Books to Die For Read online

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  I suppose it will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with me and my work that I’ve signed on to recommend Mickey Spillane’s novel I, the Jury. Just the same, I had trouble deciding which of Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels to recommend, and finally I took the easy way out and just went with the first book.

  Mickey Spillane is perhaps the most popular, famous, and influential writer in any genre ever to receive so widespread, and even hysterical, a critical pummeling. Yet his first novel, I, the Jury, has been turning up regularly on lists of the best mystery novels of the twentieth century for some time now—perhaps grudgingly, but there the book is.

  A small irony is that I, the Jury—apart from its shocking striptease conclusion—is perhaps the least typical of the writer’s first half dozen Hammer novels, a group of mysteries that (along with Spillane’s non-Hammer thriller, The Long Wait, 1951) sat for many years at the top of the list of all-time best-selling novels. Not best-selling mystery novels, but novels. Period. And as late as the 1980s.

  It’s difficult to explain to anyone born after 1970 how huge Spillane was. How the sexual content of the books opened doors for writers both genre and mainstream. How the allowable level of violence similarly increased throughout popular fiction and even films and television shows due to Spillane’s impact. That James Bond and Shaft wouldn’t have happened without Spillane and Hammer, or Dirty Harry and Jack Bauer and every tough-guy hero since with vigilante DNA in his blood.

  Spillane and Hammer, more than any other writer and character in any genre of the twentieth century—more than any mainstream author and his work, either—changed popular culture.

  So it comes as something of a surprise, all these years later, to discover that I, the Jury feels like a fairly standard private-eye mystery, with a complicated plot that descends more from Agatha Christie than Dashiell Hammett. What still separates it from a standard such yarn is Hammer’s emotional ranting and raving, the extreme violence of the action scenes, and the still titillating (the perfect word to describe it) sexual content of the novel.

  Yet I, the Jury pales next to the follow-up novels—My Gun Is Quick (1950), Vengeance Is Mine! (1950), One Lonely Night (1951), The Big Kill (1951), and Kiss Me, Deadly (1952). All of those key elements—emotion, sex, violence—escalate as Hammer becomes ever more volatile and even mentally ill.

  By One Lonely Night, the attacks on Spillane had taken a toll on the writer. Though politically conservative, Spillane suffered the same kind of witch-hunt tactics that McCarthy served up to liberals, except Spillane was being attacked by the leftist likes of Dr. Frederic Wertham—we forget that the hysteria of that era was not exclusive to the Right. One Lonely Night, probably Spillane’s masterpiece, has Mike Hammer taking on the establishment that condemned him in open court as a kill-crazy maniac. It’s an overt and audacious response to the literary and social criticism his creator had received. For the record, Hammer decides that God has sent him to earth to destroy evil. Not exactly a standard PI yarn, but wonderful, crazy stuff.

  Spillane was a born storyteller, and a gifted natural noir poet, but he was also a blue-collar guy who never dreamed he’d be attacked in such a fashion. He had become a full-time professional writer in the comic-book field before the war, writing such features as Captain America, Sub-Mariner, and The Human Torch. He created a very tough comic-book private eye, inspired by his boyhood idol Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams (star of the famous pulp Black Mask), initially calling the character Mike Lancer and later Mike Danger. He tried to peddle the Danger feature right after the war but had no success, and in 1945 he wrote a novel about the character instead, renaming him Hammer. That novel was I, the Jury.

  In I, the Jury, Hammer swears over the corpse of his murdered pal Jack Williams (a reference to Race) that he will find the killer and kill that killer, whoever he might turn out to be. Williams, you see, had lost an arm protecting Hammer in a Pacific jungle. Spillane’s success is usually linked to sex and violence, but at least as important is the way he linked Hammer to war veterans. Hammer is a combat veteran himself, and his first case is driven by the loyalty one GI in a foxhole feels for another. That loyalty will outstrip even a man’s love for a woman.

  Hammer is a randy character, although for a while he keeps his hands off his lovely secretary Velda, who, over the course of the series, becomes the love of his life. He is a romantic who falls rather easily in love, which gives I, the Jury a heart of tragedy in the midst of all that melodrama. His cop pal is Captain Pat Chambers of Homicide (Spillane was kiddingly invoking the “Pat and Mike” jokes of his childhood). Hammer quickly discovers that his likely suspect list are the guests at a party of Jack’s that took place shortly before the murder. This very Christie-like setup leads Hammer to wealthy homes but also down some dark alleys. Shorter than other Hammer novels, I, the Jury rockets along, thanks to Hammer’s speedy tough-guy first-person, a technique that looks easy but has been mastered by few.

  Fires begin with a spark, and I, the Jury is the spark that ignited not only Spillane’s career but a shift in popular culture that included a sea change in publishing. When I, the Jury was initially published in hardcover, it did not set the world on fire, and the reviews were often contemptuous. But when the paperback edition came out, with an evocative cover showing Hammer pointing his trademark .45 at a disrobing blonde, I, the Jury exploded. Spillane, whose second novel had been rejected by his publisher, Dutton, due to disappointing hardcover sales, was suddenly asked for more, and right away.

  So popular were Spillane’s novels in paperback reprint editions that Gold Medal Books initiated the first major line of paperback originals to publish similarly sexy, violent crime novels. Virtually all of Gold Medal’s early output—and that of other paperback publishers following the Spillane trend—were private-eye yarns imitating Mike Hammer, or steamy sexual-triangle novels imitating James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.

  For all the talk of Hammett and Chandler as the founders of the hard-boiled feast—and I revere them as much as the next guy or gal—it’s Spillane and Cain who were the most influential.

  Mickey didn’t care for James M. Cain, though. He said, “I don’t like books written by guys in prison cells.”

  That’s okay. I’m sure Cain didn’t like Mickey’s books, either. It didn’t matter, because readers loved them both.

  In the millions.

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  If you’ve never read Mike Hammer, or if it’s been years since you have, I, the Jury is a good place to start. I would strongly suggest reading all six of that first wild round of Hammer mysteries, in order of publication. If you do, you will likely move on to Mickey’s later Hammers, written mostly in the 1960s with a couple more toward the end of his life. There are also some posthumous works, unfinished yet substantial manuscripts that some guy named Collins has been working on.

  Hammer remains the quintessential tough private eye. In 1947, when I, the Jury was published, the private-eye novel had pretty much run its course, although Chandler and Stout were still publishing. Radio in particular had turned the genre into self-parody. Like Robert B. Parker, Mickey Spillane reinvigorated the PI genre in a way that meant scores of other writers could get into the game. For example, the fad for private eyes on television in the late 1950s and early 1960s flowed entirely from Spillane/Hammer. Peter Gunn, that cool Brooks Brothers imitation of the hotheaded off-the-rack Hammer, leads us directly to James Bond.

  So. See where it started, in a little book called I, the Jury. You’ll probably like it. If you don’t, you’ll at least have witnessed the spark that lit the fire.

  Max Allan Collins is a novelist, graphic novelist, essayist, songwriter, critic, and filmmaker. He has been honored for both his fiction and nonfiction work, and his graphic novel Road to Perdition was the basis for the acclaimed Sam Mendes movie starring Tom Hanks. Visit him online at www.maxallancollins.com.

  The Ghost of Blackwood Hall
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  by Carolyn Keene (1948)

  LIZA MARKLUND

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  Carolyn Keene is the pseudonym that has been used by the authors of the Nancy Drew series of mystery stories since 1930. The books originated with the Stratemeyer Syndicate, a U.S. book-packaging company that specialized in producing works for children, among them the adventures of the Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins. Mildred Wirt Benson (1905–2002) is generally credited with having done much of the writing work on the earliest Nancy Drew mysteries, including The Ghost of Blackwood Hall.

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  I might have read a few thousand books in my lifetime, but none as important as this one. The Ghost of Blackwood Hall by Carolyn Keene, number 25 in the Nancy Drew series, taught me how to read. I spelled my way through it, letter by letter, word by word, and magic happened. At that point, I had seen nothing but the forests of the Arctic Circle in my native northern Sweden, but with this book a whole new world opened up to me. I wanted to go to River Heights. I wanted to drive a blue sports car. I wanted to be an American.

  Nancy (or Kitty, as she was called in Sweden, for reasons that nobody can recall) also strengthened me in my belief that all of my boundaries were solely geographical. Nancy could do anything, from catching thieves to changing flat tires, so why couldn’t I? She and her friends Bess and George didn’t need guys to get things done. They depended on themselves and solved mysteries on their own terms. Numerous powerful women have described Nancy as a role model, a feminist icon, and I couldn’t agree more. Annika Bengtzon, the protagonist in my own novels, shares quite a few of her characteristics.

  In many ways, these children’s mysteries have many similarities to their adult equivalent of modern crime fiction, one of the most significant being their geographical spread. The Nancy Drew books have been translated into about twenty-five languages (the numbers vary). They were an instant success in Scandinavia and parts of Western Europe, and have only recently been published in Estonia. The releases in Latin America and Asia, by contrast, never made much of an impact.

  This has also been my experience with the violent entertainment novels of today. You can find extensive reading and writing of crime fiction only in very old and stable democracies. I once asked a bookstore owner in Buenos Aires where the crime section was, and he answered: “There is none. We don’t read such things.” The Argentinian best-seller lists confirm his statement. You can find just about every kind of genre on it—romance, political biographies, supernatural novels, horror, even porn—but no crime novels.

  I spend quite a lot of time in Africa, and when I tell my friends in Kenya that I write fictional books about crimes being committed, they look at me strangely and ask: “Why?” You need freedom of speech, law and order, hope, and prosperity to be able to enjoy fictitious crimes and violence. Many Argentinians still bear the memory of the military banging on the door in the middle of the night: no need for cozy crime there. The Kenyans are living next door to Somalia: any imaginary misconduct is bound to be bleak and tedious in comparison. If you’re living too close to the real thing, the urge to indulge in the killing of individuals for the purposes of entertainment seems to be limited.

  I personally experienced this a number of years ago. Our foreign minister Anna Lindh was murdered in a department store in Stockholm on September 11, 2003. She was a very good friend of mine. I can still hear myself screaming when I got the call that said she had died.

  For the next three years I did not write about mystery or murders. Instead, I was totally focused on the topic of women being haunted and hurt. I wrote a nonfiction book about a woman who was granted asylum in the United States because of domestic violence in Sweden. I did a series of TV documentaries on murdered women. I wrote chronicles, and newspaper articles, and a book about gender issues.

  It was only much later that I saw the connection: Anna’s death had made it impossible for me even to consider writing crime fiction, and it remained that way for a long time.

  In order for a crime novel to work, the killing of a human being has to create chaos and mayhem—otherwise, why bother? The whiter and brighter the society, the darker and blacker the crime appears: the drama is all in the contrast. I think this is why crime fiction from the United States, Great Britain, and Scandinavia seems to be the most popular and successful in our time. Where can you find better, older, more stable democracies on earth? The United States, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave; the United Kingdom, with its legacy of empire; and Scandinavia, where the welfare system takes care of you from the cradle to the grave. In what other nations could the contrast between society and criminal behavior possibly be sharper, the betrayal greater, the failure more forceful?

  Today, I’m back writing my fierce stories. I’m keeping the memory of Anna Lindh alive as a member of the board of her memorial fund. And when I think about it, I continue to visit River Heights quite often, as a place where imagined things happen.

  I never did become an American, but I have a daughter who is.

  And I actually do drive a blue sports car.

  Liza Marklund was born in 1962 in the small village of Pålmark, close to the Arctic Circle in Sweden. She is an author, journalist, columnist, publisher, and goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. Since her debut in 1995, Liza Marklund has written eleven novels and two nonfiction books. She cowrote the international best seller The Postcard Killers with James Patterson, making her the second Swedish author ever to reach number one on the New York Times best-seller list. Her crime novels featuring the gutsy reporter Annika Bengtzon, the latest of which is Last Will, have sold more than 13 million copies in thirty languages to date. Visit her online at www.lizamarklund.com.

  The Franchise Affair

  by Josephine Tey (1948)

  LOUISE PENNY

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  Josephine Tey was one of the pseudonyms of Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896–1952), a Scottish novelist and playwright who found fame with a series of novels featuring Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard. The most famous of these is probably The Daughter of Time (1951), which combined Mackintosh’s twin fascinations with history and crime by having a bedridden Grant investigate the question of whether or not Richard III was responsible for the murders of his nephews, the sons of Edward IV, commonly known as the “Princes in the Tower,” at the end of the fifteenth century. Grant also makes a brief appearance in The Franchise Affair.

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  It took me an unconscionable length of time finally to read the book that would become my favorite detective novel of all time, and the reason is deeply embarrassing.

  I’d read all of Josephine Tey’s books, save one, and adored them all—with the exception of The Daughter of Time, which I not only adored but revered for its marriage of tension, history, crime, and curiosity. It was clearly a masterpiece. (Indeed, the Crime Writers’ Association in Britain named it the best crime novel ever, and rightly so.) But there was one Tey book I wasn’t at all interested in reading. It was in my personal library, unopened. I had never even read the synopsis on the back.

  And my reason for shunning this work?

  The title. Dear God, it’s true. The title.

  It’s called The Franchise Affair.

  Now, I knew it couldn’t possibly be a mystery set in a McDonald’s or a Dairy Queen, but I couldn’t shake the suspicion that it just might be . . .

  I couldn’t tell you what finally made me pick up the book with the green Penguin spine and the bold, no-nonsense type: perhaps boredom, or curiosity, or a higher power weary of my pettiness.

  Like all of Josephine Tey’s works, The Franchise Affair is a slim volume, really more of a novella by today’s standards. And like all of Tey’s books, each word is a gem, perfectly placed. Her prose is clear, crystalline even; sharp, multifaceted, like prisms on the page, and with those clear words she creates equally multifaceted characters. But what I adore most about her works is, I think, the ambivalence. As a reader I’m never sure who is telling the truth, who
is the good guy and who isn’t. I want to believe in certain characters, but there is always a shard of doubt.

  It’s unsettling.

  And that’s what struck me first, and stayed with me throughout my increasingly enchanting and terrifying reading of The Franchise Affair.

  Now, I say terrifying, but I don’t mean knife-wielding psychopaths, or serial killers torturing their victims. There are no ghouls or vampires, no demented murderers behind the closed doors.

  But there are ghosts. The past gets up, takes form, and walks the pages of The Franchise Affair: memory, perception, and the fears they feed.

  Let me tell you a little about the book. Not much—I don’t want to spoil it for you.

  It’s set in a Kentucky Fried Chicken . . . no, just kidding. The setting is a village in Britain shortly after World War II. We follow a country solicitor named Robert Blair: staid, comfortable, middle-aged. He receives a call one day from a woman he’s never met. Marion Sharpe needs his help. She and her elderly mother are new to the village, having moved into the house called The Franchise a few months earlier.

  It’s a bleak time in the lives of the community, and of these women. The inhabitants of this English village have closed in on themselves and aren’t interested in strangers, and especially not the equally reclusive mother and middle-aged daughter.

  Then Blair receives a call to tell him something extraordinary and baffling: the Sharpe women have been accused of kidnapping a schoolgirl. The police, including a man from “the Yard,” are at The Franchise, investigating. The women claim never to have seen the girl before. The girl claims to have been held by them for days, and barely managed to escape. The schoolgirl offers to prove it by describing the entire interior of The Franchise, including the room in which she was held.