Episode 102 - Slipped a Mickey (That Hammer Guy)

Down These Mean Streets (Old Time Radio Detectives)

Jack Mooney

Tv & Film, Arts, Performing Arts

4.5 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2015

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We raise a glass to Mickey Spillane, the hard-boiled wordsmith born March 9, 1918. Spillane introduced the world to Mike Hammer, one of fiction's toughest gumshoes, in 1947, and detective fiction was never the same. The unique blend of sex and violence, powered by Spillane's terse prose, enthralled readers and led to adaptations on television, the big screen, and on radio. We'll hear Larry Haines as Mike Hammer in That Hammer Guy in "There's Something About a Dame" (first aired on Mutual on March 31, 1953) and "What You Don't Know About Dames" (first aired on Mutual on April 28, 1953).

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The Born Frank Morrison-Selain in Brooklyn on March 9th, 1918, Mickey Spelain seen in 1947 and his writing style and his signature character would leave lasting marks in the world of detective fiction.
0:39.0	Spelane introduced the world to Mike Hammer, the hardest of the hard-boiled gumshoes. A man whose ultraviolet tendencies
0:47.0	made him stand out from the crowd of fictional private eyes like Marlow, Archer, and Spade.
0:53.0	Hammer would dazzle audiences, annoy critics, and turn Mickey Spillane into a best-selling household name.
1:01.0	Spillane was the only child of an Irish father and a Scottish mother.
1:05.0	Though he started writing in high school, his professional career didn't begin until the 1940s
1:11.0	when he got a job writing stories for comic books.
1:15.0	Spelane penned adventures for heroes like Batman, Superman, and Captain America.
1:21.3	In 1941, the day after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Spelane enlisted in the Army Air Force.
1:29.0	He was assigned as a flight instructor in Mississippi, where he met and married his wife. After the war
1:35.2	Spelane returned to writing to support his new family. In 19 days he wrote I the
1:41.8	jury the first Mike Hammer novel.
1:45.0	The novel sold nearly 7 million copies in the United States alone.
1:50.0	It kicked off a long career in print for Spillane, with over 200 million books sold worldwide.
1:57.0	Critics were usually unimpressed, but Spillane's focus was on his reading public who devoured each new Mike Hammer mystery.
2:06.4	In 1953, with seven Hammer novels in print, the character came to radio in the mutual series That Hammer Guy.
2:15.0	Larry Haynes, George Petrie, and Ted Corsia all starred as Hammer in various points in the run.
2:22.0	The show, while it couldn't capture the full
2:25.5	color of the Mickey Spelaine novels, comes close to matching the tone. At the
2:31.0	very least on radio Mike Hammer has a noticeably harder edge than his brother private eyes.
2:37.0	The same year the radio series premiered, a film version of I the Jury hit theaters. It was followed in 1955 by Kiss Me Deadly, widely hailed
2:47.7	as the best my camera film, and my gun is Quick in 1957.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jack Mooney, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Jack Mooney and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.