek champions a resurgence of a new, economic individualism.

Hayek argues that ―individualism has a bad name . . . and the term has come to be connected with egotism and selfishness‖ (Hayek, Road 68). Hayek‘s individualism is the individual-enterprise, a rational and complete free entity in the marketplace: the homo economicus. The homo economicus, Hayek asserts, would be a rational, economically non-coerced individual-enterprise competing with other individual-enterprises in the free market. Competition serves as Hayek‘s linchpin for individual interaction, as it

―dispenses with the need for ‗conscious social control‘ . . . it gives the individuals a chance to decide whether the prospects of a particular occupation are sufficient to compensate for the disadvantages and risks connected with it‖ (Hayek, Road 86). While

Hayek‘s theory of competitive individual-enterprises in a free market seems alienated from Hammer‘s fights (gun, fist, or otherwise), the similarities become quickly apparent after a closer inspection of Spillane‘s style of hyper-masculine individualism.

Like Hayek‘s, Spillane‘s nationalist-masculine discourse uses competition as the indicator of Hammer‘s—and through him, individualism‘s—victories. As in the scene with Pat Chambers at the beginning of I, the Jury, Hammer proves individualism‘s worth through competition. Hammer declares his intentions to Chambers as ―race,‖ one of the most simplistic forms of competition in the novels. Hammer wins his ―race‖ with

Chambers to the killer, and his desires are rewarded by his revenge on Charlotte.

Hammer proves through physical competition (mostly fistfights) that he is better than any male characters in the novels, as when Hammer takes down a ―platoon‖ of men to gain

Lola‘s affection (Spillane, My Gun is Quick 304).9 Competitive individualism, upon close reading, even dictates Hammer‘s relationship with women.

Hammer, often described as ugly in the texts, is highly attractive to women due to his rugged masculinity. The brief relationships that Hammer has with women form are analogous (albeit one that is veiled due to the hyper-misogynistic and sexualized discourse) to Hayek‘s principle of competition. Hammer approaches each of his relationships with woman as competitions of wills. The language of these interactions is exceedingly violent, but such violent rhetoric is fundamental in establishing both the brutal passion of these romances and Hammer‘s dominance of his romantic partner‘s will: variations of the line ―[Hammer] knew [his] hands were hurting her and she didn‘t care‖ are seen throughout each novel, too frequently to cite individually (Spillane, My

Gun Is Quick 232). Hammer‘s attractiveness in each of these relationships is articulated as his ability to ―win‖ these romantic conflicts. In Vengeance is Mine! Hammer‘s

9 In My Gun Is Quick, Hammer attacks a ―platoon‖ of men who flirt with his date, Lola. Hammer approaches the men and ―kick[s] the wise guy right in the belly, so hard that he was puking his guts out before he hit the floor doubled up like a pretzel‖ (Spillane, My Gun Is Quick 304). The men leave and Lola is enthralled with Hammer‘s masculine dominance. 32 competitiveness is seen in his interactions with Connie. Connie is introduced to Hammer during a photo shoot and is ―dressed in very little nothing [sic]‖ (Spillane, Vengeance

374). When Hammer asks Connie if she ever wears clothes, Connie replies ―not if I can help it . . . sometimes they make me‖ (Spillane, Vengeance 375). Hammer charges the exchange by asserting his ability to control Connie, stating ―that‘s what I‘d like to do . . . make you‖ (Spillane, Vengeance 375). Connie is intrigued and waits for Hammer after the photo shoot, greeting him by saying only ―make me‖ (Spillane, Vengeance 377).

Connie continues to challenge Hammer‘s masculine dominance in this fashion, eventually causing the scene to transcend the rhetorical violence into physical assault:

―Connie swung so fast [Hammer] didn‘t close [his] eyes for it . . . a small, solid fist sliced into [his] cheek . . . another trickle of blood ran down [Hammer‘s] chin‖ (Spillane,

Vengeance 383). Hammer retaliates by ―smack[ing] her across the mouth as hard as [he] could,‖ reestablishing his power in the encounter. The more aggressive the competition of courting, however troubling to the modern reader, the more worthy the women in

Spillane‘s fiction find Hammer of romance. Hammer‘s steady stream of female companions is seen as the culmination of these previously won romantic competitions and a testament to his competitive edge, which is reaffirmed and re-experienced in each subsequent romance.

Hammer‘s masculinity, especially in relationships with women, demands a competitiveness that aligns with Hayek‘s rhetoric. Connie desires Hammer because of his ability to dominate her, a power derived from his masculine-individualism. In this regard,

Hammer‘s masculine-individualism must be perpetual in nature and earned through every interaction. If Hammer were to lose any competition, whether with Chambers, a

―platoon‖ of men, Connie, or Communists, it would mark an occasion where Hammer‘s wills and desires are curbed and, according to Spillane‘s ideology, his masculinity would be in question. Thus, Spillane‘s masculinity is inextricably linked to Hayekian competition. Hammer must be competitive, as it offers the only forum to prove his masculine superiority. For both Hayek and Spillane competition is the only acceptable method to prove quality. While Spillane desires a nationalistic, masculine toughness, the method in which Spillane‘s fiction achieves this masculinity is Hayekian competition.

Hayekian economic competition and Spillane‘s hyper-masculinity are two approaches to the same end: individualist desire proven through open competition. Spillane‘s masculinity is a neoliberalist-masculinity. Spillane‘s ―Mike Hammer, Inc.‖ is Hayek‘s homo economicus (Spillane, Lonely 27). And Hammer always wins.

MIKE HAMMER: DESTROYER OF COLLECTIVES, CHAMPION OF THE

AMERICAN DREAM

Hammer as a Hayekian homo economicus only denotes one aspect of neoliberal thought in Spillane‘s Hammer novels. Hammer emblemizes both Hayekian individualist- based competition and neoliberalist ideology regarding collectivism. Spillane‘s plotlines are constantly articulated in a dichotomy of Hammer versus collectives: Hammer battling a group of secret communists in One Lonely Night; Hammer pitted against the Mafia in

Kiss Me, Deadly; Hammer fighting Charlotte‘s heroin syndicate in I, the Jury; Hammer exposing a prostitution and blackmail ring in My Gun Is Quick. While each of these scenarios also affords Hammer an individual villain to eventually destroy (e.g., Charlotte in I, the Jury), up until the point of discovery the villain is always referred to as part of a larger criminal enterprise. Hammer‘s victory over these groups forwards an ideologically neoliberal narrative: the benefit of unhindered individualism exceeds the advantage of a collective.

The urge to destroy collectivism in neoliberalist theory is drawn from its supposed

―coercive‖ effects. According to neoliberalism, collectives limit individual freedom by curtailing personal desires for collective benefit. Pierre Bourdieu‘s essay ―The Essence of

Neoliberalism‖ notes the importance of destroying collectives in neoliberalist theory as they represent bastions against neoliberalist logic:

And yet the world is there, with the immediately visible effects of the

implementation of the great neoliberal utopia . . . First is the destruction of all the

collective institutions capable of counteracting the effects of the infernal machine,

primarily those of the state, the repository of all the universal values associated

with the idea of the public realm. (Bourdieu 4)

Collectives undermine the notion of competition as an indicator of quality by producing unequal grounds between individual-enterprises, also serving to stifle the reach of market-based competition within the collective itself; accordingly, collectives are demonized by Hayek throughout The Road to Serfdom and argued to eventually lead to

Communism and Nazism (both telling terms in the Cold War discourse). Spillane‘s neoliberalist-masculinity serves to further the criticism of ―coercive‖ and ―socialist‖ collectives and to champion the ―freedom‖ and ―liberty‖ found in individualism, to use

Hayek‘s rhetoric.

The criticism of collectives displays itself in different ways in the Hammer novels. Spillane charges the dynamic of the detective versus police with collective- breaking rhetoric. In the Hammer novels, the police are not inept as in other hardboiled fiction but fail due to restrictive rules and regulations. Hammer speaks to this point directly, telling Chambers that he is ―tied down by rules and regulations‖ and that

―there‘s someone over‖ him; however, Hammer can ―slap someone in the puss and they can‘t do a damn thing‖ (Spillane, Jury 7). Since Hammer is a private detective, and ―no one [can] kick [him] out of [his] job,‖ he is free to be an individual; the police are not

(Spillane, Jury 7). Spillane goes further to make the difference between the private

36 detective, Hammer, and the public detective, Chambers, not one of ability but of means, as Hammer states:

I can work the bastards up to the point where they make a try at me and I can

shoot in self-defense and be cleared in a court of law. The cops can‘t go that far,

but they‘d like to, don‘t forget it. People are always running down the police, but

they‘re all right guys that are tied down by a mess of red tape and they have to go

through channels. Sure, there are bum cops, too . . . not many of them. (Spillane,

My Gun Is Quick 231)

The individual policemen, like Pat Chambers, are restricted by the rules of the collective police force and limited in their ability to rid society of crime; however, Hammer is shown victorious over criminals due to being unhindered by these restrictions. While the dynamic of police-collective versus individual-Hammer offers a backboard for neoliberalist logic, Hammer‘s relationship with the District Attorney in Vengeance is

Mine! provides a battleground for Spillane to display the invasive techniques of, according to Hayekian rhetoric, the worst type of coercive collective: the government.

The District Attorney in Vengeance is Mine! wields the power of his office to disrupt Hammer in his pursuit of the murderer of his friend Chester. Chester‘s murder is complicated for Hammer, as it occurred while he was passed out drunk in the same room as Chester; the death is presumed by all (except Hammer) to be a suicide. While the

District Attorney is an individual, the power the DA exercises is the result of the collective civic society. As an individual the DA poses no threat to Hammer; however, as the district attorney of New York City he is able to use the city‘s backing to restrict (or attempt to restrict) Hammer‘s ability to catch Chester‘s murderer. The DA, ―who‘s been

37 after [Hammer‘s] hide ever since [the DA] walked into office,‖ calls Hammer in after

Chester‘s murder to discuss Hammer‘s presence at the crime scene (Spillane, Vengeance

355). While Hammer was proven by a paraffin test not to have shot Chester, the DA tells

Hammer that ―You‘re done in this town . . . you let yourself get out of hand once too often . . . It‘s my opinion that the city is better off without your services‖ (Spillane,

Vengeance 354, emphasis added). The meeting ends with the DA shouting at Hammer that, the ―very first time [he] so much as speed[s] down Broadway, [the DA is] going to see to it personally that [he is] slapped with every charge in the book‖ (Spillane,

Vengeance 355). The DA‘s language in chastising Hammer is charged to expose

Hammer‘s individualism defined against the DA‘s collectivism. The DA asserts that

Hammer‘s actions have offended the whole ―city‖ instead of the individual DA.

Hammer‘s unrestricted pursuit of crime and criminals is too unregulated or, to use the

DA‘s phrase, ―out of hand‖ for Hammer to continue to hold a private investigator‘s license. His private ability to solve crime is revoked due to the public official‘s overzealous use of government authority. The DA galvanizes the point by threatening

Hammer‘s unrestricted individualism with ―the book‖ of collective rules and regulations.

Later in the novel, secretary Velda comments on the DA‘s use of his public office against

Hammer: ―Damn these public officials and their petty grievances‖ (Spillane, Vengeance

358, emphasis added). While Spillane neglected to give the DA a name, stripping the character of all individualism in favor of a political position, Velda‘s comments generalize the politician into a nameless political collective. The DA loses the remainder of his individualism and is secured into the collection of ―public officials,‖ who supposedly always abuse their offices.

The dispensing of collectives in favor of individual-enterprises competing in a free market abolishes certain collectivist programs designed to help people during times of crisis. ―Social safety nets‖ are assembled through large-scale, centrally planned collectivist projects such as FDR‘s New Deal policies, which put people to work on government-sponsored, non-profit projects (e.g., the interstate highway system). As neoliberalism disbands collectives, it individualizes these large safety nets, as Foucault articulates:

It involves an individualization of social policy and individualization through

social policy, instead of collectivization and socialization by and in social policy.

In short, it does not involve providing individuals social covers for risks, but

according everyone a sort of economic space within which they can take on and

confront risks. (Foucault, Biopolitics 144)

In an effort to cease ―coercive collectivism,‖ neoliberalist theory disbands social policy designed to protect individuals from risk and allows the individual-enterprise to determine the riskiness of his or her behavior. The only social policy remaining is for the individual-enterprise to grow economically. Foucault asserts that ―economic growth and only economic growth will enable all individuals to achieve a level of income that will allow them the individual insurance . . . with which to absorb risk‖ (Foucault, Biopolitics

144). Neoliberalist theory presents a ―freedom‖ that opens up society to risks in potentially devastating ways.

The Hammer novels combat the anxiety of the individual risk present in neoliberalism in different, yet intertwined, ways: a rigid devotion to the American Dream of success, the feminization of safety nets, and the avoidance of any negative

39 consequences of Hammer‘s risky behavior. While the hardboiled school critiqued the growing consumerism of the American Dream (as seen in Raymond Chandler‘s depiction of Skalla and Beulah in ―Try the Girl‖), the Hammer novels only present the success of the American Dream. Hammer can have Velda (and usually her friends, too) whenever he desires. Hammer‘s setbacks, like the DA removing his private inspector‘s license, are always overcome. Spillane, by depicting Hammer as winning and succeeding in any and all pursuits, hollows the anxiety of risk by denying its negative outcomes. Spillane creates a space where each reader is Hammer, and each reader puts failure out of his or her mind. Hammer consistently chooses risky options throughout the novels—and succeeds. In I, the Jury, as Hammer is investigating Hal Klines‘s dormitory, from the window he ―couldn‘t detect any sound from inside‖ so he ―took the chance‖ and hopped into the room (Spillane, Jury 103-104). Hammer slips upon entering the room and falls to the ground; the fall ―saved [his] life‖ as ―two shots . . . from the corner of the room‖ barely miss the now prone Hammer (Spillane, Jury 104). While Hammer ―felt [his] ribs burn‖ from the near-miss, he survives the incident and kills the assailant (Spillane, Jury

104). Hammer‘s risky behavior is then humorously dismissed later in the novel, as his tailor has ―a fit when he [sees] the bullet hole in [Hammer‘s] coat‖ (Spillane, Jury 118).

For Hammer, the riskiness inherent in neoliberalist theory‘s individualizing societal

―safety nets‖ is easily dismissed and laughable, as he never loses. Spillane‘s neoliberal- masculine ideology stifles dissent so thoroughly that criticism of neoliberalism‘s riskiness is relegated to the punch line of a joke about a tailor not wanting to lose a customer.

Spillane‘s novels present a society where there is no risk because the American Dream is fact. Success is unpreventable. Hammer never loses. The impossibility of Hammer‘s

40 failure in the novels mimics the impossibility of failure in a neoliberal theory: if given the opportunity to succeed, barring coercive collectivism, success occurs. Spillane defends against criticism of risk by presenting the utopia of Hammer.

The cultural impact of Spillane‘s political ideology is most telling in One Lonely

Night. The novel wades heavily into Cold War politics by dealing directly with

Communism. One Lonely Night traces Hammer as he protects Senator Lee Deamer from political adversaries and his twin brother, Oscar. Deamer is depicted as ―what we need nowadays‖ in politics because he has ―the cleanest record of anybody‖; Deamer‘s distance from corruption causes other characters to regard him as ―the minimum of politician,‖ implying that politicians are inherently corrupt (Spillane, Lonely 24). Deamer as the non-politician is championed as a ―reformer‖ in One Lonely Night, a man who will

―raise all kind of hell with the corruption we have in our government . . . smoke out the rakes that live on the public and give [the United States] back some . . . strength‖

(Spillane, Lonely 26). Deamer is depicted as the last hope for American politics; however, in reality the senator is actually dead and being impersonated by his brother

Oscar, who is a communist sleeper-agent. Hammer discovers the truth about Oscar but chooses to hide his corruption from the public in order to harden American politics.

Before killing Oscar, Hammer tells him

You‘re going to die and the blame will go to the Kremlin. I‘m going to stick a

wallet and some shreds of cloth in your fist when you‘re dead. In your other hand

will be the remains of those documents, enough to show what they were. Enough

to make the coppers think that somehow you alone, in a burst of patriotic effort,

managed to get hold of those important papers and destroyed them . . . You‘re

going to be a big hero. You saved the day and died in the saving. When the news

is made public and the people know their favorite hero has been knocked off by

the Reds they‘ll go on a hunt that won‘t stop until the issue is decided, and

brother, when the people in this country finally do get around to moving, they

move fast! (Spillane, Lonely 173)

Hammer‘s decision to kill Oscar and harden American political resolve against

Communism rather than expose Oscar‘s corruption is analogous to Spillane‘s entire neoliberalist-masculine legacy. Spillane‘s cultural wake is the same call to arms that

Hammer advocates at the end of One Lonely Night. Hammer plants documents on Oscar so that society will ―go on a hunt that won‘t stop‖; for Spillane, the end of this ―hunt‖ is an individualism that will lead to increased nationalism and hardened masculinity. In effect, Spillane‘s fiction is the ―secret documents‖ planted to lead society down a prescriptive path: to a nationalistic, neoliberalist-masculinity.

THE FAÇADE OF SPILLANE‘S POPULAR NEOLIBERALISM

The cultural wake of Spillane‘s fiction, regardless of its simplicity, remains highly influential in modern political discourse. Recently, National Public Radio‘s (NPR) daily news program Morning Edition did a three-part series on influential political thinkers and dedicated the first two segments to Rand and Hayek. Throughout these segments, Rand‘s and Hayek‘s theories were championed by economists and members of congress10 as highly influential, Representative Justin Amash even going so far as to say ―that Hayek‘s ideas have informed just about all of his votes in the House‖ (Keith, Morning Edition).

While Spillane is not mentioned, the introduction to the series bears incredible weight when considering Spillane‘s cultural legacy:

NPR is taking a look at some of the most influential philosophers whose ideas

molded the present and could shape the future. You might not know all their

names, but you‘re certainly familiar with their ideas. They are woven into the

fabric of our society. (Seabrook, Morning Edition)

As NPR notes with Rand and Hayek, Spillane‘s neoliberalist-masculinity has also been woven into the fabric of our society. The violent, nationalistic-egotism that is core to

Spillane‘s neoliberalist-masculinity is seen throughout modern political discourse, from

10 Two particularly telling moments of the fervor of Hayek‘s and Rand‘s following is seen in the series when Rep. Justin Amash boasts of the framed portrait (which is ―big, almost rock-poster big‖) and framed signature of Hayek hanging in his office and when Rep. Mike Mulvaney admits to reading each Rand novel ―six or eight times‖ (Keith, Morning Edition; Seabrook, Morning Edition). 43 pundits and newscasters on twenty-four-hour news networks to the debate between

Republican presidential candidates.11 While I am loath to suggest placing Spillane on the shelf next to Rand and Hayek, perhaps such an elevation of Spillane‘s works as influential in present discourse is warranted to temper the violent extremism it exudes.

Perhaps, once the narrative switches from the handsome, eloquent John Galt of Rand‘s

Atlas Shrugged as the embodiment of neoliberalist ideology to the ugly, drunk, and misogynistic Mike Hammer as the true homo economicus, politicians will stop championing their violent and utopian commonalities. If not, we may all end up getting shot in the abdomen by Mike Hammer‘s .45 while a crowd of onlookers cheers ―Let him die!‖ (McMorris-Santoro 1).

11 During the 12 September 2011 CNN/Tea Party GOP Debate, moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Rep. Ron Paul a hypothetical question regarding a healthy man who chose not to have an insurance policy and who was suddenly stricken with illness and had fallen into a coma. When Blitzer pushed the question toward Paul about letting the sick man die, the crowd intervened with a fusillade of applause and cheering, the loudest audible being ―Yeah!‖ and ―Let him die!‖ (McMorris-Santoro, ―Tea Party Debate Audience Cheers Idea of Letting Sick Man Without Insurance Die‖). 44

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