Mystery writer Mickey Spillane dies

updated 5:15 p.m. ET July 18, 2006

CHARLESTON, S.C. - Mickey Spillane created tough guy detective Mike Hammer, whose savage, shoot-’em-up exploits wowed millions and influenced Hollywood’s film noir movement. But he considered himself a writer, not an author.

Books by writers, he said, are the ones that sell.

“This is an income-generating job,” he told The Associated Press in a 2001 interview. “Fame was never anything to me unless it afforded me a good livelihood.”

The macho mystery writer died Monday at 88. Spillane’s wife, Jane, told The (Myrtle Beach) Sun News that he had cancer.

Visitation was scheduled for Saturday at the Goldfinch Funeral Home, and a memorial service will be held July 29 at the Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall near Spillane’s Murrells Inlet home, about 80 miles northeast of Charleston.

After starting out in comic books, Spillane wrote his first Hammer novel, “I, the Jury,” which was published in 1947. Twelve more followed, with sales topping 100 million. Notable titles included “The Killing Man,” “The Girl Hunters” and “One Lonely Night.”

Many Hammer books were made into movies, including the classic film noir “Kiss Me, Deadly” and “The Girl Hunters,” in which Spillane himself starred. Hammer stories were also featured on television in the series “Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer” and in made-for-TV movies. In the 1980s, Spillane appeared in a string of Miller Lite beer commercials.

“Thanks, Mickey, for giving the world so much pleasure during your time with us,” actor Stacy Keach, who portrayed Hammer on TV in the 1980s, said Monday in a statement. “We shall miss you, but we are comforted by the knowledge that your work and Mike Hammer will live forever.”

More than just Hammer
Besides the Hammer novels, Spillane wrote a dozen other books, including some award-winning volumes for young people. Nonetheless, by the end of the 20th century, many of his novels were out of print or hard to find. In 2001, the New American Library began reissuing them.

As a stylist, Spillane was no innovator; the prose was hard-boiled boilerplate. In a typical scene, from “The Big Kill,” Hammer slugs a little punk with “pig eyes.”

“I snapped the side of the rod across his jaw and laid the flesh open to the bone,” Spillane wrote. “I pounded his teeth back into his mouth with the end of the barrel ... and I took my own damn time about kicking him in the face. He smashed into the door and lay there bubbling. So I kicked him again and he stopped bubbling.”

Mainstream critics had little use for Spillane, but he got his due in the mystery world, receiving lifetime achievement awards from the Mystery Writers of America and the Private Eye Writers of America.

“What I liked about him was he was always aware of who and what he was,” said mystery writer Robert Parker, 73, whose novels feature Boston private eye Spenser. “He said to me once, ’I don’t have readers, I have customers.’ And I don’t think anyone, even in the solemnity of death, would argue that Mickey was a great writer, but he was a good guy and he was a successful writer and the combination ain’t bad.”

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