US: 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. Titles included The Killing Man, The Girl Hunters and One Lonely Night.
Many Hammer books were made into films, including the classic film noir Kiss Me, Deadly and The Girl Hunters, in which Spillane himself starred. Hammer stories were also featured on TV in the series Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer and in made-for-TV films.
Besides the Hammer novels, Spillane wrote a dozen other books, including some award-winning volumes for young people.
As a stylist Spillane was no innovator; the prose was hard-boiled boilerplate. In a typical scene, from The Big Kill, Hammer slugs 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."
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" not an "author", defining a writer as someone whose books sell.
He was born Frank Morrison Spillane on March 9th, 1918, in the New York borough of Brooklyn. He grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and attended Fort Hays State College in Kansas where he was a good swimmer before beginning writing for magazines.
He was a quintessential Cold War writer, an unconditional believer in good and evil. Communists were villains in his work and liberals took some hits as well. He was not above using crude racial and sexual stereotypes.
In the 1950s, he worked as a circus performer, allowing himself to be shot out of a cannon and appearing in the circus film Ring of Fear. Married three times, Spillane was the father of four children. -