Mickey, We Hardly Knew Ye
Ace has the big rundown on the passing of Mickey Spillane, mensch. Includes this beautiful one liner:
“[My wife's] an intellectual,” he told me in the car, disgruntled. “She loves politics. I married her on Hallowe’en. Still don’t know if it was a trick or treat.”
One Response to “Mickey, We Hardly Knew Ye”
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July 18th, 2006 at 7:43 am
Mickey was a study in contradictions… a well-known curmudgeonly figure in his adopted hometown of Murrell’s Inlet, South Carolina, where my family used to take vacations in the summertime.
He was a hard-drinking author of potboiler mysteries, but also a devout Jehovah’s Witness (!) who bankrolled the construction of the Kingdom Hall (the J.W. church) in his town.
Ace is quite correct: nobody will ever mistake Spillane for Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler (who could write unforgettable noir lines like this, in the voice of tough-guy P.I. Philip Marlowe: “It was a blonde… a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.” Or my personal favorite, “Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”)
But Spillane’s books are still enjoyable reads, and he was a likeable, gruff old guy. I’ll have a shot of bourbon in his memory tonight.