VENGEANCE IS MINE: THE REVENGE-SEEKER IN THE POST WORLD WAR

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VENGEANCE IS MINE: THE REVENGE-SEEKER IN THE POST WORLD WAR TWO NOIR THRILLER (FROM THE 'FATAL MEN' CHAPTER OF 'THE NOIR THRILLER', [PALGRAVE 2001])

by Lee Horsley

http://www.allanguthrie.co.uk/pages/noi ... s_mine.php

A word of warning: the following extract reveals one or two sensitive plot details. Consult the bibliography for a full listing of the texts discussed.

Killer protagonists proliferate in the post-World War Two noir thriller: revenge-seekers, criminally inclined social climbers and scornfully superior psychopaths, these 'fatal men' derive from earlier noir character types, all of them being in some measure victims seeking to become active agents and taking on the qualities of the punitive investigator, the gangster or the murderer. The representation of post-war America as a ‘consensus society' has been challenged in recent years by those who argue that the domestic scene, both during and after World War Two, was 'a site of disagreements, of oppressions, and, often, of the careful and carefully hidden deployment of new modes of power and power-alliances' (Richard Polenberg, quoted by Dana Polan). Amongst popular genre writers, it was the noir novelists who issued the most effective challenge to optimistic portrayals of American life. Rejecting the pervasive 'vocabulary of normality', noir thrillers offered portraits of maladjustment - what David Riesman called 'Tales of the Abnorm'. The inset film plot in Charles Willeford's The Woman Chaser (1960) epitomises the contrast: 'Mr Average American', with an average family and 'the dullest job imaginable...Deadly', causes a fatal accident and, in consequence, is isolated completely from his conventional existence. Execrated and hunted and doomed, he ceases to be 'a nobody' and, 'all alone on Highway one-oh-one - a good place to work in some symbolism', is suddenly someone of importance, 'a man against the world' (80-2).

The avenger, one of the most recurrent types of protagonist killer, acts to change things by 'cleansing' society or righting a wrong; he is used to probe and subvert what he sees as the complacent conformity of the time. In comparison to earlier figures like Hammett’s Continental Op or Daly’s Satan Hall, post-war avengers are more isolated and may themselves be trying to escape from the demands for conformity to a particular code or organisational loyalty (as in Stark [Westlake], Rabe and McGivern). The obsessive mindset of someone bent on revenge acts as a comment on the tendency of others to sell out to a plausible but corrupt system and to put the demands of tame conformity above truth and justice. In McGivern's Big Heat (1953), for example, unreasoning anger is the starting point for an individual assault on received opinion and for revelations about the corrupt links between respectable life and criminality. In urban settings, such narratives tend to involve one form or another of the faceless organisation, conspiring, coercing or compelling conformity. The huge, impersonal business corporation, the crime syndicate and the communist conspiracy can all fill the role of the system or 'outfit' that demands a collective identity. As the protagonist of Peter Rabe's Dig My Grave Deep (1956) says of the criminal organisation he is trying to leave, '"...there's a deal, and a deal to match that one, ...and you spit at one guy and tip your hat to another, because one belongs here and the other one over there, and, hell, don't upset the organisation whatever you do, because we all got to stick together ..."' (20). The films of the period also provide many examples of the plot that opposes the small man to the big organisation. With the resurgence of gangster films in the late forties and early fifties, there is a new emphasis on syndicated crime and on the crime cartel and 'corporate gangsterism' as mirror-images of legitimate capitalist enterprise. Films like I Walk Alone (Byron Haskin, 1948), Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1948) and The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis, 1955) all represent individuals up against corporate criminality. As Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953) suggests, even the communist conspiracy turns out to be uncomfortably similar to the economic machine of monolithic, large-scale industrial capitalism - just another large, impersonal power with hidden iniquities against which the solitary hero must battle.

Revenge-seekers, then, can function as the most direct critics of a corrupt system, though they are not all equally outspoken. Avenging angels range from the reluctant to the overly zealous, and some are too nearly angelic to be very good at revenge. The fact that they nevertheless remain firm in their purpose is, however, a reproach to the 'silent majority'. Essentially gentle, unaggressive men who have been propelled by traumatic events into a search for vengeance, they are kindred spirits of the ineffectual, civilised British characters of the interwar period who were unwillingly drawn into conflict by the threat of fascist violence. Fearing that their involvement will lead to the destruction of their own humanity, they are all but disqualified from their task. The quiet family man in Leigh Brackett's The Tiger Among Us (1957), going after the members of the juvenile gang who beat him up, reaches the point at which he comes close to shooting them, but is horrified by the extent to which he has become like his antagonists: 'Because I lusted to kill them...I never wanted anything so much...The tiger stripes were showing on my own hide' (177). In An Eye for an Eye, another novel of the same year (1957), Brackett portrays a mild-mannered lawyer who becomes 'possessed of a fury so sudden and wild' (95) that he is almost unrecognisable as he pursues the man who has kidnapped his wife. It is usual for the protagonist of such narratives to meet with indifference and inaction on the part of the majority of those in the wider community, people anxious not to get involved. In other versions of this basic plot pattern, instead of communal apathy there is hostility on the part of a slavishly conformist community that unites to obstruct a protagonist's quest for justice. The small town, reacting as a body and closing itself entirely against any intrusion, functions in this way to thwart an inexperienced revenge-seeker in Harry Whittington's Hell Can Wait (1960): 'They all seemed to be watching me. They were silent, their faces set and rigid, unblinking eyes like marbles in their sockets' (13).

Much the same conflict is to be found in urban plots involving either supposedly legitimate or manifestly criminal organisations that expect loyalty and acquiescence from all who have dealings with them. Amongst gentle avenger narratives, the best known of the fifties is perhaps McGivern's Big Heat, in which the humane, reasonable Bannion is driven to become a destructive force, opposing corruption that involves deep connections between the 'respectable' criminal syndicate and the whole fabric of the community: 'This was their city, their private, beautifully-rigged slot machine, and to hell with the few slobs who just happened to live in the place' (123). McGivern gives Bannion an intellectual background that defines a sane, sanguine human norm which is savagely violated during the course of the narrative. It is not that he is an innocent (he is in most respects much closer to the tough guy image of Spade or Marlowe). But his strong family life, destroyed when his wife is blown up by those seeking to kill Bannion, gives him a 'lost centre', and he has a set of values defined by his reading of 'the gentle philosophers'. The transformation forced on Bannion is symbolised by his leaving behind the books in which man is represented as naturally good and evil as 'the aberrant course, abnormal, accidental, out of line with man's true needs and nature' (15).

The opposing type of revenge-seeker is the cold, amoral, violent outsider. The stubborn refusal of the lone wolf to buckle to social pressure and the resistance to conformity and acquiescence are also present in a character like Bannion, but in contrast to Bannion this is a figure who has no compunction about killing. He is often given an impersonal or symbolic name (just 'Parker', or Clinch or Hammer). Richard Stark [Donald E. Westlake], who represents his most disagreeable gangsters as organisation men, sets against them one of the most memorable examples of the existential loner pitted against the criminal machine. Stark's Parker has had several incarnations on screen, including Lee Marvin's powerful creation of the ruthless Walker in John Boorman's Point Blank (1967), Robert Duvall's humanised portrayal of the almost equally laconic and remorseless Macklin in The Outfit (John Flynn, 1974) and, more recently, Mel Gibson's action-hero avenger, Porter, in Payback, Brian Helgeland's 1999 remake of Point Blank (the other film adaptations of the Parker novels are Gordon Flemyng’s The Split in 1968 and two French films, both released in 1967, Alain Cavalier's Mise à Sac and Godard's Made in USA). What these diverse characterisations of the Parker figure have in common is their tenacious, obsessive single-mindedness: when Macklin's girl friend tries to persuade him that it needn't be 'this way', he simply replies, 'It does with me'. Westlake's original intention had been to have 'the bad guy...get caught at the end', but his publisher (at Pocket Books) saw Parker's potential as a series character and persuaded Westlake to let him escape. What this meant was that Parker was quite different from the usual series protagonist: 'I'd made Parker completely remorseless, completely without redeeming characteristics,' Westlake says, 'because he was going to get caught at the end. So I wound up with a truly cold leading-series character...' There is, however, something touching about Parker's sense of betrayal and his persistence in the face of terrible odds. In comparison to the typical Charles Williams or Jim Thompson criminal protagonist, he is in many ways a sympathetic figure. Westlake strongly stresses his uncompromising individualism and his honest acknowledgement of his own motives in pursuing what he sees as an adequate revenge.

What Parker is up against is a 'respectable' and successful criminal organisation, transformed between Prohibition and the present by their diversification of interests and the intricacies of their organisation. When Parker, in the first of the novels, The Hunter (1962) - the basis for Point Blank - decides to reclaim his money from the Outfit, he is told that it is impossible for the individual to stand up against something so pervasive: '"Coast to coast, Parker, it's all the same..."' (117). Except for the fact that the organisation works outside the law, it 'conforms as closely as possible to the corporate concept' (125-6). In the eyes of the Outfit, Parker is 'a heister, a hijacker'. We know that Parker is wrong in thinking that his wife was betraying him with Mal Resnick, but her acquiescence out of fear for her life makes her a foil to him. Parker's intelligent strength, psychological as well as physical, is a distinguishing trait. The first physical description of him, followed by a female response ('They knew he was a bastard, they knew his big hands were born to slap with...' [7-8]), fixes him in our minds as a male force, the embodiment of potent determination. His face may be changed for his own protection, as it is in The Man with the Getaway Face (1963), but he always retains his force and resolution, manifest in a refusal to submit that marks him out as 'a true existential'. Parker is, before the start of The Hunter, thought to be dead. In a way Parker is death, a man back from the dead to revenge his betrayal and to visit death on others. This sense of a protagonist so far beyond normal life that he is 'dead to it' is central to the understanding of Boorman's Point Blank, in which the whole narrative can be interpreted as a fantasy of revenge passing through Walker's mind in the few moments before he dies, after having been shot at point-blank range.

W.R. Burnett's Underdog (1957) is similarly structured around the conflict between a criminal misfit and an organisation - in this case, a partnership between gangsters and corrupt politicians that sacrifices the individual to secure a smoothly operating power structure. The protagonist, Clinch, another loner with his own kind of integrity, is drawn on a less mythic scale than Parker. A genuine 'underdog' possessing no qualities of leadership, he is sustained by his contact with a good-hearted whore and a generous political boss, Big Dan Moford. Moford, who 'runs a whole city' but is too individual in his standards to fit in with the plans of 'the gang' of those who want to run things by regularising the corrupt links between crime and politics. Though Clinch bonds with Moford, he does not 'know the meaning' of words like 'pal', 'chum' or 'buddy' (27). The vocabulary of American normalcy - all words that assert a shared ethos and conventional connection - is beyond him. His very name 'hardly seems like a name at all' (52), and the integrity born of Clinch's isolation combines at the end with his reluctant affection for Moford to spur his revenge on a killer who is 'always surrounded by crawling yes-men' (75).

The period's most famous and forthright scourge of organised rackets and their 'crawling yes-men' is Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer - a name is equally calculated to imply separation from ordinarily warm human instincts. Hammer first appeared in I, the Jury in 1947. Spillane's protagonist, though not a criminal, is in fact a more extreme example of the brutally aggressive revenge-seeker than either Parker or Clinch. Hammer emerges from his first-person narrative as a strongly individuated centre of consciousness. He is connected to others through love (his secretary, Velda) and friendship (Pat Chambers, his police contact), but shares more with a symbolic executioner like Satan Hall than he does with a comparatively humanised and self-doubting figure like Hammett's Op, and is clearly allied to such later vigilante figures as Dirty Harry, Paul Kersey (Death Wish) and Steven Seagal (Out for Justice). Hammer's origins as a comic book character are significant, suggesting the kind of larger-than-life hero represented on Harry Sahle's cover for the unpublished 'Mike Danger' comic that formed the basis for I, the Jury - 'A vibrant personality...as ROUGH as he looks!'

Spillane's early Hammer novels, published between 1947 and 1952, were by far the most popular late forties-early fifties reworkings of the revenge motif. His sales were phenomenal - over fifteen million copies of his books sold by 1953. One of the acknowledged masters of hard-boiled fiction, Spillane exploits the possibilities of the style in ways that make his novels very different from those of Chandler and his heirs. Spillane is described by Ed Gorman as 'the great American primitive whose real talents got lost in all the clamour over the violence of his hero. He brought energy and a street-fighter's rage to a form grown moribund with cuteness and imitation Chandler prose.' Like the earlier pulp tough guys, Hammer is primarily used to expose and punish the kinds of vice associated with the evil metropolis - narcotics (I, the Jury and Kiss Me, Deadly), the prostitution racket (My Gun Is Quick), blackmail (Vengeance Is Mine!). He assails the corruption that is engendered by wealth and power and that lurks under apparently admirable surfaces. His adversaries are men like the wealthy, gracious Berin-Grotin who is actually the head of a prostitution racket (My Gun Is Quick) or Lee Deamer, in One Lonely Night, who turns out to be the evil twin, the 'head Commie' rather than 'the little man whom the public loves and trusts' (157). Confronted with such duplicitous enemies, Hammer shares the noir protagonist's alienation, his world-weary despair and his anger at urban corruption.

Hammer's vigilantism, like the intuitive, independent investigation of the private eye, implicitly expresses distrust of the 'faceless', impersonal mechanism of law enforcement. He knows from first-hand experience how vicious life is, and when he says to the reader at the beginning of My Gun Is Quick, 'I'm not you', he is declaring a separation from bourgeois ease and illusion that has always characterised the hard-boiled investigative figure. He has an ability to understand the lawlessness of the urban jungle: 'You have to be quick, and you have to be able, or you become one of the devoured...'. But in contrast to many earlier hard-boiled writers, Spillane is led by his sense of life's viciousness towards right- rather than left-wing views. Mike Hammer acts out McCarthyite paranoia. It is not capitalism itself but hidden, conspiratorial organisations subverting American life that are to be feared, among them the communist party. Other thriller writers of the time expressed anxieties generated by McCarthyism. Even where McCarthyism is not directly mentioned, narratives in which an outsider is threatened by the accusing voice of 'normal society' are often coded references to McCarthyite persecution - to demands for conformity and for absolute loyalty, to the silencing of opposition through fear and to sacrificing the interests of the individual in the name of the collective good. Spillane, on the other hand, expresses the fears that motivated the McCarthyite witch-hunts. Hammer's savage one-man crusade is in some ways that of the existential loner, but he also has the views of the disgruntled moral majoritarian, directing his violence against a variety of demonised others suspected of subverting American life. What results is a macho conservatism that has, over the years, led to many criticisms.

It is easy see why Spillane has alienated many with his vigorous, no-holds-barred style, his extremity of violent action and his unashamed commercialism (he is, he maintains, a 'writer' rather than an 'author', and writes only what he feels sure will sell (Guardian interview with Spillane, NFT). His prose is hyperbolic, sometimes surreal and hallucinatory in its evocation of sensual or grotesque physical detail: at the end of Kiss Me, Deadly, for example, 'beautiful Lily', at last revealed as an appalling scarred villainess, is set alight by Hammer, 'and in the moment of time before the scream blossoms into the wild cry of terror she was a mass of flames tumbling on the floor...The flames were teeth that ate, ripping and tearing, into the scars of other flames and her voice the shrill sound of death on the loose' (158). Probably the most often-quoted example of Hammer's crudely violent methods is from Spillane's first novel, I, the Jury, which rewrites the famous conflict between desire and justice at the close of Hammett's Maltese Falcon. Spade's response to Brigid O'Shaughnessy's '"Sam, you can't!"' is a reasoned defence of the code of the private eye before he hands her over to the police; Hammer gives the treacherous Charlotte a lecture on the deficiencies of the jury system, declares himself to be judge and jury, shoots her and then, looking down at 'the ugly swelling in her naked belly where the bullet went in', famously answers her dying cry of '"How c-could you?"' with '"It was easy."' (187-8). Hammer's killing of the woman he 'almost loved' haunts him in subsequent novels; it contributes to his isolation, but it is not a disabling guilt, or one which makes him question the rightness of his ethic of summary justice. Even Daly's Satan Hall, whose metaphoric qualities place him outside the bounds of human law, does not execute malefactors so cold-bloodedly.

The reader never doubts that Hammer will come out on top, and this to some extent sets him apart from the noir protagonist. Hammer asserts himself in ways that ally him closely with earlier action heroes like Race Williams and Bulldog Drummond and with more recent super-heroes like Sylvester Stallone in Cobra (George P. Cosmatos, 1986), or Judge Dredd (Danny Cannon, 1995) and RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987), which Spillane names as one of his favourite films (the other is The Terminator). Like these figures, Hammer possesses such prodigious endurance it approaches invulnerability and he responds with such effective violence that he is matched only by the most extreme of his predecessors. He proves his worth in surviving a series of tests, but the ferocity of his assaults and the relish with which he recounts them places him outside normal civilised humanity. His assertion that he in no way resembles his arm-chair-bound reader is more than just a declaration of an unillusioned knowledge of the city. It is a boast that he has the combative skills necessary for survival amidst the 'blood and terror', the 'razor-sharp claws' of the Colosseum-like city (My Gun Is Quick, 7). His competence is a form of superiority that is remote from the self-doubt and self-reproach of the noir protagonist.

It is in the opening pages of One Lonely Night that Mike Hammer comes closest to the iconic noir protagonist in reflecting on his outcast status and on the brutality that renders him indistinguishable from the criminals he pursues. Alone on the bridge in the cold, fog-like rain, suicidally depressed, he broods on the way he has been denounced by the 'little judge' who reluctantly acquitted him. He feels branded as 'a guy who had no earthly reason for existing in a decent, normal society', and goes home to dream that his gun has become 'part of me and stuck fast' (5-13). The novel in which Hammer feels most marginalised is also, however, the one in which his aggression and paranoia are most closely linked to the collective hatreds and anxieties of the American right-wing in the McCarthyite early 1950s. The decision to make his villains 'the Commie bastards' who are secretly infiltrating the country is a reflection of Spillane's sense of what would appeal to the widest possible audience of the time. In tackling them, Hammer gives vent to violent impulses that would in the context of the fifties be judged as 'evil for the good'. Though 'lonely' and intensely personal, his individualism is an expression of group hatreds and a rejection of the whole liberal machinery of law, restraint and civil rights. Vengeance is taken against those who affect conformity but in reality threaten the very fabric of American society.

Bibliography

Brackett, Leigh, The Tiger Among Us (1957), London: Blue Murder, 1989; An Eye for an Eye (1957), London: Corgi, 1961

Burnett, W. R., Underdog (1957), New York: Bantam, 1958

Collins, Max Allan and James L. Traylor, One Lonely Knight: Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1984)

Hugo, Chris, 'The Big Combo: Production Conditions and the Film Text', in Ian Cameron (ed), The Movie Book of Film Noir (London: Studio Vista, 1992)

Maxfield, James F., The Fatal Woman: Sources of Male Anxiety in Fim Noir, 1941-1991 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996)

McGivern, William B., The Big Heat (1953), London: Blue Murder, 1988

Munby, Jonathan, Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)

Polan, Dana, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative and the American Cinema, 1940-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)

Pronzini, Bill and Jack Adrian (eds), Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)

Rabe, Peter, Kiss the Boss Goodbye (1956), Berkeley: Black Lizard, 1988; Dig My Grave Deep (1956), Manchester: Fawcett (Gold Medal), 1957; The Out is Death (1957), Manchester: Fawcett (Gold Medal), 1959

Ruehlmann, William, Saint with a Gun: The Unlawful American Private Eye (Washington, DC: American University Press, 1974)

Seltzer, Mark, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998)

Shadoian, Jack, Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster /CrimeFilm (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977)

Silet, Charles L. P., 'Interview with Donald Westlake', in Lee Server, Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg (eds), The Big Book of Noir (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1998)

Spillane, Mickey, I, the Jury (1947), London: Corgi, 1960; My Gun is Quick (1950), London: Corgi, 1960; Vengeance is Mine (1950), London: Corgi, 1960; The Big Kill (1951), New York: Signet, 1955; One Lonely Night (1951), New York: Signet, 1955; Kiss Me, Deadly (1952), London: Corgi, 1975

Stark, Richard [Donald E. Westlake], The Hunter [Point Blank] (1962), London: Allison and Busby, 1986; The Parker Omnibus (London: Allison and Busby, 1997), including: The Man with the Getaway Face (1963), The Outfit (1963) and Deadly Edge (1971)

Whittington, Harry, Hell Can Wait (1960), Manchester: Fawcett (Gold Medal), 1962

Willeford, Charles, The Woman Chaser (1960), New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992

Copyright© 2001 Lee Horsley

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Lee Horsley had a hard-boiled but not noir childhood in Minnesota, where she read pulp fiction, hunted, fished and was particularly good at rifle shooting (winning both state and national championships in her late teens). In the mid-60s, after graduating from the University of Minnesota, she came to England as a Fulbright Scholar to do postgraduate work in English Literature and has lived here ever since (with an English husband and three children, now all in their twenties). She has been at the University of Lancaster since 1974 - currently teaching twentieth-century British and American literature and two specialist crime courses. Over the last fifteen years, she has written two books on literature and politics – Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination (Macmillan, 1990) and Fictions of Power in English Literature 1900-1950 (Longman, 1995) – and more recently The Noir Thriller (Palgrave, 2001). Her current projects include a book on twentieth-century British and American crime fiction for OUP and another (jointly with her daughter, Katharine) called Fatal Families: Representations of Domesticity in Twentieth-Century Crime Stories (contracted to Greenwood Press). Both of these should be out sometime in 2005-06. Katharine and Lee also started a website, Crime Culture, in September 2002, aimed particularly at university students and teachers involved in the growing number of crime-related courses - but also, they hope, of interest to anyone who enjoys crime films and crime fiction.