Mickey Spillane

For the gangster, see Mickey Spillane (gangster).

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Frank Morrison Spillane (March 9 1918 – July 17 2006), better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American author of crime novels, many featuring his signature detective character, Mike Hammer. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold around the globe. By 1980, Spillane was responsible for seven of the top 15 all-time bestselling fiction titles in America.

Born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Spillane was the only child of his Irish-American bartender father, John Joseph Spillane, and his Scottish mother, Catherine Anne. He started writing while in high school and briefly went to Fort Hays State College in Kansas. He worked a variety of jobs, including summers as a lifeguard and a period as a trampoline artist for the Barnum and Bailey circus.

Comic books

Like another famed writer of crime fiction, Patricia Highsmith, Spillane started as a writer for comic books, While working as a salesman in Gimbel's 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. Spillane soon began writing an eight-page story every day and concocted adventures for major 1940s comic book characters, including Captain Marvel, Superman, Batman and Captain America.

Mike Hammer

After the Pearl Harbor attack, Spillane joined the United States Army Air Corps the next day, December 8, 1941. 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 house in the country, so Spillane decided to boost his bank account by writing a novel. In 19 days he wrote I, the Jury. At the suggestion of Ray Gill, he sent it to E.P. Dutton.

With the 1947 hardcover and the Signet paperback (December 1948), I, the Jury sold six and a half million copies in the United States alone. I, the Jury introduced Spillane's tough detective Mike Hammer. Although tame by current standards, his novels featured more sex than competing titles, and the violence was more overt than the usual detective story. An early version of Spillane's Mike Hammer character, called Mike Danger, was submitted in a script for a detective-themed comic book.

Marriages

Mickey and Mary Ann Spillane had four children (Caroline, Kathy, Michael, Ward), but their marriage ended in 1962. In November 1965, he married his second wife, nightclub singer Sherri Malinou, who had posed nude for the cover of The Erection Set (1972), a novel dedicated to her. After that marriage ended in divorce (and a lawsuit over money) in 1983, Spillane shared his waterfront house in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina with his third wife, Jane Rodgers Johnson, whom he married in October 1983 although his first wife, Mary Ann, and their four children lived only a short distance away.

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

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The Erection Set (1972) cover featuring Spillane's then-wife Sherri Malinou

Films

Spillane portrayed himself as a detective in Ring of Fear (1954), directed by screenwriter James Edward Grant. Several of the Mike Hammer novels were made into movies, including the classic film noir, Kiss Me Deadly (1955). In The Girl Hunters (1963) Spillane appeared as Mike Hammer, one of the few occasions in film history in which an author of a popular literary hero has portrayed his own character. In the TV series Columbo Spillane played a writer who is murdered. During the 1980s, he appeared in Miller Lite beer commercials.

Spillane became a Jehovah's Witness in 1951 (NPR Interview). He died July 17 2006 at his home in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina from pancreatic cancer. Spillane's novels went out of print, but in 2001, the New American Library began reissuing them. He received an Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award in 1995.

Critical reactions

Literary critics had a negative reaction to Spillane's writing, citing the high content of sex and violence. Spillane answered his critics with a few terse comments: "Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar... If the public likes you, you're good."

However, Russian-American author 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. She later publicly repudiated what she regarded as the amorality of Spillane's Tiger Mann stories.

German painter Markus Lüpertz claimed that Spillane's writing influenced his own work. He certainly loves to shock his critics by saying that Spillane ranks as one of the major poets of the 20th Century.

Popular culture references

• In the Academy Award winning film Marty (1955}, one of the characters repeats "That Mickey Spillane...he sure knows how to WRITE" endlessly.
• The late writer Charles Bukowski was said to have been inspired to write his 1994 novel Pulp as a parody of Spillane's style of detective novels.
• Avant-garde composer John Zorn's 25-minute piece based on motifs found in Spillane's work was released as an LP, Spillane (1987).
• The 1986-88 sitcom Sledge Hammer was a parody of Mike Hammer.
• In episode 9.10, Operation Friendship, of the television series M*A*S*H, Corporal Klinger saves Major Winchester's life and, in the process, breaks his nose. At Klinger's request, Winchester reads Spillane's I, the Jury to him, as a way to help repay his debt to Klinger-and nearly has a nervous breakdown!
• In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode, "Profit and Loss", Quark interrupts Odo in the security office and is surprised to find him reading I, the Jury.
• In the movie Full Metal Jacket, the drill instructor responds to the protagonist's choice to become a Marine Combat Correspondant by saying "You think you're Mickey Spillane? You think you're some kind of fucking writer?"
• The song "The Friends of Mr. Cairo", by Jon & Vangelis, on the album of the same name, includes the line in the lyrics "She came, as in the book, Mickey Spillane".
• In the "Lost" Stella short entitled "Bar", while drinking in a bar, Michael Ian Black makes a toast to David Wain and Michael Showalter makes a toast to Black. Each of these is in the style of a limerick and each ends with the line, "He'd have to be Mickey Spillane".
• A child is shown reading a Spillane book in an April 2007 IKEA Canada [ad.]Ikea AD
• Mickey Spillane was featured in a Gap Ad for Khakis.
• In a Mad satire of specialized book clubs, one fictitious club listed is "The Spicy Abridged Book Club" which offers books with "only them [sic] 'choicest parts'" i.e., the parts of racy novels that lust-minded readers look for. "The Spicy Abridged Mickey Spillane" is described as containing, "A selection of the meatiest parts of his books, meaning every word he ever wrote!".

Spillane quotes

• "I'm actually a softie. Tough guys get killed too early... I've got a full head of hair and don't wear eyeglasses."
• "I'm the most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne. And they're all dead..."
• "I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends."
• "My work may be garbage but it's good garbage."
• "Now what happened with Ernest Hemingway was that he wrote this nasty piece about me... So I was on a show in Chicago, a live TV show. It was a big theatre and there was a stage audience, and the guy who was interviewing me said, "Did you read that piece that Hemingway wrote about you?" And I said, "Hemingway who?" It brought the house down, but he hated my guts after that."
• "Inspiration is an empty bank account."

See also

• History of crime fiction
• Hard boiled American crime fiction writing

External links

• crimetime.co.uk on Spillane
• One of many unofficial Spillane sites
• thrillingdetective.com on Spillane
• Mickey Spillane: King of the Pulp Novelists
• Spillane at 81
• Spillane quotes
• Article on the Ayn Rand-Mickey Spillane relationship
• A Defense of Spillane's literary art
• Spillane explains his faith
• Guardian Obituary
• Mystery novelist Spillane dies
• You, the Jury, article examining the critical reaction to Spillane's early novels
• Photo
• Obituary with unique perspective on Spillane and his role in culture from NewYorkNightTrain.com