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Mickey Spillane

kevinburtonsmith

Frank Morrison Spillane
(1918-2006)

“Anyone who doesn’t recognize Spillane’s importance is an idiot.”
— Max Allan Collins

FRANK MORRISON SPILLANE was a Brooklyn kid, born on March 9, 1918, the only child of Catherine Anne and John Joseph Spillane, an Irish-American bartender who nicknamed him “Mickey.”

He passed away July 17, 2006 at his home in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, leaving behind a wife, a couple of ex-wives, four children, possibly as many as 200 million copies of his books in print and plenty of satisfied customers, as he liked to call them.

The most popular of those books, of course, feature Spillane’s hard-boiled gumshoe/avenger Mike Hammer, the New York eye whose every case turned into a personal vendetta that — following a suitable number of trysts with beautiful and generally willing babes and raw scenes of brutality — inevitably ended with Hammer serving up his own kind of justice, usually out of the smoking barrel of a .45.

The critics may have sneered at Spillane’s sex-and-violence-filled romps (and admittedly, sometimes it was difficult to tell where the sex ended and the violence began), and he may have been denounced in churches and at US Senate hearings, but the public ate up his books.

Spillane became, easily, the best selling private eye writer of his time and Hammer became a multi-media juggernaut, with Mike Hammer appearing on radio and in films, a daily newspaper comic strip and not one but two popular television series, as well as, of course, thirteen best-selling novels, stretching from I, the Jury in 1947 and wrapping up with Black Alley in 1996.

Spillane was something of a media star himself himself, playing the part of Hammer in the 1963 film version of The Girl Hunters and appearing as a spokesman for Miller Lite beer TV ad for almost two decades.

Spillane wrote about other memorable tough-guy characters, including super-spy Tiger Mann in a spate of novels written in the mid-1960s, Dogeron Kelly in The Erection Set (1972) and Mako Hooker, a semi-retired spy in Spillane’s last novel, Something’s Down There, published in 2003, when the author was 85.

But it was Hammer, and Spillane’s take-no-prisoner’s blend of blood and lust and vengeance that captured the imagination of Cold War audiences and influenced countless imitators.

His success also had a major impact on publishing. Although I, the Jury sold a respectable 10,000 or so copies in hardcover, it was the then-unheard sale of over two million copies of the paperback edition that got the industry’s attention. Seemingly overnight, the previously neglected paperback was everywhere, appearing in spinner racks from coast to coast, as publishers rushed to tap into the public’s hunger for inexpensive literary thrills, even launching entire paperback lines such as the legendary Fawcett Gold Medal that published original novels, not reprints.

* * * * *

Spillane grew up in Brooklyn and Elizabeth, New Jersey and graduated from high school in Brooklyn right at the height of the Depression. A natural storyteller, he managed to sell a story or two to various magazines, but mostly he worked odd jobs (including a stint as a lifeguard) before enrolling at Fort Hays State College in Kansas, where he played football and swam competively.

He never graduated, though, and by 1940, he was working part-time in a New York department store during the Christmas rush. There he met another Brooklyn-born youth who introduced Spillane to his brother, Ray Gill, an editor in need of someone to churn out short pieces for his Timely Comics line (including prose in their comics allowed publishers to qualify for cheaper postal rates). Spillane proved up to the task, but left to join the U.S. Army Air Force in the wake of Pearl Harbor.

He served his time as a flight instructor in Mississippi, where he met his first wife, Mary Ann Pearce. After the war, the couple returned to Brooklyn, with dreams of buying a house and some land. Spillane hooked up with the Gill brothers again, this time in a new comic-book freelancing venture. He came up with the idea for new comic, based around a tough, hard-boiled private eye called Mike Danger.

“I wanted to get away from the flying heroes, and I had the prototype cop,” Spillane explained.

Unfortunately, Danger failed to sell. Spillane then tried to sell it as a comic strip. According to Mike Benton in his The Illustrated History of Crime Comics, “In 1947, Spillane wrote a “Mike Danger” comic strip for the newspapers. Drawn by Mike Roy and offered by Jerry Iger’s syndicate, the comic strip appeared briefly in New York area newspapers and disappeared. Spillane decided to leave the world of comics to become a mystery writer.”

He retooled Danger, re-named him Mike Hammer and supposedly cranked out I, the Jury in three weeks (or nine days–accounts vary). With the help of Ray Gill, he sold it to E. P. Dutton & Co, whose editors apparently weren’t all that impressed with Spillane’s writing, but nonetheless thought there might be a market for it. So they gave it a shot.

The rest is history. Always a fast–if not particularly prolific–writer, he cranked out six more novels, all bestsellers, in the next five years, including My Gun is Quick, One Lonely Night and Vengeance is Mine.

Despite his staggering success, in his private life Spillane lived simply. He became a Jehovah’s Witness in the early 1950s and moved his family (by then he and Mary Ann had four kids) to Murrells Inlet, a quiet beach community in South Carolina, where he continued to pound away on a manual typewriter.

Unfortunately, the marriage ended in divorce. In 1964, he married an actress, Sherri Malinou, who posed nude on the cover of The Erection Set, but that marriage also ended. In 1983, Spillane married Jane Rodgers Johnson, and they remained married until Spillane’s death in 2006.

* * * * *

Spillane never took himself too seriously, at least publicly, spurning the moniker of “author,” insisting he wrote simply for the money, and cheerfully admitting he represented “the chewing gum of American literature.”

Certainly, Spillane was no great stylist–his prose was unapologetically blunt, direct and workmanlike, just like Hammer. But it was occasionally so overboiled as to approach parody.

As in “her breasts were laughing things”? And I’m still trying to figure out what “he took off like a herd of turtles,” from I, the Jury, actually means.

He was also something of a rarity in publishing–he was unapologetically conservative, an “unconditional believer in good and evil” who seemed to delight in rattling cages in his fiction, slamming Communists and liberals and anyone else he took exception to. He wasn’t above dishing out often crude (even for the era) caricatures of independent women, homosexuals and various racial and ethnic groups (in the early novels, for example, the depiction of blacks–almost all of whom are domestics or criminals–still manages to make one cringe–mostly because it seems simply so gratuitous and mean-spirited). And the virgin/whore complex Hammer had towards women and particularly in regards to his peculiar relationship with Velda, his long-suffering secretary, was nothing short of just plain twisted.

And yet, for all his ham-handed excess and unapologetic worldview that even then raised eyebrows, the best of Spillane’s books, and particularly the Hammer novels, possess a fierce, driving energy and white-hot passion that cannot be denied; one that drags the reader along in its wake and keeps them turning pages.

You step into Hammer’s world at your own risk, but by the end of the book, you’ll know you’ve read something, damn it.

STRAIGHT FROM THE AUTHOR’S MOUTH

  • “Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.”
    — Mickey Spillane
  • “The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.”
    — Mickey Spillane
  • “I don’t give a hoot about reading reviews. What I want to read is the royalty checks.”
    — Mickey Spillane
  • “I’m actually a softie. Tough guys get killed too early… I’ve got a full head of hair and don’t wear eye glasses… And I’ve kept the smoke coming out of the chimney for a very long time.”
    — Mickey Spillane (2004)

UNDER OATH

  • “Spillane broke down the barriers, where sex and violence were concerned, and this pissed people off. Also, he was perceived as right-wing. The vigilante approach Hammer used turned the stomachs of many liberals… (Spillane) is number three, after Hammett and Chandler (in a list of the 10 most important detective novelists of the 20th century). Anyone who doesn’t recognize Spillane’s importance is an idiot. There are paperback originals because Gold Medal Books was created to fill the public’s demand for Spillane-type fare. Disliking Spillane’s writing is one thing — ignoring history is another. ”
    — Max Allan Collins, The January Magazine Interview
  • “Spillane is like eating takeout fried chicken: so much fun to consume, but you can feel those lowlife grease-induced zits rising before you’ve finished the first drumstick.”
    — Sally Eckhoff, The Village Voice
  • “I’m a fan of Spillane, I know not everyone is but nobody should deny his massive influence on P.I. fiction. Max Allan Collins did a great job keeping Hammer alive for another 19 years.”
    — Jeff Schofield on Baby, It’s You

NOVELS

 

SHORT STORIES & NOVELLAS

COLLECTIONS

RADIO

FILMS

TELEVISION

COMIC STRIPS

COMICS

COMIC COLLECTIONS

REFERENCE

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks to Max Allan Collins, Lynn Myers and James F. for their help. Mickey Spillane illustration courtesy of cartoonist Terry Beatty.

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