Spillane wrote a children's book, "The Day the Sea Rolled Back" (1979), about two boys who find a shipwreck loaded with treasure. The card read, "Thanks, Duke."ĭone initially on a dare from his publisher, Mr. In gratitude, the producer, John Wayne, surprised him one morning with a white Jaguar sportster wrapped in a red ribbon. He rewrote much of the film, too, refusing payment. Spillane also scripted several television shows and films and played a detective in the 1954 suspense film "Ring of Fear," set at a Clyde Beatty circus.
With the charisma of a redwood, he played Hammer in "The Girl Hunters," a 1963 film adaptation of his novel. His books were translated into many languages, and he proved so popular as a writer that he was able to transfer his thick-necked, barrel-chested personality across many media. Spillane "a homicidal paranoiac," going on to note what he called his misogyny and vigilante tendencies. Spillane's success rankled other critics, who sometimes became very personal in their reviews. Spillane spun out six novels in the next five years, among them "My Gun Is Quick," "The Big Kill," "One Lonely Night" and "Kiss Me, Deadly." Most concerned Hammer, his faithful sidekick, Velda, and the police homicide captain Pat Chambers, who acknowledges that Hammer's style of vigilante justice is often better suited than the law to dispatching criminals. The book, in which Hammer pursues a murderous narcotics ring led by a curvaceous female psychiatrist, went on to sell more than 1 million copies. Spillane's publisher, was skeptical of the book's literary merit but conceded it would probably be a smash with postwar readers looking for ready action. Spillane was a struggling comic book publisher when he wrote "I, the Jury." He initially envisioned it as a comic book called "Mike Danger," and when that did not go over, he took a week to reconfigure it as a novel.Įven the editor in chief of E.P. Even his father, a Brooklyn bartender, called them "crud." Spillane sold hundreds of millions of books during his lifetime and garnered consistently scathing reviews. Starting with "I, the Jury," in 1947, Mr. It was once tallied that he offed 58 people in six novels. His writing style was characterized by short words, lightning transitions, gruff sex and violent endings. His specialty was tight-fisted, sadistic revenge stories, often featuring his alcoholic gumshoe Mike Hammer and a cast of evildoers who launder money or spout the Communist Party line. Mickey Spillane was one of the world's most popular mystery writers.
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