Mike Hammer creator Mickey Spillane dies By BRUCE SMITH,
Associated Press Writer 3 minutes ago
Mickey Spillane, the macho mystery writer who wowed millions
of readers with the shoot-'em-up sex and violence of gumshoe
Mike Hammer, died Monday. He was 88.
Spillane's death was confirmed by Brad Stephens of Goldfinch
Funeral Home in his hometown of Murrells Inlet. Details about
his death were not immediately available.
After starting out in comic books Spillane wrote his first
Mike Hammer novel, "I, the Jury," in 1946. Twelve more
followed, with sales topping 100 million. Notable titles
included "The Killing Man," "The Girl Hunters" and
"One Lonely Night."
Many of these books were made into movies, including the
classic film noir
"Kiss Me, Deadly" and "The Girl Hunters," in which Spillane
himself starred. Hammer stories were also featured on
television in the series "Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer" and
in made-for-TV movies. In the 1980s, Spillane appeared in a
string of Miller Lite beer commercials.
Besides the Hammer novels, Spillane wrote a dozen other
books, including some award-winning volumes for young
people.
Nonetheless, by the end of the 20th century, many of his
novels were out of print or hard to find. In 2001, the New
American Library began reissuing them.
As a stylist Spillane was no innovator; the prose was
hard-boiled boilerplate. In a typical scene, from "The Big
Kill," Hammer slugs out a little punk with "pig eyes."
"I snapped the side of the rod across his jaw and laid the
flesh open to the bone," Spillane wrote. "I pounded his teeth
back into his mouth with the end of the barrel ... and I took
my own damn time about kicking him in the face. He smashed
into the door and lay there bubbling. So I kicked him again
and he stopped bubbling."
Mainstream critics had little use for Spillane, but he got
his due in the mystery world, receiving lifetime achievement
awards from the Mystery Writers of America and the Private
Eye Writers of America.
Spillane, a bearish man who wrote on an old manual Smith
Corona, always claimed he didn't care about reviews. He
considered himself a "writer" as opposed to an "author,"
defining a writer as someone whose books sell.
"This is an income-generating job," he told The Associated
Press during a 2001 interview. "Fame was never anything to me
unless it afforded me a good livelihood."
Spillane was born Frank Morrison Spillane on March 9, 1918,
in the New York borough of Brooklyn. He grew up in Elizabeth,
N.J., and attended Fort Hayes State College in Kansas where
he was a standout swimmer before beginning his career writing
for magazines.
He had always liked police stories - an uncle was a cop - and
in his pre-Hammer days he created a comic book detective
named Mike Danger. At the time, the early 1940s, he was
scribing for Batman, SubMariner and other comics.
"I wanted to get away from the flying heroes and I had the
prototype cop," Spillane said.
Danger never saw print. World War II broke out and Spillane
enlisted. When he came home, he needed $1,000 to buy some
land and thought novels the best way to go. Within three
weeks, he had completed "I, the Jury" and sent it to Dutton.
The editors there doubted the writing, but not the market for
it; a literary franchise began. His books helped reveal the
power of the paperback market and became so popular they were
parodied in movies, including the Fred Astaire musical "The
Band Wagon."
He was a quintessential Cold War writer, an unconditional
believer in good and evil. He was also a rare political
conservative in the book world. Communists were villains in
his work and liberals took some hits as well. He was not
above using crude racial and sexual stereotypes.
Viewed by some as a precursor to Clint Eastwood's Dirty
Harry, Spillane's Hammer was a loner contemptuous of the
"tedious process" of the jury system, choosing instead to
enforce the law on his own murderous terms. His novels were
attacked for their violence and vigilantism_ one critic said
"I, the Jury" belonged in "Gestapo training school" - but
some defended them as the most shameless kind of
pleasure.
"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 wrote in the liberal weekly The Village
Voice.
The Hammer novels had a couple of recurring characters: Pat,
the honest, but slow-moving cop, and Velda, Mike's faithful
secretary. Like so many women in Hammer's life, Velda was a
looker, and burning for love.
"Velda was watching me with the tip of her tongue clenched
between her teeth," Spillane wrote in "Vengeance is Mine!",
an early Hammer novel.
"There wasn't any kitten-softness about her now. She was big
and she was lovely, with the kind of curves that made you
want to turn around and have another look. The lush fullness
of her lips had tightened into the faintest kind of snarl and
her eyes were the carnivorous eyes you could expect to see in
the jungle watching you from behind a clump of bushes."
While the Hammer books were set in New York, Spillane was a
longtime resident of Murrells Inlet, a coastal community near
Myrtle Beach.
He moved to South Carolina in 1954 when the area, now jammed
with motels and tourist attractions, was still predominantly
tobacco and corn fields.
Spillane said he fell in love with the long stretches of
deserted beaches when he first saw the area from an
airplane.
The writer, who became a Jehovah's Witness in 1951 and helped
build the group's Kingdom Hall in Murrells Inlet, spent his
time boating and fishing when he wasn't writing. In the
1950s, he also worked as a circus performer, allowing himself
to be shot out of a cannon and appearing in the circus
film
"Ring of Fear."
The home where he lived for 35 years was destroyed by the 135
mph winds of Hurricane Hugo in 1989.
Married three times, Spillane was the father of four
children.
___
National Writer Hillel Italie contributed to this
report.
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