PULP FICTION
late
1800’s – mid 1950’s
Mickey Spillane, the king of the pulp
novelists in the post-WW II period, sold an estimated 200 million copies
globally. He was born in Brooklyn, NY.
Despite the fact that his books
were international bestsellers, as a writer Spillane was almost universally
reviled by literary critics. He and his novels were attacked not only for their
alleged illiteracy but were denounced by the U.S. Senate's Kefauver Commission
as promoting juvenile delinquency. Explaining the extraordinary appeal of his
novels, Spillane simply said, "People like them." He countered his
critics by saying they were jealous of his success. "I'm a writer, not an
author," was Spillane's mantra all through his literary life. "The
difference is a writer makes money." As late as 1999 Spillane told an
audience at London's National Film Theatre, "Authors write, writers get
paid." When he was asked about his literary influences, Spillane replied, "Dollars". 
As a pulp writer, Spillane's mantra
was "violence will outsell sex every time." By combining them he
created a formula for success that begat a book publishing phenomenon.
Spillane's innovation was to inject
gory violence into P.I. stories for a generation of 16 million men who had just
been through the most violent war in history. These new mass-market novels
featured lurid covers that would attract a customer at what became the
ubiquitous steel-wire racks filled with paperbacks that sprouted up at bus
stations, lunch counters, shops and newsstands all over the world.
Spillane's books always featured a
great hook in the opening pages, as he believed that "the first page sells
the book". His narratives are first-person spoken monologues, directly
addressed to the reader.
Spillane published his first Mike
Hammer pulp, the infamous, I, the Jury, in 1947. Written in nine days,
the book introduces Hammer as a tough-talking, hard-drinking bruiser.
In 1980 seven of the top 15 all-time bestselling fiction books published in the U.S. had been written by Spillane. Source IMDb
Always,
Em-Musing
