Mickey Spillane, the crime novelist who created the tough-as-nails detective Mike Hammer, died on Monday at 88 at his home in South Carolina, a mortuary employee told Agence France-Presse.
”He died today,” said Josh Campbell of Goldfinch Funeral Home in Murrells Inlet in the south-eastern United States, without giving a cause of death.
Spillane was born Frank Morrison Spillane in Brooklyn, New York in 1918. He dropped out of law school in 1935 to start out as a writer for cheap, pulp fiction magazines and comic strips. He wrote storylines for Captain America and The Human Torch, among others.
With his writing carreer on hold during World War II, Spillane joined the US army air forces as a flight instructor and took part in several missions.
Back from the war, he resumed writing and was also a trampoline performer with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus for a period — he played himself in Ring of Fear film in 1954.
He also worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation for a short spell and was shot twice and knifed during a drug trafficking investigation.
Police work seemed to inspire him and in 1947 Spillane wrote his first Mike Hammer novel I, the Jury in only nine days, and the graphic, sexy and violent story quickly became a bestseller, with millions of copies snapped up.
Mike Hammer has little in common with Dashiell Hammet’s cold-blooded private-eye Sam Spade, or with Raymond Chandler’s cynical Philip Marlowe, but benefits from the story-telling knack of his creator, his direct language and punchy dialogues.
In 1952, after seven novels, Spillane became a Jehovah’s Witness and spent time travelling throughout the United States spreading a religious message.
He returned to his desk in 1961 to write four more Hammer novels until 1970. An older but still hard as nails Mike Hammer reappeared in two best-sellers in 1986 and 1990.
Several Mike Hammer stories were turned into movies and later a 1980s television series. Most notable film adaptations of Hammer novels include Robert Aldrich’s Kiss me Deadly (1955).
Spillane also turned out several novels with other characters, including the former communist-hating spy Tiger Mann.
Spillane played Hammer himself in the 1963 film The Girl Hunters and also took a role in a 1974 episode of the detective series Columbo.
Never the critics’ darling, Spillane made no excuses for the crude and violent content of his work, saying in a recent interview: ”Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts than caviar … If the public likes
you, you’re good.” – Sapa-AFP