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Frank Morrison Spillane (March 9, 1918 – July 17, 2006), better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American author of crime novels, many featuring his signature detective character, Mike Hammer. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally.[1][2] In 1980, Spillane was responsible for seven of the top 15 all-time best-selling fiction titles in the US.
Overshadowed by Mike Hammer, espionage agent Tiger Mann is the hero of Mickey Spillane's only other series of mystery novels, a Bond-era reworking of the Hammer formula.
Tiger Mann is employed by an espionage organization funded by ultra-right-wing billionaire Martin Grady, of self-professed altruistic, patriotic purposes. Chatting with a Broadway columnist in a nightclub, Tiger spots a beautiful woman who strikingly resembles a Nazi spy named Rondine who attempted to kill him years before.
Though he loved Rondine, Tiger has sworn to kill her should he encounter her again. The woman, Edith Caine, professes not to be Rondine, but Tiger refuses to believe her and sets out to learn what she is up to. Soon he is battling a Communist conspiracy, and in a striptease finale that purposely evokes and invokes the classic conclusion of I, the Jury, Tiger must face the naked truth about Rondine.
Day of the Guns is a fast-moving and fine example of Spillane’s mature craftsmanship; he has great fun doing twists on himself, as the conclusion of the novel shows.
Tiger Mann is Mike Hammer in secret-agent drag: His style and world are Hammer’s; despite mentions of faraway places, the action is confined to New York. But while Hammer is an anti-organization man, Tiger, for all his lone-wolf posturing, is a company man. This goes against the Spillane grain.
The three other Tiger Mann novels are Bloody Sunrise (1965),The Death Dealers (1965), and The By-Pass Control (1966).
Writing career Comic books Spillane started as a writer for comic books. While working as a salesman in Gimbels department store basement in 1940, he met tie salesman Joe Gill, who later found a lifetime career in scripting for Charlton Comics. Gill told Spillane to meet his brother, Ray Gill, who wrote for Funnies Inc., an outfit that packaged comic books for different publishers. Spillane soon began writing an eight-page story every day. He concocted adventures for major 1940s comic book characters, including Captain Marvel, Superman, Batman and Captain America. Two-page text stories, which he wrote in the mid-1940s for Timely, appeared under his name and were collected in Primal Spillane (Gryphon Books, 2003).
Novels Spillane joined the United States Army Air Forces on December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the mid-1940s he was stationed as a flight instructor in Greenwood, Mississippi, where he met and married Mary Ann Pearce in 1945. The couple wanted to buy a country house in the town of Newburgh, New York, 60 miles north of New York City, so Spillane decided to boost his bank account by writing a novel. In 19 days he wrote I, the Jury. At the suggestion of Ray Gill, he sent it to E. P. Dutton.
With the combined total of the 1947 hardcover and the Signet paperback (December 1948), I, the Jury sold six and a half million copies in the United States alone. I, the Jury introduced Spillane's most famous character, hardboiled detective Mike Hammer. Although tame by current standards, his novels featured more sex than competing titles, and the violence was more overt than the usual detective story.[2] An early version of Spillane's Mike Hammer character, called Mike Danger, was submitted in a script for a detective-themed comic book. " 'Mike Hammer originally started out to be a comic book. I was gonna have a Mike Danger comic book,' [Spillane] said in a 1984 interview."[11] Two Mike Danger comic-book stories were published in 1954 without Spillane's knowledge, as well as one featuring Mike Lancer (1942). These were published with other material in "Byline: Mickey Spillane," edited by Max Allan Collins and Lynn F. Myers, Jr. (Crippen & Landru publishers, 2004).
The Signet paperbacks displayed dramatic front cover illustrations. Lou Kimmel did the cover paintings for My Gun Is Quick, Vengeance Is Mine, One Lonely Nightand The Long Wait. The cover art for Kiss Me, Deadly was by James Meese.
Novels 1947 I, the Jury - Mike Hammer 1950 My Gun Is Quick - Mike Hammer 1950 Vengeance Is Mine! - Mike Hammer 1951 One Lonely Night - Mike Hammer 1951 The Big Kill - Mike Hammer 1951 The Long Wait 1952 Kiss Me, Deadly - Mike Hammer 1961 The Deep 1962 The Girl Hunters - Mike Hammer 1963 Me, Hood 1964 Day of the Guns - Tiger Mann 1964 The Snake - Mike Hammer 1964 Return of the Hood 1964 The Flier 1965 Bloody Sunrise - Tiger Mann 1965 The Death Dealers - Tiger Mann 1965 Killer Mine 1965 Man Alone 1966 The By-Pass Control - Tiger Mann 1966 The Twisted Thing - Mike Hammer 1967 The Body Lovers - Mike Hammer 1967 The Delta Factor 1970 Survival... Zero! - Mike Hammer 1972 The Erection Set - a Dogeron Kelly novel; in the Jacqueline Susann mold 1973 The Last Cop Out 1979 The Day The Sea Rolled Back - young adult 1982 The Ship That Never Was - young adult 1984 Tomorrow I Die - collection of short stories 1989 The Killing Man - Mike Hammer 1996 Black Alley - Mike Hammer 2001 Together We Kill: The Uncollected Stories of Mickey Spillane - collection of short stories 2003 Something Down There - featuring semi-retired spy Mako Hooker 2007 Dead Street - completed by Max Allan Collins[12] 2008 The Goliath Bone - Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins 2009 I'll Die Tomorrow - Mike Hammer 2010 The Big Bang - Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins 2011 Kiss Her Goodbye - Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins 2011 The Consummata - sequel to The Delta Factor; completed by Max Allan Collins 2012 Lady, Go Die! - Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins 2013 Complex 90 - Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins 2014 King of the Weeds - Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins Coming 2015 Kill Me, Darling - Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins Short stories 1989 The Killing Man - Mike Hammer short story later turned into a full length Mike Hammer novel published in Playboy magazine December 1989, later republished in the book Byline: Mickey Spillane in 2004 1996 Black Alley - Mike Hammer short story later turned into a full length Mike Hammer novel published in Playboy magazine December 1996, later republished in the book Byline: Mickey Spillane in 2004 1998 The Night I Died - Mike Hammer short story published in the anthology Private Eyes - although story was written in 1953, was not published until 1998 2004 The Duke Alexander - Mike Hammer short story published in the book Byline: Mickey Spillane first published in 2004, although it was originally written circa 1956 2008 The Big Switch - Mike Hammer short story; completed by Max Allan Collins - published in The Strand Magazine, reprinted in paperback in The Mammoth Book of the World's Best Crime Stories, 2009 2012 Skin - Mike Hammer e-book short story; completed by Max Allan Collins 2014 It's In The Book - Mike Hammer e-book short story; completed by Max Allan Collins Films Spillane portrayed himself as a detective in Ring of Fear (1954), and rewrote the film without credit for John Wayne's and Robert Fellows' Wayne-Fellows Productions. The film was directed by screenwriter James Edward Grant. Several Hammer novels were made into movies, including Kiss Me Deadly (1955). In The Girl Hunters (1963) filmed in England, Spillane appeared as Hammer, one of the few occasions in film history in which an author of a popular literary hero has portrayed his own character. Spillane was scheduled to film The Snake as a follow up, but the film was never made.[13]
On October 25, 1956, Spillane appeared on The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, with interest on his Mike Hammer novels.[14] In January 1974, he appeared with Jack Cassidy in the television series Columbo in the episode Publish or Perish. He portrayed a writer who is murdered.[15]
In 1969, Spillane formed a production company with Robert Fellows who had produced The Girl Hunters to produce many of his books, but Fellows died soon after and only The Delta Factor was produced.[16]
During the 1980s, he appeared in Miller Lite beer commercials.[17] In the 1990s, Spillane licensed one of his characters to Tekno Comix for use in a science-fiction adventure series, Mike Danger. In his introduction to the series, Spillane said he had conceived of the character decades earlier but never used him.[11]
Critical reactions When literary critics had a negative reaction to Spillane's writing, citing the high content of sex and violence, Spillane answered with a few terse comments: "Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar... If the public likes you, you're good." Early reaction to Spillane's work was generally hostile: Malcolm Cowley dismissed the Mike Hammer character as "a homicidal paranoiac",[18] John G. Cawelti called Spillane's writing "atrocious",[18] and Julian Symons called Spillane's work "nauseating".[18] By contrast, Ayn Rand publicly praised Spillane's work at a time when critics were almost uniformly hostile. She considered him an underrated if uneven stylist and found congenial the black-and-white morality of the Hammer stories. She later publicly repudiated what she regarded as the amorality of Spillane's Tiger Mann stories.
Spillane's work was later praised by Max Allan Collins, William L. DeAndrea[2] and Robert L. Gale.[18] DeAndrea argued that although Spillane's characters were stereotypes, Spillane had a "flair for fast-action writing", that his work broke new ground for American crime fiction, and that Spillane's prose "is lean and spare and authentically tough, something that writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald never achieved".[2] German painter Markus Lüpertz claimed that Spillane's writing influenced his own work, saying that Spillane ranks as one of the major poets of the 20th century. American comic book writer Frank Miller has mentioned Spillane as an influence for his own hardboiled style. Avant-Garde musician John Zorn composed an album influenced by Spillane's writing titled Spillane, consisting of three file-card pieces[clarification needed], as well as a work for voice, string quartet and turntables.
Quotation I started off at the high level, in the slick magazines, but they didn't use my name, they used house names. Anyway, then I went downhill to the pulps, then downhill further to the comics - Mickey Spillane
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