Mickey Spillane, the macho mystery writer who wowed millions of readers with the sex and violence of gumshoe Mike Hammer, has died. He was 88.
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 Huntersand One Lonely Night.
American crime writer Mickey Spillane stands in a bar circa 1960.
Many Hammer books were made into films, including the classic film noir Kiss Me, Deadlyand 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 films.
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.
Spillane, a bearish man who wrote on an old manual Smith Corona, always claimed he did not 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 said in a 2001 interview. "Fame was never anything to me unless it afforded me a good livelihood."
Sally Eckhoff from The Village Voice.
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.
behind a clump of bushes." While the Hammer books were set in New York, Spillane was a long-time resident of Murrells Inlet, a coastal community near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Married three times, Spillane was the father of four children.
Details about his death were not immediately available.