THE READING RHEUM: KISS ME DEADLY (1952)

This is not a full review of Mickey Spillane's sixth Mike Hammer novel, but rather a companion to a forthcoming review of the far-from-faithful 1955 film adaptation. The novel's a good read, and perhaps displays less of the so-called misogyny for which Spillane's works are routinely criticized-- until the ending, which I'll proceed to reveal, so...

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

For most of the novel, the tough-guy hero has pursued a mysterious package, causing him to come into conflict with sinister Mafiosi. As is standard in such novels, Hammer also protects a gorgeous "helpless femme," this one going by the name of Lily Carver. In contrast to many such novels, Hammer doesn't get any advance romantic rewards from the mysterious young woman, but there's a good reason for this, beyond Hammer simply playing the part of a noble rescuer. Probably no one was much surprised back in the day when it's revealed that Lily is a femme fatale who's also seeking the valuable whatsit. She's not even the real Lily Carver, but an unnamed schemer who has assumed the real woman's identity. But the concluding scene suddenly amps up the misogyny by Warp Factor Five:


"Her hands slipped through the belt of the robe, opened it. Her hands parted it slowly....until I could see what she was really like. I wanted to vomit worse than before. I wanted to let my guts come up and felt my belly retching. She was a horrible caricature of a human! There was no skin, just a disgusting mass of twisted, puckered flesh from her knees to her neck, making a picture of gruesome freakishness that made you want to shut your eyes against it." 

This strange image of a woman who presents an alluring face and form but whose garments conceal a monstrous "freakishness" remains riveting even today, and even though I've only read a handful of the author's works, I'll hypothesize that this may well be Spillane's most misogynistic-- and mythopoeic-- scene in any of his books. Hammer only gets a look at the goods after Lily has shot him once, and is preparing to shoot him again, but she stops only to mess with his mind before she kills him. While pointing her gun directly at Hammer's "belt"-- which is probably as close as a 1950s pop-culture author could come to intimating the groin-- she tries to force him to "kiss me, deadly," knowing that he'll be grossed out by her injuries, briefly explained as having been caused by a fire. Hammer manages a last-minute save, improbably managing to set "Lily" on fire because she's soaked in alcohol from an earlier rubdown.

I for one would not characterize Spillane's use of violence against a woman to be misogynistic in itself, for Hammer is just as wildly violent against his male enemies.Yet, as averse as I am to quick-stop Freudianian readings, I must admit that Spillane's era was uniquely saturated with the ideas of the Viennese "father of psychology." There had been many femme fatales before "False Lily," and they too combined the idea of physical allure coupled with a "masculine" will to turn on the hero and try to kill him. But few of them reproduced an image that was so resonant of the Medusa-myth, in which the female combines aspects of normative beauty and a repulsive hideousness.  A Freudian-influenced reader would probably opine that the ugliness beneath Lily's garments was a displacement for male fears of the vagina; indeed, in SEXUAL PERSONAE Camille Paglia goes so far as to claim that Western culture's enshrinement of feminine beauty is a means of avoiding the unlovely reality of the female sex organ (not that Paglia thinks the male organ is much better). I myself don't subscribe to this reading as being broadly applicable, but it does seem to fit Spillane's particular brand of female-fear.

The 1955 adaptation, while it subverts many of the masculine priorities of Spillane's novel, doesn't make its version of Lily a hideously scarred woman. However, in place of the original's rapacity, the film script makes learned comparisons to the myth of feminine curiosity, directly referencing such figures as Medusa and Lot's wife, and implicitly invoking the idea of the Greeks' Pandora and the Box of Evils. And since Pandora's Box may also be seen as a symbol for the female sex organ, it's arguable that the film-maker may have also demonized femininity every bit as much as Spillane did.

WOMAN IN WHITE: THE ANTI-DETECTIVE STORY

I've recently finished Wilkie Collins' THE WOMAN IN WHITE, often cited as one of the first novels that cemented the European mystery-detective genre. I didn't find it nearly as salutary an experience as his arguably more famous novel THE MOONSTONE, which boasts not only a better plot but an exciting pace and more rounded characters.

That said, THE WOMAN IN WHITE has one thing going for it that MOONSTONE did not: a story that totally invalidates one of the major tropes of the detective genre, so much so that I view it as being "anti-detective," at least in theme.

One of the most enduring themes of the straightforward detective story is the reader's experience of salvation when the clever detective sees the solution to some puzzle that has confounded all others. I don't know whether literary pundits still deem Edgar Allan Poe to be the creator of the detective story, but in at least two of his Dupin stories, Poe concretized the idea of the detective as the solver of great puzzles, both in "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter."

As in many such detective stories, the 1860 novel WOMAN IN WHITE does present the audience with a very convoluted scheme involving certain villains' attempts to despoil an heiress of her inheritance, And two of the principal witnesses to the scheme-- main characters Walter Hartright and Marian Halcombe-- become amateur detectives in order to figure out what has been done and what they can do about it.

Without detailing that scheme, though, I will say that Collins structures the novel so that even when the heroes find out the truth, the villains have arranged things so thoroughly to their advantage that the detectives can't DO anything with their knowledge. At the very time when a Dupin or Holmes would unveil the secret that solves the whole difficulty, Walter and Marian find themselves helpless to make that revelation, because they know that no one will believe them.

Collins, in other words, has no faith that society will listen to the detective once he reveals the truth.  Early in the novel the main villain Count Fosco pokes fun at one character's belief that "murder will out," claiming that only stupid criminals are easily found out, and he does arrange things so that it takes advantage of both the inertia of society and the straightjacketing effects of the legal system. On a side-note Collins' father nagged the author into studying law, so that Collins might have some more profitable employment than being a writer. Collins, in showing in his novel that the law hampers more than it helps, may be demonstrating his extreme dislike for the legal profession in THE WOMAN IN WHITE-- though to be sure, Collins' friend and collaborator Charles Dickens had provided an even greater excoriation of the law in 1852's BLEAK HOUSE.

The undoing of the novel's villains takes place not because of any great revelation, but simply because Walter, by sheer coincidence, lucks into making contact with an enemy of Fosco, and that enemy is key to tearing down Fosco's tapestry of deception.  And thus, though THE WOMAN IN WHITE still qualifies as a "detective novel" in terms of content, in terms of theme it rejects one of the main emotional satisfactions of the genre.