For ’50s schoolboys, the qualities that made Mickey Spillane’s paperback mysteries so appealing seemed pretty elementary: lurid sex, brazen violence and dum-dum prose. In “I, the Jury,” “Vengeance Is Mine” and other pulp artifacts, Spillane’s skinhead private eye, Mike Hammer, took the law into his own two fists with a homicidal finesse that makes such movie vigilantes as Charles (“Death Wish”) Bronson and Clint (“Dirty Harry”) Eastwood look like a couple of pansies, to use one of the novelist’s milder slurs.
“Before I’m done I may shoot up a lot of snotty punks like you but you can bet that one of them will have been the one I was after, and as for the rest, tough luck.” With declarations like that, from “I, the Jury,” Mike Hammer won the hearts and minds of the teen multitudes.
Among them was Otto Penzler, who also grew up believing the ’50s party line about Spillane: that his novels were unreconstituted trash, without any redeeming social, moral or literary value. Why else would he have consumed them so religiously?
Now Penzler knows better. In his revisionist opinion, Spillane is held in subterranean esteem “only by those who haven’t read him or are too snobbish to recognize that he’s a tremendously powerful writer.”
Penzler speaks with some authority. Not just a post-adolescent pulp junkie, addled by overexposure to fictional mayhem, he’s the founder of the Mysterious Press and perhaps the country’s most knowledgeable and pre-eminent connoisseur of the literary underworld, from Arthur Conan Doyle to Dashiell Hammett to Ross Thomas.
As for Spillane, Penzler is willing to put his money where his mouth is, along with his prestige and his credibility. Any day now, Penzler’s facsimile reissue of “I, the Jury” should hit bookstores, not in the two-bit paperback version so beloved by schoolboys, but in a $35 hardcover replica of the 1947 first edition for hard-core collectors.
In addition to eating, breathing and publishing mysteries (under the imprint Otto Penzler Books, now that he has severed his natal connection to the Mysterious Press), Penzler sells them at his Mysterious Bookshop, a skeletal townhouse at 129 W. 56th St., which also houses his publishing operation.
Sitting in a wingback chair in his office, an inner sanctum reached by spiral staircase on an upper floor of his bookshop, publishing house and living quarters, Penzler explained Spillane’s somewhat mysterious inclusion among the initial offerings in his First Edition Library of mystery classics.
“It’s one thing to read Mickey’s book when you’re 15,” Penzler said. “The good guy goes out and avenges his best friend’s murder. That was great stuff, the kind of frontier justice we could understand in those days.
“But they’re not quite the same books when you read them at 30,” added Penzler, now 50. “In a more mature context, you understand what he’s writing about in terms of philosophy and politics. He had a very individualistic, very American-frontier, lone-gunfighter kind of mentality.”
In his willingness to stand up for Spillane, Penzler is no lone gunfighter. One of his chief allies is the late Ayn Rand, exponent of ruthless egoism and self-preservation in such tendentious epics as “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged.” According to Penzler, Rand made him a Spillane convert in her book “The Romantic Manifesto.”
“She called him the last of the great romantic writers. Her definition didn’t refer to Harlequin or Silhouette Romances. She was writing about man as he ought to be, not as he is, which is a very romantic notion.”
No matter how you define it, “romantic” is not usually a word applied to Spillane, who may be the most politically, sexually, morally and ethically incorrect novelist in the annals of literary crime and punishment.
Or, as Kenneth C. Davis put it in “Two-Bit Culture,” his history of paperback books: Mike Hammer “stood for . . . sexism, racism (blacks are either shuffling genetic defectives or pimps and pushers), anti-intellectualism, homophobia, and a brand of jackbooted fascist vigilantes in the guise of preserving order.”
Considered a visionary in some quarters, a fascist in others, for her objectivist philosophy and her rabid opposition to the Red Menace, Rand wrote of her admiration for Spillane’s “plot ingenuity and moralistic style,” adding, “Spillane’s style is reality-oriented and addressed to an objective psycho-epistemology.”
Since being alerted by Rand to the detective novelist’s psycho-epistemological style, Penzler said he has become a friend of Spillane’s as well as his publisher. The 76-year-old author, whose 12th Mike Hammer book, “The Killing Man,” was published in 1989, lives reclusively in South Carolina, Penzler said.
Penzler suggested that it might be prudent not to try to contact the Mick. “He’s a lovely man,” he said, “but he’s quite sick now. And he’s not real good at talking to people. He’s never been treated well by the press. Even if they want to write something nice about him, he’s not interested. And he really means it.”
Hooked on mysteries
In starting up his First Edition Library of mysteries, Penzler didn’t put just one hard-boiled egg into his basket. First off the presses was a mockup of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon.”
Penzler’s prospective lineup also includes Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep,” William Irish’s “Phantom Lady,” James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” Rex Stout’s “Fer de Lance,” the first of the Nero Wolfes, and “The Roman Hat Mystery,” the first Ellery Queen.
At $35, these aren’t cheap imitations. The facsimiles are aimed not at casual readers, Penzler explained, but at collectors, who seek first editions as obsessively and avariciously, if not as murderously, as Casper Gutman and Joel Cairo pursued the Maltese falcon.
“With a dust jacket and in nice condition,” he said, “there are probably a couple of dozen `Maltese Falcons,’ ” any one of which may be worth more than the title “dingus,” as Sam Spade called the big bird, which was responsible for all the skulduggery in Hammett’s 1930 novel.
“The last one sold at auction for $27,000,” Penzler said. ” `The Big Sleep’ would be $10,000. `Fer de Lance’ close to that. This series is designed to fill that gap for normal people who can’t possibly afford those books.”
Until he got hooked on mysteries, Penzler was a normal person himself. A former sportswriter for the New York Daily News, he started the Mysterious Press in 1975 while “earning a meager living as a free-lance writer.”
Penzler had long abandoned any ambitions to write mysteries, however devoted he was to the form.
“After writing my first novel at the age of 17, I realized that this was not something for which I was suited. It was a terrible disappointment to me, but no greater than learning that I wasn’t going to play center field for the New York Yankees.”
In retrospect, Penzler was perhaps too successful as a publisher. Four years ago, he sold the Mysterious Press to Warner Books, agreeing to stay on for a year as president. “They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he said of the deal, one of those byzantine arrangements so common in publishing these days.
According to the terms of the buyout, Penzler said he was legally bound and gagged: forbidden from starting a competing publishing house or even fraternizing with his former authors, most of whom were top guns he’d personally recruited for the Mysterious Press: Ross Thomas, Donald Westlake, Ruth Rendell, James Crumley, Joe Gores and Jerome Charyn, among them.
“It was horrible,” he said. “The Mysterious Press had the greatest crime list in the history of publishing. And I couldn’t take any of those authors with me. I wasn’t even permitted to speak to them until Feb. 1 of this year.”
Into the lion’s den
While curiously waiting to see how many of his “old friends,” as he calls them, will return to the fold, Penzler has managed to assemble a respectable rogues’ gallery for the spring line of Otto Penzler Books: James Ellroy’s “Hollywood Nocturnes,” Brendan du Bois’ “Dead Sand” and Sam Siciliano’s “The Angel of the Opera.”
The Otto Penzler catalog is also stocked with old and new masters, both living and dead, who appear not only as First Editions facsimiles but also in his Armchair Detective Library, reprints of neo-classics such as Lawrence Block’s “The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep” and Elmore Leonard’s “Unknown Man No. 89.”
As numerous visitors to Penzler’s office have observed, it could be a reproduction of Nero Wolfe’s vintage brownstone, while the publisher’s Wolfean gray beard (if not his comparatively slender girth) give him at least passing resemblance to Rex Stout’s sleuth. At the same time, the gloomy, shuttered light makes the room look like the set for Don Corleone’s den in “The Godfather.”
And yet, it seems safe to assume that neither Nero Wolfe nor Don Corleone ever displayed skulls on his desk or Sherlock Holmes posters on his walls, as Penzler does. Nor have many rare-book collectors amassed an inventory of mysteries quite like Penzler’s, 20,000 of them on shelves that reach 12 feet up to the ceiling, among which are many signed copies of those he’s duplicating in the First Edition Library.
Even though “The Maltese Falcon” led off the series last fall, Penzler said he has never been a fan of Hammett. “The writing is so dated, so stylishly anachronistic that I don’t see why some people consider him the greatest.”
Taste for Chandler
More to Penzler’s personal taste are the works of Raymond Chandler (a “great, great writer whose stuff is still fresh and contemporary”); James M. Cain (“I’m not sure I totally approve of his moral sense, but what a writer!”); Cornell Woolrich, a k a William Irish (“absolutely the best suspense writer who ever lived, though a lot of it now seems dated”); and James Crumley (whose “The Last Good Kiss” is the “single greatest” private-eye novel).
Straying into the minefield of espionage, Penzler had grave reservations about the later works of John Le Carre. ” `The Spy Who Came In From the Cold’ was as great a book as I’ve read. But beginning with `The Little Drummer Girl,’ they’re dismal.”
At that point, Penzler thought he’d better stop shooting from the lip. “There are plenty of other writers I could offend by telling how overrated they are. But I live in this world, I publish some of these people, and I rely on them to come into my bookshop to do signings.”
Even praising writers can have its unexpected perils, Penzler said. “A Detroit columnist once asked me who I thought was the best writer in America today. Consistently, I think Ross Thomas is. My opinion was printed in his column. And then Elmore Leonard, who’s one of my half-dozen best friends in the world, called and said, `Do you really think he’s better than I am?’ It was terrible.”
Off the subject of writers, Penzler was only too willing to discuss the reasons for the abiding popularity of mystery and detective fiction. While many of the books are high in literary value, Penzler said it’s impossible to discount the crucial element of escapism, particularly in an age of seemingly promiscuous and often unresolved violence.
“In mysteries,” he said, “the bad guys get punished in the end. There’s justice. That’s not true in everyday life. The bad guys get away with it all the time. So fiction is a great comfort.”
Despite his rude behavior and his unpleasant methods, no fiction writer could be quite so comforting as Mickey Spillane when it came to quickly and efficiently dispensing justice. As Mike Hammer described his undue process in “I, the Jury”:
“By Christ, I’m not letting the killer go through the tedious process of the law. . . . Cops can’t break a guy’s arm to make him talk, and they can’t shove his teeth in with the muzzle of a .45 to remind him that you aren’t fooling.”
