Mickey Spillane will hardly be remembered for his services to the English language. Raymond Chandler, one of many critics, described him as a literary "gorilla". Yet Spillane was sufficiently respectful about the rules of grammar that he once had 50,000 copies of his novel Kiss Me, Deadly pulped, because the printers omitted the comma from its title page, writes Frank McNally.
The issue of what the comma was doing there in the first place, turning Deadly into a noun, has provoked some debate. The classic film version had an intriguing plot-twist in which the comma disappeared again and Deadly was transformed back into an adverb, with no apparent ill-effects. Whichever was correct, the affair at least highlighted the potential importance of commas decades before Lynn Truss's best-selling grammar guide, Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
You'll recall that the latter book takes its title from an act of random violence into which a panda is forced by a misplaced comma in a wildlife manual describing its diet. Sounding like one of Spillane's vigilantes, Truss uses the example to advocate a "zero tolerance approach" to careless punctuation. But here, one senses, is where the paths of the grammarian and the hard-boiled crime writer would have diverged.
In the unlikely event of a panda turning up in a Spillane novel, the comma would have been retained deliberately, causing the bear to embark on a homicidal crime spree, shooting everyone who looked at him crossways. Eventually he would come to a grisly end (as all bears must), probably at the hands of Mike Hammer, who would have only contempt for the notion that the panda's violence was the result of misunderstanding. With Spillane's trade-mark anti-communism, Hammer would have noted that the dead bear was from China. "What's black and white and red all over?" he would have quipped.
Spillane's macho approach to literature seems to have come from his Irish father, who once affectionately described his son's books as "crud". The same father was also responsible for calling him "Mickey", although this did not feature in the birth certificate's first draft. The writer was christened Frank, and his official second name - courtesy of his Scottish Presbyterian mother - was "Morrison". Had he gone through life as Morrison Spillane, the man who liked to claim that none of his characters drank cognac because he couldn't spell it might have been forced upmarket. Instead, his name was rewritten for a mass audience. The rest was history.
Critics despised him almost as much as he despised them. But in recent decades there has been grudging acceptance of his influence on crime writing. The influence was clearly apparent in the Daily Telegraph's obituary. The hard-boiled obit writer notes that during Spillane's early days, working for the crime comics, he could "churn out" a story a day. Soon he was "thumping out" books on an old portable typewriter. His debut novel was "banged out" in less than a fortnight. And even in his 70s, according to the obit, the violence was unabated: "He knocked out The Killing Man (1989) in four weeks."
As may have happened with Spillane and his comma, writers and journalists develop attachments to certain usages of grammar or vocabulary, passionately defending what they consider correct, even though they know that language is always evolving and that if a mistake becomes popular enough it ends us as the rule.
I myself have a weakness for the original meaning of the word "decimate" (to reduce by one tenth), now all but extinct. As readers will know, it derives from a Roman punishment for mutinous or cowardly armies. And the case in favour of its modern usage (as a luxury version of "destroy") is that there hasn't been much call for the original meaning in recent millennia. The word is like a listed Roman ruin now housing a nightclub. It's good that it's being used for something, goes the argument, and that it can pay its way while being preserved.
As recently as 1599, there was an attempt to revive the true meaning of the word, when Lord Essex's doomed Irish campaign was undermined by a cowardly retreat. In an action of which both Mickey Spillane and Lynn Truss would have approved, in their different ways, Essex decimated the troops responsible by executing one in every ten. Apparently he had been reading Tacitus, who gave him the idea.
Sadly, the episode only added to suspicions in England that Essex was getting above himself. Within two years, he in turn would be decimated (approximately), by the loss of his head. The affair probably contributed to the word's long-term decline.
But surely we could hold on to its "correct" meaning without resorting to the same lengths as Lord Essex. There is no shortage of potential modern uses, after all.
What, for example, happened to the Portuguese and Dutch soccer teams during their recent World Cup match when, already down to ten men each, they also had Deco and Van Bronckhorst sent off? That's right, both sides were decimated. And what often happens to supermarket prices? Not much, I hear you say. That's just the point: their advertisements try to work us into a lather by promising "10 per cent off", which always sounds a bit miserly. But imagine David Norris on TV claiming that Tesco had "decimated" all its prices. The shops would be overrun with excited customers.