Frank Morrison Spillane (March 9, 1918July 17, 2006), better known as
Mickey Spillane, was an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
author of
crime novelsCrime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred...
, many featuring his signature detective character,
Mike HammerMichael "Mike" Hammer is a fictional detective created by the American author Mickey Spillane in the 1947 book I, the Jury .-Description:...
. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally. In 1980, Spillane was responsible for seven of the top 15 all-time best-selling fiction titles in the U.S.
Biography
Born in
BrooklynBrooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
,
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, and raised in
Elizabeth, New JerseyElizabeth is a city in Union County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city had a total population of 124,969, retaining its ranking as New Jersey's fourth largest city with an increase of 4,401 residents from its 2000 Census population of 120,568...
, Spillane was the only child of his Irish bartender father, John Joseph Spillane, and his Scottish mother, Catherine Anne. Spillane attended
Erasmus Hall High SchoolErasmus Hall Campus High School is a four-year public high school in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, United States operated by the New York City Department of Education....
, graduating in 1935. He started writing while in high school, briefly attended Fort Hays State College in Kansas and worked a variety of jobs, including summers as a life-guard at
Breezy Point, QueensBreezy Point is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens, located on the western end of the Rockaway peninsula, between Rockaway Inlet and Jamaica Bay on the landward side, and the Atlantic Ocean. The neighborhood is governed by Queens Community Board 14...
, and a period as a trampoline artist for the
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey CircusRingling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus is an American circus company. The company was started when the circus created by James Anthony Bailey and P. T. Barnum was merged with the Ringling Brothers Circus. The Ringling brothers purchased the Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1907, but ran the circuses...
.
During
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
Spillane enlisted in the
Army Air CorpsThe United States Army Air Forces was the military aviation arm of the United States of America during and immediately after World War II, and the direct predecessor of the United States Air Force....
, becoming a fighter pilot and a flight instructor. While flying over
Murrells Inlet, South CarolinaMurrells Inlet is a small fishing village in Horry County, South Carolina, United States that is considered to be the "Seafood Capital of South Carolina". The population was 5,519 at the 2000 census. It was once primarily a fishing village, but has grown substantially in modern time, along with the...
, he said, "That is where I want to live." Later, he would use his celebrity status to publicize the
Grand StrandThe Grand Strand refers to a large stretch of beaches on the East Coast of the United States extending from Little River to Georgetown in the U.S. State of South Carolina. It consists of 60+ miles along an essentially uninterrupted arc of beach land, beginning around the Little River and...
on TV, but when it became a popular resort area and traffic became a problem, Spillane said, "I shouldn't have told people about it."
Mickey and Mary Ann Spillane had four children (Caroline, Kathy, Michael, Ward), and their marriage ended in 1962. In November 1965, he married his second wife, nightclub singer Sherri Malinou. After that marriage ended in divorce (and a lawsuit) in 1983, Spillane shared his waterfront house in Murrells Inlet with his third wife, Jane Rogers Johnson, whom he married in October 1983, and her two daughters (Jennifer and Margaret Johnson).
In 1989,
Hurricane HugoHurricane Hugo was a classical, destructive and rare Cape Verde-type hurricane which struck the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe, Montserrat, St. Croix, Puerto Rico and the USA mainland in South Carolina as a Category 4 hurricane during September of the 1989 Atlantic hurricane season...
ravaged his Murrells Inlet house to such a degree it had to be almost entirely reconstructed. A television interview showed Spillane standing in the ruins of his house. He received an
Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master AwardThe Edgar Allan Poe Awards , named after Edgar Allan Poe, are presented every year by the Mystery Writers of America...
in 1995. Spillane's novels went out of print, but in 2001, the New American Library began reissuing them.
Spillane died July 17, 2006 at his home in Murrells Inlet, of pancreatic carcinoma. After his death, his friend and literary executor,
Max Allan CollinsMax Allan Collins is an American mystery writer. He has written novels, screenplays, comic books, comic strips, trading cards, short stories, movie novelizations and historical fiction. He wrote the graphic novel Road to Perdition , created the comic book private eye Ms...
, began the task of editing and completing Spillane's unpublished typescripts, beginning with a Mike Hammer novel,
The Goliath Bone (2008).
In July 2011, Murrells Inlet named
U.S 17 BusinessIn the U.S. state of South Carolina, U.S. Route 17 is a north–south highway located near the Atlantic Ocean. The route enters the state from Georgia at the Savannah River and serves Charleston and Myrtle Beach before entering North Carolina near Calabash.-Route description:US 17 enters into...
the "Mickey Spillane Waterfront 17 Highway." The proposal first passed the
Georgetown County Council in 2006 while Spillane was still alive, but the
South Carolina General AssemblyThe South Carolina General Assembly, also called the South Carolina Legislature, is the state legislature of the U.S. state of South Carolina. The legislature is bicameral and consists of the lower South Carolina House of Representatives and the upper South Carolina Senate. Altogether, the General...
rejected the plan then.
He is survived by his wife, Jane Spillane, of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina.
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 GillJoseph Gill was an American magazine writer and highly prolific comic book scripter. Most of his work was for Charlton Comics, where he co-created the superheroes Captain Atom, Peacemaker, and Judomaster, among others. Comics historians consider Gill a top contender as the comic-book field's most...
, who later found a lifetime career in scripting for
Charlton ComicsCharlton Comics was an American comic book publishing company that existed from 1946 to 1985, having begun under a different name in 1944. It was based in Derby, Connecticut...
. Gill told Spillane to meet his brother, Ray Gill, who wrote for
Funnies Inc.Funnies, Inc. is an American comic book packager of the 1930s-1940s Golden Age of comic books. Founded by Lloyd Jacquet, it supplied the contents of early comics, including that of Marvel Comics #1 , the first publication of what would become the multimedia corporation Marvel Comics. The 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 MarvelCaptain Marvel is a fictional comic book superhero, originally published by Fawcett Comics and later by DC Comics. Created in 1939 by artist C. C. Beck and writer Bill Parker, the character first appeared in Whiz Comics #2...
,
SupermanSuperman is a fictional comic book superhero appearing in publications by DC Comics, widely considered to be an American cultural icon. Created by American writer Jerry Siegel and Canadian-born American artist Joe Shuster in 1932 while both were living in Cleveland, Ohio, and sold to Detective...
,
BatmanBatman is a fictional character created by the artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger. A comic book superhero, Batman first appeared in Detective Comics #27 , and since then has appeared primarily in publications by DC Comics...
and
Captain AmericaCaptain America is a fictional character, a superhero that appears in comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character first appeared in Captain America Comics #1 , from Marvel Comics' 1940s predecessor, Timely Comics, and was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby...
. 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 HarborPearl Harbor, known to Hawaiians as Puuloa, is a lagoon harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, west of Honolulu. Much of the harbor and surrounding lands is a United States Navy deep-water naval base. It is also the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet...
. In the mid-1940s he was stationed as a flight instructor in
Greenwood, MississippiGreenwood is a city in and the county seat of Leflore County, Mississippi, United States, located at the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta approximately 96 miles north of Jackson, Mississippi, and 130 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee. The population was 15,205 at the 2010 census. It is the...
, where he met and married
Mary Ann Pearce in 1945. The couple wanted to buy a country house in the
Newburgh, New YorkNewburgh is a town in Orange County, New York, United States. The 2010 census determined the population is 29,801. This is the first time ever that the population of the Town of Newburgh officially exceeded that of the adjacent but totally separate municipality known as the city of Newburgh...
, 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 JuryI, The Jury is Mickey Spillane's first novel featuring private investigator Mike Hammer.-Plot summary:New York City, summer 1944. Although she runs a successful private psychiatric clinic on New York's Park Avenue, Dr. Charlotte Manning — young, beautiful, blonde, and well-to-do —...
. At the suggestion of Ray Gill, he sent it to
E. P. DuttonE. P. Dutton was an American book publishing company founded as a book retailer in Boston, Massachusetts in 1852 by Edward Payson Dutton. In 1986, the company was acquired by Penguin Group and split into two imprints: Dutton Penguin and Dutton Children's Books.-History:Edward Payson Dutton founded...
.
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 HammerMichael "Mike" Hammer is a fictional detective created by the American author Mickey Spillane in the 1947 book I, the Jury .-Description:...
. Although tame by current standards, his novels featured more sex than competing titles, and the violence was more overt than the usual detective story. 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." Two Mike Danger comic-book stories were published in 1954 without Spillane's knowledge, as well as one featuring Mike Lancer (1942), 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 Night and
The Long Wait. The cover art for
Kiss Me, Deadly was by James Meese.
All novels
- 1947 I, the Jury
I, The Jury is Mickey Spillane's first novel featuring private investigator Mike Hammer.-Plot summary:New York City, summer 1944. Although she runs a successful private psychiatric clinic on New York's Park Avenue, Dr. Charlotte Manning — young, beautiful, blonde, and well-to-do —...
- Mike Hammer
- 1950 My Gun is Quick
My Gun Is Quick is a 1957 mystery film based on the novel My Gun is Quick by Mickey Spillane. Written by Richard M. Powell and directed by Phil Victor and George White, the movie stars Robert Bray as private investigator Mike Hammer, Pamela Duncan as Velda, Hammer's secretary.The story begins when...
- Mike Hammer
- 1950 Vengeance Is Mine!
Vengeance Is Mine! is Mickey Spillane's third novel featuring private investigator Mike Hammer.-Plot summary:Mike Hammer wakes up being questioned by the police in the same hotel room as the body of an old friend from World War II. His friend, Chester Wheeler, has apparently committed suicide...
- Mike Hammer
- 1951 One Lonely Night
One Lonely Night is Mickey Spillane's fourth novel featuring private investigator Mike Hammer.-Plot summary:After having been berated by a Judge, Mike Hammer goes for a walk and comes across a terrified woman and her pursuer. He kills the man but the woman, terrified, jumps to her death from a...
- Mike Hammer
- 1951 The Big Kill
The Big Kill is Mickey Spillane's fifth novel featuring private investigator Mike Hammer.-Plot:Drinking at a seedy bar on a rainy night, Hammer notices a man come in with an infant. The man, named Decker, cries as he kisses the infant goodbye, then walks out in the rain to be shot to death. ...
- Mike Hammer
- 1951 The Long Wait
-Plot:Johnny McBride is badly hurt while hitch hiking and loses his memory when the car he is riding in crashes. Two years later, a clue leads him to his old home town, where he finds he is a murder suspect. Johnny tries to clear his name of the presumed murder charges...
- 1952 Kiss Me, Deadly
Kiss Me, Deadly is Mickey Spillane's sixth novel featuring private investigator Mike Hammer. The novel was later adapted into the film Kiss Me Deadly in 1955.- External links :*: The Mike Hammer Collection by Mickey Spillane...
- Mike Hammer
- 1961 The Deep
- 1962 The Girl Hunters
The Girl Hunters is a British-made film, adapted from the 1962 Mickey Spillane pulp novel The Girl Hunters.Mickey Spillane played Mike Hammer, one of the few occasions in film history in which an author of a popular literary hero has portrayed his own character. It also starred Bond girl Shirley...
- Mike Hammer
- 1964 Day of the Guns - Tiger Mann
- 1964 The Snake
The Snake is Mickey Spillane's eighth novel featuring private investigator Mike Hammer.-The plot:The novel picks up where exactly where The Girl Hunters left off. Hammer has discovered the location of his long lost love and secretary, Velda...
- Mike Hammer
- 1965 Bloody Sunrise - Tiger Mann
- 1965 The Death Dealers - Tiger Mann
- 1966 The By-Pass Control - Tiger Mann
- 1966 The Twisted Thing
The Twisted Thing is Mickey Spillane's ninth novel featuring private investigator Mike Hammer....
- Mike Hammer
- 1967 The Body Lovers
The Body Lovers is Mickey Spillane's tenth book featuring private investigator Mike Hammer.-Synopsis:Mike Hammer finds himself investigating a sex-orgy cult with money and murder on the agenda....
- Mike Hammer
- 1967 The Delta Factor
The Delta Factor is a 1970 film directed by Tay Garnett. It stars Christopher George and Yvette Mimieux. The film is based on a novel by Mickey Spillane with the same name.-Plot:...
- 1970 Survival Zero - Mike Hammer
- 1972 The Erection Set - a Dogeron Kelly novel; in the Jacqueline Susann
Jacqueline Susann was an American author known for her best-selling novels. Her most notable work was Valley of the Dolls, a book that broke sales records and spawned an Oscar-nominated 1967 film and a short-lived TV series.-Early years:Jacqueline Susann was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to...
mold
- 1973 The Last Cop Out - written in the third person
- 1979 The Day The Sea Rolled Back - young adult
- 1982 The Ship That Never Was - young adult
- 1989 The Killing Man
thumb|1st edition The Killing Man is Mickey Spillane's twelfth novel featuring private investigator Mike Hammer....
- Mike Hammer
- 1996 Black Alley
Black Alley is Mickey Spillane's thirteenth novel featuring private investigator Mike Hammer, and the last one completed before his death ....
- Mike Hammer
- 2003 Something Down There - featuring semi-retired spy Mako Hooker
- 2007 Dead Street - completed by Max Allan Collins
Max Allan Collins is an American mystery writer. He has written novels, screenplays, comic books, comic strips, trading cards, short stories, movie novelizations and historical fiction. He wrote the graphic novel Road to Perdition , created the comic book private eye Ms...
- 2008 The Goliath Bone
The Goliath Bone is the 14th entry in the Mike Hammer series by Mickey Spillane. It was completed by Max Allan Collins, and was first published on October 13, 2008...
- Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan CollinsMax Allan Collins is an American mystery writer. He has written novels, screenplays, comic books, comic strips, trading cards, short stories, movie novelizations and historical fiction. He wrote the graphic novel Road to Perdition , created the comic book private eye Ms...
- 2010 The Big Bang - Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins
Max Allan Collins is an American mystery writer. He has written novels, screenplays, comic books, comic strips, trading cards, short stories, movie novelizations and historical fiction. He wrote the graphic novel Road to Perdition , created the comic book private eye Ms...
- 2011 Kiss Her Goodbye - Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins
Max Allan Collins is an American mystery writer. He has written novels, screenplays, comic books, comic strips, trading cards, short stories, movie novelizations and historical fiction. He wrote the graphic novel Road to Perdition , created the comic book private eye Ms...
Films
Spillane portrayed himself as a detective in
Ring of FearRing of Fear is a 1954 film starring Clyde Beatty and Mickey Spillane as themselves. With a deranged killer on the loose in his circus, lion tamer Beatty calls in mystery writer Spillane to solve the case.-Cast:*Clyde Beatty as Himself...
(1954), and rewrote the film without credit for John Wayne's and
Robert FellowsRobert Fellows or Robert M. Fellows was an American film producer who was once a production partner with John Wayne and later Mickey Spillane.-Biography:...
' Wayne-Fellows Productions. The film was directed by screenwriter
James Edward GrantJames Edward Grant was an American short story writer and screenwriter who contributed to more than fifty films between 1935 and 1971....
. Several Hammer novels were made into movies, including
Kiss Me DeadlyKiss Me Deadly is a 1955 film noir drama produced and directed by Robert Aldrich starring Ralph Meeker. The screenplay was written by A.I. Bezzerides, based on the Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer mystery novel Kiss Me, Deadly. Kiss Me Deadly is often considered a classic of the noir genre. The film...
(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 SnakeThe Snake is Mickey Spillane's eighth novel featuring private investigator Mike Hammer.-The plot:The novel picks up where exactly where The Girl Hunters left off. Hammer has discovered the location of his long lost love and secretary, Velda...
as a follow up, but the film was never made.
On October 25, 1956, Spillane appeared on
The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie FordThe Ford Show is a half-hour comedy/variety program, starring singer and folk humorist Tennessee Ernie Ford, which aired in color on NBC television on Thursday evenings from October 4, 1956 to June 29, 1961....
, with interest on his Mike Hammer novels. In 1974, he appeared with
Jack CassidyJohn Joseph Edward “Jack” Cassidy was an American actor of stage, film and screen.His frequent professional persona was that of an urbane, super-confident egotist with a dramatic flair, much in the manner of Broadway actor Frank Fay...
in the television series
Columbo in the episode "Publish or Perish." Spillane portrayed a writer who is murdered.
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.
During the 1980s, he appeared in
Miller LiteMiller Lite is a 4.2% abv pale lager brand sold by MillerCoors of Chicago, Illinois, United States. Sibling beers include Miller Genuine Draft and Miller High Life.-History:...
beer commercials.
In the 1990s, Spillane licensed one of his characters to
Tekno ComixTekno Comix was an American publishing company that produced comic books from 1995 to 1997.-History:The company was founded by Laurie Silvers and Mitchell Rubenstein as a division of their publicly traded company, Big Entertainment...
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.
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
peanutThe peanut, or groundnut , is a species in the legume or "bean" family , so it is not a nut. The peanut was probably first cultivated in the valleys of Peru. It is an annual herbaceous plant growing tall...
s consumed than
caviarCaviar, sometimes called black caviar, is a luxury delicacy, consisting of processed, salted, non-fertilized sturgeon roe. The roe can be "fresh" or pasteurized, the latter having much less culinary and economic value....
... If the public likes you, you're good." Russian-American author
Ayn RandAyn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism....
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.
GermanGermany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
painter
Markus LüpertzMarkus Lüpertz is a contemporary German painter and sculptor.In the 1960s, Lüpertz worked primarily in Berlin, moving on to take a professorship at Karlsruhe at the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe in the 1970s, then to Düsseldorf where he was for over twenty years director of the Kunstakademie...
claimed that Spillane's writing influenced his own work, saying that Spillane ranks as one of the major poets of the 20th century.
See also
- History of crime fiction
Crime fiction is a typically 19th- and 20th-century genre, dominated by British and American writers. This article explores its historical development as a genre.-Crime fiction in history:...
- Hard boiled American crime fiction writing
External links
- "'Comics Were Great!' A Colorful Conversation with Mickey Spillane", Alter Ego vol. 3, #11, November 2001. Accessed September 5, 2008. WebCitation archive.
- "The Religious Affiliation of Writer of Hard-boiled Detective Novels Mickey Spillane", Crime Time August 6, 2001, via Famous Jehovah's Witnesses. WebCitation archive.
- Liukkonen, Petri. "Mickey Spillane (1918-2006) - Pseudonym of Frank Morrison Spillane", Books and Writers], n.d. WebCitation archive.
- Smith, Kevin Burton. "Authors and Creators: Mickey Spillane (Frank Morrison Spillane) (1918-2006)", Thrilling Detective, n.d. WebCitation archive.
- Holland, Steve. "Mickey Spillane: Hardboiled's Most Extreme Stylist or Cynical Exploiter of Machismo?", Crime Time 2.6, December 1999, via MysteryFile.com
- Meroney, John. "Man of Mysteries: It'd Been Years Since Spillane Pulled a Job. Could We Find Him? Yeah. It Was Easy", The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
, August 22, 2001, p. C01. WebCitation archive.
- Photo