Mickey Spillane

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Mickey Spillane (birth name Frank Morrison Spillane) was one of the most commercially successful American hardboiled crime novelists of the 20th century, best known for creating the iconic tough private detective character Mike Hammer. His work has sold more than 225 million copies worldwide, and he also worked occasionally as an actor and screenwriter, with many of his stories adapted for film and television.

Key moments

March 9, 1918Born in Brooklyn, New York, United States
1947Published his debut Mike Hammer novel *I, the Jury*, which became an instant blockbuster bestseller
1950s to 1990sReleased a steady stream of Mike Hammer series novels, with multiple titles adapted for popular film and TV productions
July 17, 2006Passed away at the age of 88
2023The first full official biography of Spillane, written by noted mystery author Max Allan Collins, was published to document his life and career

Unorthodox pulp style that broke literary convention

Unlike celebrated hardboiled detective predecessors such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett who often wove in formal literary flourishes and nuanced thematic subtext, Spillane embraced unapologetically blunt, fast-paced plots with graphic depictions of violence and unfiltered revenge themes that resonated deeply with working-class post-WWII American audiences. Though he faced frequent criticism from literary circles for perceived gratuitous content, his unprecedented sales volumes proved there was massive untapped public demand for his stripped-down, high-stakes approach to crime storytelling.

Cross-medium pop culture legacy

Spillane did not limit his creative output to printed novels: he frequently collaborated on screen adaptations of his work, appeared on screen in acting roles including a self-portrayal adjacent to his Mike Hammer character, and even featured in widely seen national brand advertising spots late in his career. His decades-long body of work laid important groundwork for the modern action and noir storytelling tropes that remain ubiquitous in global entertainment today.

Overview

Mickey Spillane

birth name	Frank Morrison Spillane
birth date	March 9, 1918
birth place	Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
death date	July 17, 2006
death place	Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, U.S.
awards	Inkpot Award (1994)‡R1R‡
spouse	Mary Ann Pearce (1945–1963), Sherri Malinou (1965–1983), Jane Rogers Johnson (1983)

period	1947–2006

genre	Hardboiled crime fiction, detective fiction

Frank Morrison Spillane (March 9, 1918 – July 17, 2006), better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American crime novelist, called the "king of pulp fiction".[2] He was best-known for stories featuring his signature detective character, Mike Hammer.

Spillane's total sales rank him among the most successful fiction authors of the modern era with estimates of between 100 million[3] to more than 200 million copies sold.[4] Spillane was also an occasional actor, once even playing Hammer himself in the 1963 film The Girl Hunters.[5][6]

Early life

Frank Morrison Spillane was born March 9, 1918, in Brooklyn, New York, and primarily raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Spillane was the only child of his Irish bartender father, John Joseph Spillane, and his Scottish mother, Catherine Anne. During his late adolescence, his family returned to Brooklyn, where he graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in 1936.[7] He started writing while in high school, briefly attended Fort Hays State College in Kansas and worked a variety of jobs, including summers as a lifeguard at Breezy Point, Queens, and a period as a trampoline artist for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.[8] During World War II, Spillane enlisted in the Army Air Corps, becoming a fighter pilot and a flight instructor.[9] He was first stationed at the air base in Greenwood, Mississippi, where he met and married first wife Mary Ann Pearce in 1945.[10] He also met two younger writers, Earle Basinsky and Charlie Wells, who would become his protégés; each published two hardboiled-noir novels in the Spillane style in the early 1950s.[11][12]

Career

Comic books

Spillane claims that he started being published as an author of higher-quality magazines known as "slicks" where he was credited under house names, then went "lower" to the pulps,[13] then went lower still as a writer for comic books.[14] While working as a salesman in Gimbels department store basement in 1940, he met tie salesman Joe Gill, who later found a lifetime career in scripting for Charlton Comics. Gill told Spillane to meet his brother, Ray Gill, who wrote for Funnies Inc., an outfit that packaged comic books for different publishers.[15]

Spillane soon began writing an eight-page story every day. He concocted adventures for major 1940s comic book characters, including

Reception

Early reaction to Spillane's work was generally hostile from other authors and professional critics. Malcolm Cowley dismissed the Mike Hammer character as "a homicidal paranoiac."[25] John G. Cawelti called Spillane's writing "atrocious," and Julian Symons called Spillane's work "nauseating."[25] By contrast, Ayn Rand publicly praised Spillane's work at a time when critics were almost uniformly hostile. She considered him an underrated if uneven stylist and found congenial the black-and-white morality of the Hammer stories. However, Rand condemned the political views expressed by Spillane in his Tiger Mann novel Day of the Guns, describing the book's cynical protagonist and his "semi-governmental gang" as being "shocking and rationally indefensible", as Rand opposed the use of force unlimited by any framework of rights.[26]

Spillane's work was later praised by Max Allan Collins, William L. DeAndrea,[6] and Robert L. Gale.[25]

Awards and accolades

In 1983, Spillane received the lifetime achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America.[27] He also received an Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award in 1995.[28][29]

Personal life

In 1945, Mickey met and married Mary Ann Pearce. They had four children, Caroline, Kathy, Michael, and Ward. Their marriage ended in 1962.

In November 1965, he married his second wife, nightclub singer Sherri Malinou. The marriage ended in divorce (and a lawsuit) in 1983.

Spillane shared his waterfront house in Murrells Inlet with his third wife, Jane Rogers Johnson, and her two daughters, Jennifer and Margaret Johnson. They married in October 1983.

In the 1960s, Spillane became a friend of the novelist Ayn Rand. Despite their apparent differences, Rand admired Spillane's literary style, and Spillane became, as he described it, a "fan" of Rand's work.[30] Later in his life, Spillane became an active Jehovah's Witness.[31]

In 1989, Hurricane Hugo ravaged his Murrells Inlet house to such a degree it had to be almost entirely reconstructed.[24] A television interview showed Spillane standing in the ruins of his house.

Death and legacy

Spillane died on July 17, 2006, at his home in Murrells Inlet, of pancreatic cancer.[32][33][34] After his death, his friend and literary executor, Max Allan Collins, began editing and completing Spillane's unpublished typescripts, beginning with a non-series novel, Dead Street (2007).

In July 2011, the community of Murrells Inlet named U.S. 17 Business the "Mickey Spillane Waterfront 17 Highway". The proposal first passed the Georgetown County Council in 2006 while Spillane was still alive, but the South Carolina General Assembly rejected the plan.[35]

Novels

Mike Hammer

1947 I, the Jury
1950 My Gun Is Quick
1950 Vengeance Is Mine
1951 One Lonely Night
1951 The Big Kill
1952 Kiss Me, Deadly
1962 The Girl Hunters
1964 The Snake
1966 The Twisted Thing
1967 The Body Lovers
1970 Survival... Zero!
1989 The Killing Man

External links

Biography of Jack Stang - The Real Mike Hammer
"'Comics Were Great!' A Colorful Conversation with Mickey Spillane", Alter Ego vol. 3, #11, November 2001. Accessed September 5, 2008. WebCitation archive.
, Crime Time August 6, 2001, via Famous Jehovah's Witnesses..
Smith, Kevin Burton. "Authors and Creators: Mickey Spillane (Frank Morrison Spillane) (1918–2006)", Thrilling Detective, n.d. WebCitation archive.
Holland, Steve. "Mickey Spillane: Hardboiled's Most Extreme Stylist or Cynical Exploiter of Machismo?", Crime Time 2.6, December 1999, via MysteryFile.com
Meroney, John. "Man of Mysteries: It'd Been Years Since Spillane Pulled a Job. Could We Find Him? Yeah. It Was Easy", The Washington Post, August 22, 2001, p. C01. WebCitation archive.

References

Inkpot Award Comic-Con International: San Diego, December 6, 2012, retrieved September 16, 2020^
Max Allan Collins, James L. Traylor. Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction Mysterious Press, 2023^
Mickey Spillane, author of popular detective stories, dies CBC News, July 18, 2006^

Novels

Spillane joined the United States Army Air Corps on December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the mid-1940s he was stationed as a flight instructor in Greenwood, Mississippi, where he met and married Mary Ann Pearce in 1945. The couple wanted to buy a country house in the town of Newburgh, New York, 60 miles north of New York City, so Spillane decided to boost his bank account by writing a novel. He wrote I, the Jury in just 9 days.[8] At the suggestion of Ray Gill, he sent it to E. P. Dutton.

With the combined total of the 1947 hardcover and the Signet paperback (December 1948), I, the Jury sold 6-1/2 million copies in the United States alone. I, the Jury introduced Spillane's most famous character, hardboiled detective Mike Hammer. Although tame by some standards, his novels featured more sex than competing titles, and the violence was more overt than the usual detective story. Covers tended to feature scantily dressed women or women who appeared as if they were about to undress. In the beginning, Mike Hammer's chief nemeses consisted of gangsters, but by the early '50s, this broadened to communists and deviants.[6]

In December 1942 an early version of Spillane's Mike Hammer character, called Mike Lancer, appeared in Harvey Comics' Green Hornet Comics #10.[16][15] In 1946, Spillane submitted in a script for a detective-themed comic book.[17] "Mike Hammer originally started out to be a comic book. I was gonna have a Mike Danger comic book," Spillane said in a 1984 interview.[18] Two Mike Danger comic-book stories were published in 1954 without Spillane's knowledge. These were published with other material in "Byline: Mickey Spillane," edited by Max Allan Collins and Lynn F. Myers, Jr. (Crippen & Landru publishers, 2004).

The Mike Hammer series proved hugely successful during the 1950s and 1960s, but the books were excoriated by the literary establishment. Malcolm Cowley of The New Republic called Spillane "a dangerous paranoid, sadist, and masochist" and even his own editors sometimes found his novels distasteful. Spillane for his part was unmoved by critics, saying "You can sell a lot more peanuts than caviar" and "The literary world is made of second rate writers writing about other second rate writers." Attractively low prices (25 cents for a paperback copy, later raised to 50 cents) helped sales, and the 1956 informative guide Sixty Years of Best Sellers found that the six novels Spillane had written up to that point were among the top ten best selling American fiction titles of all time.

The Signet paperbacks displayed dramatic front cover illustrations. Lu Kimmel created the cover paintings for My Gun Is Quick, Vengeance Is Mine, One Lonely Night, and The Long Wait. The cover art for Kiss Me, Deadly was by James Meese.

List of short stories

1989 The Killing Man – Mike Hammer short story later turned into a full-length Mike Hammer novel published in Playboy magazine December 1989, later republished in the book Byline: Mickey Spillane in 2004 (Crippen & Landru)

1996 Black Alley – Mike Hammer short story later turned into a full-length Mike Hammer novel published in Playboy magazine December 1996, later republished in the book Byline: Mickey Spillane in 2004 (Crippen & Landru)

1998 The Night I Died – Mike Hammer short story published in the anthology Private Eyes – although story was written in 1953, was not published until 1998

2003 Primal Spillane: Early Stories 1941–1942 – With an introduction by Collins and Lynn F. Myers Jr. – published by Gryphon Books.

2004 The Duke Alexander – Mike Hammer short story published in the book Byline: Mickey Spillane first published in 2004 (Crippen & Landru), although it was originally written circa 1956

2008 The Big Switch – Mike Hammer short story; completed by Max Allan Collins – published in The Strand Magazine, reprinted in paperback in The Mammoth Book of the World's Best Crime Stories, 2009

2009 I'll Die Tomorrow – (illustrated, limited edition of the short story, posthumous with Collins)

2010 A Long Time Dead – Mike Hammer short story; completed by Collins – published in The Strand Magazine

2010 Grave Matter – Mike Hammer short story; completed by Collins – published in Crimes By Moonlight, ed. Charlaine Harris

2012 Skin – Mike Hammer e-book short story; completed by Collins

2013 So Long, Chief – Mike Hammer short story; completed by Collins – published in The Strand Magazine, Issue XXXIX, Feb. – May 2013

2014 It's In The Book – Mike Hammer e-book short story; completed by Collins

2015 Fallout – Mike Hammer short story; completed by Collins – published in The Strand Magazine

2016 A Dangerous Cat – Mike Hammer short story; completed by Collins – published in The Strand Magazine, Issue XLVIII, Feb. – May 2016

2016 A Long Time Dead: A Mike Hammer Casebook – a collection of short stories by Mickey Spillane and Collins – published by Mysteriouspress.com/Open Road (collection reprints the stories The Big Switch, A Long Time Dead, Grave Matter, So Long, Chief, Fallout, A Dangerous Cat, Skin (first time in print format), and It's In The Book (first time in print format))

2018 A Turn of the Tide — although written circa 1950, it was not published until 2018 in the expanded and revised edition of Primal Spillane by Bold Venture Press.

2018 Tonight My Love – Mike Hammer short story; developed by Collins – published in The Strand Magazine, Issue LVI, Oct. 2018 – Jan. 2019 – story developed from a Mickey Spillane radio-style playlet that was part of a Mike Hammer jazz LP (Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer Story) produced in 1954 by Mickey Spillane. This is the story of how Mike Hammer met Velda.

Mickey Spillane

WorldBrand briefing

Unorthodox pulp style that broke literary convention

Cross-medium pop culture legacy

Early life

Career

Comic books

Reception

Awards and accolades

Personal life

Death and legacy

Novels

Mike Hammer

See also

Further reading

External links

References

Novels

Acting

Tiger Mann

Morgan the Raider

Other novels

List of short stories