As they often do for readers of fiction like me, reality and art collided last week. I watched a hideous video showing the murder of an innocent young girl by a human monster on a Charlotte light rail train. The girl, Iryna Zarutska, was a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who fled her war-torn country for the safety of America. What Iryna didn’t know was that something is rotten in the promised land — the system that unleashed the monster on her after a mere six years in prison for robbery with a dangerous weapon, breaking and entering, and larceny. But Mickey Spillane knew. He knew way back in 1947, when his hero, Mike Hammer, almost perfectly describes the rot in the novel I’m currently reading, I, the Jury:
You know what happens, dammit. They get the best lawyer there is and screw up the whole thing and wind up a hero! The dead can’t speak for themselves. They can’t tell what happened … Nobody in the (jury) box would know how it felt to be dying or have your own killer laugh in your face … No, damn it. A jury is cold and impartial like they’re supposed to be, while some snotty lawyer makes them pour tears as he tells how his client was insane at the moment or had to shoot in self-defense.
I wrote “almost perfectly describes” because even Spillane couldn’t imagine a legal order where the pro-criminal bias is embraced as Social Justice, hinging not on the crime or criminal but on the perceived systemic oppression of his race. And not just by cold, impartial jurors but by media indoctrinated ones, plus ideologically corrupt judges.
Three years ago, few people on either side of the political divide could have predicted the instantaneous collapse of wokeness.
What would Mike Hammer think of top political leaders kneeling beside the casket of a violent scumbag like George Floyd? He’d make the overblown January 6th look like a tea party. And most American men of the postwar era would have cheered him on. They turned I, the Jury into a phenomenal bestseller that revolutionized the publishing industry.
A modest hardback success in 1947, the book came out a year later in the still innovative paperback form — and sales exploded like an atomic bomb. By 1952, it had sold two million copies, one year later, seven million copies. Because men at the time understood that common sense superseded the false cultural norm being imposed on them by their educated “betters.”
Prominent literary critics grasped the threat to their progressive view and condemned I, the Jury. Anthony Boucher in the San Francisco Chronicle described it as “so vicious a glorification of force, cruelty, and extra-legal methods that the novel might be made required reading in a Gestapo training school.” That the men he sought to diminish had fought and defeated the Gestapo seemed to escape Boucher.
Not surprisingly, another of the Left’s most maligned novelists, Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged), recognized Spillane’s skill and the societal power of his book. “Mickey Spillane is one of the best writers of our time,” Rand declared in the Los Angeles Times (September 2, 1962). “He stands as a measure of the gulf between the public and its alleged intellectual leaders. From Ancient Greece to modern America, fiction writers like Spillane have depicted the world more accurately than all the false political constructionists — and outlasted them.
For instance, more than 30 years of two-party leftward tilt in America — slowed but not stopped by Trump’s first term — resulted in a humiliating military withdrawal from Afghanistan with 13 good servicemembers blown to bits, millions of aliens pouring over the border, close to 75,000 Americans dying from fentanyl in 2023, a party pushing for police defunding, and the idea that men can become women at will. Any public criticism of these lunacies was banned or crushed as extremist. “That’s not who we are,” echoed Obama and Biden, probably the two worst judges on “who we are.”
But it is who Donald Trump and his people are. Trump closed the border in a month, revamped the military to record high recruitment levels, ended transgender dysfunction in education, government, and sports, sent the National Guard to police LA and Washington. Last week, his Department of Defense blew a US-bound Venezuelan drug boat with 11 cartel members aboard out of the Caribbean — to the wailing of the Left.
Liberal opinionist Brian Krassenstein tweeted, “Killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime.” Vice President J. D. Vance responded to him, “I don’t give a sh_t what you call it.” With leftwing activist judges trying to block or conduct Executive Branch policies to a ludicrous degree, and Democrats coddling illegal aliens and criminals, and illegal alien criminals, the Trump Administration has gone full Mike Hammer.
“I’m not letting the killer go through the tedious process of the law,” Hammer says in I, the Jury. “This time I’m the law.” Trump made a similar remark last summer. “I was the hunted,” he said. “Now I’m the hunter.”
The lesson is that literature endures, unlike the liberal-forced zeitgeist of a period. Three years ago, few people on either side of the political divide could have predicted the instantaneous collapse of wokeness, when people were being erased for calling a “transwoman” a man. Yet the truth is not only out there but in every great work of fiction since Homer. Consequently, you can learn more about modern society from Mike Hammer than Michael Moore.
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