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Page 164
He tells stories that are violent and unlikely. But there are ways and ways of doing so. In One Lonely Night Mickey Spillane describes a massacre carried out by Mike Hammer:
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They heard my scream and the awful roar of the gun and the slugs stuttering and whining and it was the last they heard. They went down as they tried to run and felt their legs going out from under them. I saw the general's head jerk and shudder before he slid to the floor, rolling over and over. The guy from the subway tried to stop the bullets with his hand but just didn't seem able to make it and joined the general on the floor.
When Fleming describes the death of Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, we meet a technique that is undoubtedly more subtle:
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There was a sharp "phut," no louder than a bubble of air escaping from a tube of toothpaste. No other noise at all, and suddenly Le Chiffre had grown another eye, a third eye on a level with the other two, right where the thick nose started to jut out below the forehead. It was a small black eye, without eyelashes or eyebrows. For a second the three eyes looked out across the room and then the whole face seemed to slip and go down on one knee. The two outer eyes turned trembling up towards the ceiling.
There is more shame, more reticence, more respect than in the uneducated outburst of Spillane; but there is also a more baroque feeling for the image, a total adaptation of the image without emotional comment, and a use of words that designate things with accuracy. It is not that Fleming renounces explosions of Grand Guignol; he even excels in them and scatters them through his novels. But when he orchestrates the macabre on a wide screen, even here he reveals much more literary venom than Spillane possesses.
Consider the death of Mr. Big in Live and Let Die. Bond and Solitaire, tied by a long rope to the bandit's ship, have been dragged behind in order to be torn to pieces on the coral rocks in the bay. In the end the ship, shrewdly mined by Bond a few hours earlier, blows up, and the two victims, now safe, witness the miserable end of Mr. Big, shipwrecked and devoured by barracuda:
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It was a large head and a veil of blood streamed down over the face from a wound in the great bald skull. . . . Bond could see the teeth showing in a rictus of agony and frenzied endeavour. Blood half veiled the eyes that Bond knew would be bulging in their sockets. He could almost hear the great diseased heart thumping under the grey-black skin. . . . The Big Man came on. His shoulders were naked, his clothes stripped off him by the explosion, Bond supposed, but the black silk tie had remained and it showed round the thick neck and streamed behind the head like a Chinaman's pigtail. A splash of water cleared some blood away from the eyes. They were wide open, staring madly towards Bond. They held no

 
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