Frank Morrison "Mickey" Spillane
Frank Morrison “Mickey” Spillane (b. 1918, Brooklyn, NY; d. 2006, Murrells Inlet, SC) has attained mythical status in the annals of popular fiction. Considered the king of the pulp novelists in the post-WWII period, he sold an estimated 200 million copies globally. In 1980, seven of the top 15 all-time bestselling fiction books published in the U.S. had been written by Spillane. Despite critical reservations, Spillane explained the extraordinary appeal of his novels with typical frankness, “People like them.” Throughout his literary life, Spillane’s mantra was “I’m a writer, not an author. The difference is a writer makes money.”
After service in the Army Air Corps during WWII, Spillane wrote I, the Jury in 19 days and sent it to E. P. Dutton. The combined total of the 1947 hardcover and the Signet paperback (1948) sold six and a half million copies in the United States alone. The novel 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. Among the dozens of novels he wrote during the subsequent years, several found inspiration in his work experiences. In the fifties, he briefly worked in the Barnum and Bailey Circus as a trampoline artist, adept knife-thrower, and even as cannon fodder, experiences which later emerged in The Girl Hunters (1962). He worked for the FBI as an undercover operative to crack a narcotics ring, which became the subject of his novel Kiss Me, Deadly (1952).
The Hammer novels did well in the visual media with two television series and multiple movies. He received an Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award in 1995. Spillane’s novels were out of print until 2001, when the New American Library began reissuing them. After his death, his friend and literary executor, Max Allan Collins, began the task of editing and completing Spillane’s unpublished typescripts, beginning with a Mike Hammer novel, The Goliath Bone (2008). From 1983 until his death, Spillane lived in Murrells Inlet with his third wife, Jane Rogers Johnson. In the works are new biographies of Spillane’s writing life and films, as well as publishing of new and reprinting of older works.
After service in the Army Air Corps during WWII, Spillane wrote I, the Jury in 19 days and sent it to E. P. Dutton. The combined total of the 1947 hardcover and the Signet paperback (1948) sold six and a half million copies in the United States alone. The novel 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. Among the dozens of novels he wrote during the subsequent years, several found inspiration in his work experiences. In the fifties, he briefly worked in the Barnum and Bailey Circus as a trampoline artist, adept knife-thrower, and even as cannon fodder, experiences which later emerged in The Girl Hunters (1962). He worked for the FBI as an undercover operative to crack a narcotics ring, which became the subject of his novel Kiss Me, Deadly (1952).
The Hammer novels did well in the visual media with two television series and multiple movies. He received an Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award in 1995. Spillane’s novels were out of print until 2001, when the New American Library began reissuing them. After his death, his friend and literary executor, Max Allan Collins, began the task of editing and completing Spillane’s unpublished typescripts, beginning with a Mike Hammer novel, The Goliath Bone (2008). From 1983 until his death, Spillane lived in Murrells Inlet with his third wife, Jane Rogers Johnson. In the works are new biographies of Spillane’s writing life and films, as well as publishing of new and reprinting of older works.