A Book By Its Cover

It has been at least 30 years since I last read a book by Mickey Spillane. When I saw this in the new arrivals of the Vancouver Public Library branch on 10th Avenue (right next to Focal Point where I teach photography) I was intrigued. I read it in one evening. The kind of language Spillane uses here (in conjunction with Max Allan Collins) is the kind of language that a politically incorrect grandfather might want to use (if he were and idiot) to impress some young thing (including perhaps a teenaged granddaughter) that he is a man of the world and has seen things.


I enjoyed it but it convinced me that any hint of using any of the language or attitudes therein would get me nowhere with the current crowd. The book and my memory of it shall reside in me as a private enjoyment that I know I cannot share with anyone I might know.


I blinked. “Who or what is the Consummata?”


“A very famous dominatrix, at least famous in certain circles.”


“From Miami?”


“From nowhere. From everywhere. Sometimes she works alone, by appointment through intermediaries. Other times she has set up locations with other young women trained in the arts of sado-masochism. And again clients are by referral only. She has turned up in every major city in America and not a few in Europe. Her clients, they say, are among the most rich and powerful in business and government. If she exists.”


“You don’t know if she exists?”


“She is a rumor. A wisp of smoke. A legend. A dream. Lovely, a vision in black leather, they say…


He was dead now, my old friend, his head blasted apart like a melon by my .45 slug, and any further details about exactly where the forty mil was stashed had gone away in a spray of gore…

I turned and at once I saw her…

…moving through the ballroom with regal grace, floating like a ghost, and yet commanding attention and respect and even subservience, a dominatrix of stunning beauty and power, entirely in black, tall (but those tightly-laced knee-high gladiator boots with the impossibly high heels contributed for the effect), in a latex gown, floor length but snapped open at the top of her sheer-dark stockinged thighs, long black latex gloves almost to her bare shoulders, her face concealed by a mask that revealed little more than red lips and chin, with little devil horns, blonde hair spilling out onto her shoulders from under the mask.

The Consummata, Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins, 2011