Man, that Gil Brewer could write

I'm reading The Erotics, a previously unpublished 1970s novel by Gil Brewer, part of a three-fer from Stark House Press. I once ranked Brewer behind Charles Williams and Peter Rabe in my small pantheon of Gold Medal paperback original writers, but Brewer may be moving up. He's almost as good as David Goodis at portraying doomed men, and his prose style is very much better than those of most other writers America was reading in the middle of the last century. (Despite its late date, the novel reads as if if had been written in the 1950s, and I mean that in the best possible way.)

By comparison, I've also been reading some Mickey Spillane and, while Spillane was indeed capable of noir poetry, he can also read like a first draft by a newspaper reporter who had something else on his mind while he was writing. Brewer was a better writer, and he could come up with lines that Spillane might have liked. Here's an example from The Erotics:

"Her name's Bernice. She's a sex-pot. I saw her once. Somebody pointed her out to me. Wow, is all I can say. And Wow again. She's a walking mattress."

 © Peter Rozovsky 2016

I, the Narrator, by Mike Dennis

  Mike Dennis (Photo
by Peter Rozovsky)

Mike Dennis (right) is a Key West-based crime writer and a musician. He also combines sound and words in his latest professional incarnation. Here's Mike's pulse-pounding story of how he became an audio-book narrator and landed the gig reading and producing the new version of Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury, published by Simon & Schuster Audio.

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First and foremost, I want to convey my deep appreciation to Peter Rozovsky for giving me the opportunity to appear on DBB. He has a lot of followers, and I'm very grateful for the chance to tell my little story on his great site.

And what a story it was! Well, for me, anyway. Since my latest reinvention of myself (and there have been many over the long years) as an audiobook narrator, I was hot to move up the ladder. Of course, I didn't kid myself. I knew I had to have a worthy product, skillful storytelling, quality sound production, and knowledge of my own strengths and weaknesses as a narrator if I was to achieve any success at all. The first thing I learned was the learning curve is steep.

So after a couple of years, I get a handle on sound crafting, and I hone my natural ability to tell a story. Then one day in the summer of 2014, I was trolling Amazon and came across Mickey Spillane's I, The Jury. The cover was typical Spillane: a gorgeous doll coming out of her clothes while a guy holds a gun on her. Then whoa! I noticed there was no audiobook attached to it.

Positive I had made a mistake, I looked again. No audiobook. I went to Audible.com and typed in the title. No results. There was an audiocassette on Amazon dating back to the Paleolithic Era for sale by a third-party vendor, but no modern downloadable audio version. Could this be true? I, The Freaking Jury, the first Mike Hammer novel and the biggest selling book of Spillane's entire career, does not appear in audiobook form?

Well, it was true, all right. I looked up the other Hammer books. Nearly all of them were available as audiobooks, and those were all narrated by Stacy Keach, who played Mike Hammer on TV for years. I mean, the guy is Mike Hammer!

I set out to become the narrator for this novel. First, I had to find out who held the audio rights. I wrote to my friend Max Allan Collins, novelist and Spillane collaborator, and he essentially told me to forget it. Simon & Schuster had the audio rights to all the Hammer novels, he said, and they had released them with Stacy Keach's powerful voice driving them. He said it would probably be just a matter of time before they got around to I, The Jury.

OK, not good news. But I kept after it, anyway. Fruitless efforts at contacting Simon & Schuster yielded nothing. After a lot of digging into the bowels of their website, however, I turned up the name of the head of their audiobook division. I called S&S, asked for him, and to my surprise, I had him on the line.

Once I collected myself, I explained who I was: an audiobook narrator/producer operating out of my home studio in Key West, and I wanted the chance to narrate and produce I, The Jury.

Now, this is the point where a guy like him would tell a guy like me, "We don't work with home studio narrators," or "We use movie stars to narrate our audiobooks," or "Buzz off, kid." And you know, you couldn't blame him if he did. Not even I could blame him. But instead, he said, "Do you deliver a finished product?"

Knowing that I had now arrived at my date with destiny, I said "Yes. But how about if I send you a brief recorded excerpt of I, The Jury? That way you can not only get an idea of how I would approach the material, but also of my sound quality." He paused for what felt like forever, then said, "OK." And he gave me his e-mail address.

I carefully prepared a recorded piece from the novel and sent it off to him. Frankly, though, I was sure that the minute he hung up the phone, he was shouting into his intercom, "Get me Stacy Keach!"

A couple of months went by. I was certain the game was over. But one day I opened my e-mail to find a response. He had sent my sample to the head of their production department for her opinion. My God, I still had a shot!

Two more months go by (they sure move slowly up there in New York), and one day I get an e-mail from the head of S&S audio production. She liked my sample, but she asked if I wouldn't mind submitting a finished version of the entire first chapter, so they could get a better idea of my sound and my consistency, as well as how I would handle more dialogue. I really couldn't believe it!
Of course, I did the first chapter, laboring over it lovingly and with great precision. Another month later, she writes back and offered me the job. We agreed on the terms and I narrated and produced the audiobook. It'll be released in unabridged form Wednesday, July 28. And you know, I still can't believe I'm actually the voice of Mike Hammer.

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Mike Dennis' narration of I, The Jury, from Simon & Schuster Audio, is available on Amazon. http://tinyurl.com/p6et4qp

Where does Spillane stop and Collins start?: A job for the style detective and some questions for readers

I've read a few crime fiction collaborations by authors who have also established literary identities on their own, and I sometimes play the idle game of trying to guess which partner in responsible for a given narrative passage or line of dialogue.

The Consummata is not a typical collaboration. Mickey Spillane began the book as a sequel to a novel of his that had appeared in 1967, and he gave the unfinished manuscript to Max Allan Collins years later. Collins then completed the novel, which finally appeared under the Hard Case Crime imprint in 2011.

I don't know how complete the book was when Spillane handed it over, and I don't know what changes Collins made over the many years it was in his custody. But I detected a few small stylistic changes in the novel's climactic section that could suggest a different hand at work, or perhaps the same hand many years later.  This was mostly a matter of repetition of words, one in particular, and a mildly political jab I fancy likelier to have come from the liberal Collins than the right-wing Spillane. Some of the wit in the section is also slyer than what I associate with Spillane, more a wink than a hearty clap between shoulder blades.

(My favorite sentence in the novel, however, does not figure in this discussion: "He conked his head on the porcelain edge of the crapper.")

Have you ever read a collaboration between two authors?  Have you ever tried to guess which author wrote what? What is likely to make you attribute a given passage to one rather than the other? Tone? Prose style? Something else?

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(When you're done, read an interview from the Rap Sheet in which Max Allan Collins talks about Spillane, his own work, and a lot more. And read Collins on anything and everything at maxallancollins.com. Collins was on a panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach. The man would be worth listening to on the subject of crime fiction and its history even if he hadn't written any of the stuff himself. Collins was my intro to Roy Huggins and Ennis Willie, for example.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Mickey Spillane could write for the critics, whether he admitted it or not

"`A man of such determination I must kiss,' she said."

*

"From nowhere. From everywhere. ... She is a rumor. A wisp of smoke. A legend."

They just don't write like that anymore, and that's good. Not too many people write like the following anymore, either, which is too bad:

"The coin flips again, comes up tails, and an intern looking for a gold star goes to the trouble of fingerprinting an accident victim whose I.D. somehow got lost in the shuffle, and those prints get sent to a local precinct house and on to Washington, and you? You're not even awake yet." 

All three examples are from The Consummata, started by Mickey Spillane as a sequel to his 1967 novel The Delta Factor, abandoned, completed by Max Allan Collins, and published by Hard Case Crime in 2011.    I don't know if the first two examples are bad writing as much as they are badly dated; perhaps they would have seemed fresher a half-century ago.  The third example, though, is wryly comic and works just as well today as it could have when it was written. (All three examples are from the first half of the book, so I'm guessing they're Spillane's rather than Collins'.)

Spillane may have sneered at critics, but the hell with him; the man had chops even if not every sentence has aged well. (Here's a post about Spillane's late-career novel Dead Street, also published by Hard Case. The book is a worthwhile mix of bluster, nostalgia, and, I suspect, Spillane having a bit of fun with his own tough-guy reputation. The book's cracks about 21st-century events rendered in typical tough-guy Spillane style are great fun and a reminder that, though people may think of him as a 1950s writer, he wrote almost until his death in 2006 and he still had something left in the literary tank at the end.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The books my Bouchercon panelists die for

Five members of panels I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach next month contributed to Books to Die For, John Connolly and Declan Burke's 2012 collection of essays by crime writers about their own favorite crime novels and stories. Here's some of what my panelist/contributors had to say about the writers who influenced them:

"Dexter's books are essentially puzzles. He once said that he was as anxious for the detective to manage without a pathology lab as he was for the crossword puzzler to manage without a dictionary."

-- Paul Charles on Colin Dexter 

"For all the talk of Hammett and Chandler as the founders of the hard-boiled feasts--and I revere them as much as the next guy or gal--it's Spillane and [James M.] Cain who were the most influential."

-- Max Allan Collins on Mickey Spillane 

"As she grew more successful and confident, the humanity began to drain from her books. Most of us would not act like the unruffled, aloof Tom Ripley, but every one of us could see himself falling into the abyss of cowardice and mendacity that finally drives poor Guy Haines to kill."

-- Adrian McKinty on Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train 

"The greatest thing I've gained from Ellroy is the will to take my characters farther and deeper into the dark places than I, or the reader, might be comfortable with."

-- Stuart Neville on James Ellroy 

"This was not literature that uplifted the race. Cooper wasn't profiled in the pages of Ebony or, I imagine, discussed much, if at all, among the self-identified arts and literature crowd. The Urban League wouldn't be inviting him to speak at their annual dinner."

-- Gary Phillips on Clarence Cooper Jr.'s The Scene

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Paul Charles, Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville will be part of my Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland panel at Bouchercon 2014 on Friday, Nov. 14, at 11:30 a.m.  Max Allan Collins and Gary Phillips will be part of my Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras panel Friday at 3 p.m..

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Delta force and other stray crime-fiction thoughts

Clearing my mental warehouse to make way for new ideas. Everything must go!!!

1) I asked Eoin Colfer at Bouchercon 2011 why the characters in his "young adult" Artemis Fowl books, even the non-human characters, were achievers — rich geniuses, elite police officers, and so on  — while the characters in his "adult" crime fiction — the story "Taking on P.J.," the new novel Plugged — are lower on the social ladder: bouncers, shady doctors, low-level hoods. Simple, Colfer said: The Fowl stories are fantasy, the crime stories meant to be believable. What do you think of his answer? Are gritty characters synonymous with greater believability?

2) Colin Cotterill, a fellow member with Colfer of my “WHAT'S SO FUNNY ABOUT MURDER?” panel at Bouchercon, mentioned off-stage that he'd been part of a crime-fiction event in Germany staged in an operating theater — appropriate for the author of a series whose protagonist is the chief and only coroner in Laos. What's the oddest setting for a reading or lecture that you know of?

3) Mickey Spillane's 2007 novel Dead Street, discussed here yesterday, is full of amusing references to the sexual, social, and political mores of Spillane's 1950s:

"Bettie just stood there smiling in her see-through nightie, her untrimmed delta a refreshing pleasure in these days of bizarre pubic buzz cuts."

Who but Spillane could make pubic hair an object of nostalgia?

 © Peter Rozovsky 2011

Meet the new Spillane, same as ...

When you want to unwind with some relaxing reading while crossing Delaware Bay, the only choice is Mickey Spillane.

Dead Street, published by Hard Case Crime, brought near completion by Spillane, and finished by Max Allan Collins based on Spillane's notes, is Spillane's final crime novel.

It's a non-Mike Hammer book set in our time (People think of Spillane as a 1950s author, but he wrote almost to the end of his life, in 2006). Despite the contemporary setting, Spillane and his retired cop protagonist yearn for their Hammeresque past as hard as the book's central figure yearns to recapture the memory she had lost in a car crash twenty years before.

Thus the protagonist, Jack Stang, as he hears the unlikely tale of the woman's survival:

"My hand was on the .45 now. My thumb flipped off the leather snap fastener and eased the hammer back. If this was a pathetic jokester he was about to die at this last punch line."

Stang finds a pipe, "the sort rich little slobs liked to tote around to puff on weed or hash."   There's even a reference to "what used to be called un-American activities." Coming from Spillane, that sounds positively nostalgic.

Cape May Welcome Center

So,  if the book is full of Spillane's well-ripened political and cultural views, how do we know that the story takes place in our time rather than Mike Hammer's? How's this for a zinger:

"`I hear fancy apartments are going in.'

"`Yeah. And guess who's behind it?'

"Another stupid little surprise, I supposed. `Tell me.' 

"`A Saudi investment group.' 

"`Only seems fair.'

"`Yeah?'

 "`They took down two buildings, didn't they? Ought to put up a few.'"

© Peter Rozovsky 2011