Sherry Chandler

An exchange between the headmaster of the Old School and Ayn Rand:

…If you had to name the single greatest work by an American author, what would it be?

Atlas Shrugged.

Your own novel

Is there another?

And after that?

The Fountainhead.

Is there really no other American author whose work you admire?

…There is one, she said, I am interested in the novels of Mr. Mickey Spillane. His metaphysic is perhaps rather instinctive but quite sound nevertheless…I would particularly recommend I, the Jury. In Mike Hammer, he has created a true hero, one who doesn’t torture himself in the current fashion with decadent niceties. Mike knows evil from good and destroys it without hesitation or regret. Most unusual. Most satisfying.

— Tobias Wolff, Old School (Vintage Books, 2003)

I must point out that this portrait of Ayn Rand is fictional and I have no idea what her actual opinion of Mickey Spillane might have been. This passage gives me cause to wonder, howver, whether our current president may have read, when he read at all, much of Mickey Spillane.

Nah. Probably caught the movie.

I might question the pronoun reference in the antepenultimate sentence in the quote.

I noticed yesterday that Mickey Spillane has passed, of whose writing Raymond Chandler observed “[p]ulp writing at its worst was never as bad as this stuff.” Spillane was the Hardest of the Hardboiled pulp authors, and the most successful, and he dominated drugstore newsracks in the 1950s. The great unwashed seems to have a vast appetite for the Simple, the Violent and the Quick. Swift vengeance satisfies our body politic as nothing else can. Our government supposedly has given the green light to the Israelis for at least one more week of Massive Destruction in Lebanon before we apply some Condi-linguis. This indiscriminate bombing may or may not destroy Hizbollah but it is violent and swift.

Looking Competent obviously trumps Being Competent, which is why Porgey was flanked by all those Defrosted & Adopted embryos during his photo-op. Our First Embryo had just signed his Very First Veto against stem cell research. What kind of World Leader allows himself to be upstaged by a small blonde waif while thousands of dark-haired Israeli and Iraqi and Lebanese and Palestinean waifs suffer and die 7 or 8 timezones away? A very canny and cynical one?

Politics, like the writing of mystery novels, requires a degree of careful consideration. Don’t well-crafted proposals produce the longer lasting solutions than slapdash fixes? Our Fearless Reader obviously favors the latter, stuffing his mouth full of a dinner roll while eructating a glib and vulgar aphorism. Juan Cole has an observation on just how well George understands the situation in the Middle East. Duhhb is Cowboy Lawman, carved from the same banana as the Duke and Mike Hammer, who never hit a woman when he could kick her. Were any of these characters the Red Sea, Pharoah’s army would barely get their feet damp.

Well nil nisi malum de fututuis or summat.

It is with some trepidation that I contemplate the forthcoming Dalziel and Pascoe novel at the Amazon.co.uk site. It is to be published in March 2007 and is titled The Death of Dalziel.