Mickey Spillane Biography and List of Works

American thriller writer, master of the "hard boiled" style peppered with sex and sadism. Spillane is best known for his private detective Mike Hammer, who appeared in his first published book I, THE JURY in 1947. The hardback edition did not sell well, but the paperback became a worldwide bestseller. With the character of Hammer, the most chauvinist avenger among classical private eyes, Spillane created a dark counterpart to the knightly Philip Marlowe.

"The biggest part of the joke is the punch line, so the biggest part of a book should be the punch line, the ending. People don't read a book to get to the middle; they read a book to get to the end and hope that the ending justifies all the time they spent reading it. So what I do is, I get my ending and, knowing what my ending is going to be, then I write to the end and have the fun of knowing where I'm going but not how I'm going to get there."
(Spillane in Speaking of Murder, ed. by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, 1998)

Mickey Spillane was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a bartender. In his youth he read such writers as Alexandre Dumas and Anthony Hope, and was fascinated by comic books. He briefly attended Fort Hays State College in Kansas, but dropped out, moved back to New York, and began his writing career in the mid-1930s. Spillane's first stories were published mostly in comic books and pulp magazines. He developed the character Mike Danger, a private detective, and wrote for Captain America, Captain Marvel, and The Human Torch. During WW II Spillane worked as a flying instructor for the U.S. Army Air Force. He met and married his first wife, Mary Ann Pearce, in 1945; they had four children. He achieved the rank of captain by the time he left the service, and returned with his young wife to New York in 1946.

"Spillane writes with speed, and the rough-hewn poetry of his narrator creates a fantasy city, a New York of myth and dream, populated by the same character types as those found in the work of Daly, Hammett, and Chandler - good girls, black widows, thugs, frustrated cops, gang lords, corrupt society leaders - but delivered with a unique fever-dream fervour."
(Max Allan Collins in Mystery & Suspence Writers, vol. 2, ed. by Robin W. Winks, 1998)

I, the Jury was written in only nine days, but it became such success that Spillane quickly produced six more Hammer novels, five of them published between 1950 and 1952. "Crime novels are a good way to make money," Spillane once stated. The sixth, THE TWISTED THING, did not appear until 1966. The world of Mike Hammer includes his secretary Velda, a dark-haired beauty, who is the tough soul mate of Mike, and Captain Pat Chambers of the New York Police Department. In the first novel Hammer investigates the brutal murder of his best friend. In the end the beautiful but bad Charlotte Manning performs a strip tease in order to dissuade Hammer from killing her. When he shoots her, Manning asks, "How c-could you?" and he replies, "It was easy" - one of the most famous last lines in popular fiction.

In VENGEANCE IS MINE! (1950) Hammer is tormented by the memory of Charlotte and vows never to kill another woman, until a murderous doppelganger of her is revealed to be a transvestite. The theme of crime and punishment - Hammer acting as the tool of some primitive God - continues in the following novels. Spillane himself posed for the dust wrapper photographs of Hammer novels and starred in the film version of THE GIRL HUNTERS (1963). In KISS ME DEADLY (1952) a beautiful woman, Berga Torn, clad only in a trench coat, stops Hammer's sports car on a lonely road. She has escaped from a sanatorium, where a Dr. Soberin referred her. However, her chasers beat Hammer, and torture and kill her. Hammer starts to investigate the case, Velda is kidnapped by the Mob but Hammer rescues her. He finds out that Lily Carver is Soberin's mistress and has used him to get a metal box containing $2 million in heroin. Hammer gets his revenge - he kills her - but is left in a burning house, trying to get away from the flames. The novel started Spillane's nine-year silence as a novelist. The hiatus ended with THE DEEP, a story of a tough guy, who returns to his old neighbourhood - revealing in the novels denouement that he has become a cop.

"Why should one of the most popular authors of the twentieth century need defending? Easy, as Mike Hammer might say: his subject matter and his approach were so hard-hitting, so individual, that Spillane repelled the more proper and staid among the Literary Establishment (and the Establishment in general, including Dr. Frederic Wertham and Parents Magazine and other unpointed arbiters of public morality.). And it has taken time, and changing mores - plus the natural PR knack of Spillane himself, with such disarming tactics as funny self-parody beer commercials and the writing of award-winning children's books - to give him his rightful place as the living giant among mystery writers."
('Mecca Spillane' by Max Allan Collins, in The Big Book of Noir, 1998)

Spillane has revealed that he finishes his texts in two weeks and does not revise anything he has written. Although critics have tried to belittle the author's achievements, Spillane has defenders such as Ayn Rand, who has said, "Spillane gives me the feeling of hearing a military band in a public park." To his critics Spillane has answered, "but it's good garbage." On a list complied in 1967 of all the best-selling books published in America between 1895 and 1965, seven of the top twenty-nine were written by Spillane. Especially during the height of anti-Communist paranoia, Hammer's unyielding, patriotic character comforted many American readers.

Between 1953 and 1961 Spillane stopped writing full-length novels after conversion to the Jehovah's Witnesses, and between 1973 and 1989 for sixteen years, when he advertised Miller Lite beer. In 1962 Spillane brought Hammer back with THE GIRL HUNTERS, in which the hero is still haunted by the memory of Charlotte. The book was followed by four more titles. He returned again in 1970 with KILLING MAN. Spillane's only other series character, Tiger Mann, was inspired by the James Bond boom. The character is first introduced in the novel DAY OF THE GUN (1964). In his longest and most ambitious piece, THE ERECTION SET, Spillane follows in the footsteps of Harold Robbins and Irving Wallace.

In 1983 Spillane married Jane Rodgers Johnson, a former Miss South Carolina twenty-eight years his junior. In 1995 the Mystery Writers of America finally presented him with the Grand Master award. In the mid-1990s Spillane returned to comic books by co-creating a futuristic Mike Danger. Although he did not do the comic-book script writing, Spillane completed a draft of a Mike Danger science fiction novel. Spillane has also written two books for children. Most of Spillane's short fiction was produced in the 1950s and published in Manhunt and such men's magazines as Cavalier and Male.

The unbeatable Hammer has survived right up to the 1990s, outliving William Crane, Philip Marlowe, Mike Shayne, and Lew Archer. In BLACK ALLEY (1996) he wakes up from a coma and tracks down a missing $89 billion. Times have changed, and Spillane reveals his tough-guy's fondness for Wagner (1813-1883), the anti-semitic German opera composer, whose music contains unnecessary Nazi connotations. Today, however, Wagner's music is almost unreservedly accepted without political overtones. In an interview at the age of 83, Spillane mentioned that he still writes and has finished a couple of adventure stories. The last novel about Hammer in under work.

See also: "Hard-boiled" mystery writers: Horace McCoy, Raymond Chandler, Jonathan Latimer, Dashiell Hammett. - As a romantic hero who has taken the law in his own hand, Mike Hammer comes from the same literary tradition as Leslie Charteris' Simon Templar alias The Saint. Spillane's role model was Carroll John Daly, whose hard-hitting detective was Race Williams. Daly was innovative writer and his use of the first-person style influenced Spillane.

For further reading: One Lonely Knight: Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer by Max Allan Collins (1984); Murder in the Millions by J. Keneth Van Dover (1984); The American Private Eye by David Geherin (1985); Speaking of Murder, ed. by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg (1998) - In 1962 Spillane portrayed his own detective character Hammer in the film The Girl Hunters. Other films: Ring of Fear (1953), Colombo series (1973), Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (1956-58, starring Darren McGavin, scriptwriter was Bill S. Ballinger among others); Mickey Spillane's Margin for Murder (1981, starring Kevin Dobson), Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer: Murder Me, Murder You (1983, starring Stacy Keach), The Return of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (1987), The New Mike Hammer (1987). - The writer himself was not satisfied with the actors playing Hammer, except his own performance. According to Spillane, Kiss Me Deadly "stank", and Stacey Keach is a good actor, but "he doesn't know how to wear a hat.

I, THE JURY, (1947)