Mystery writer Mickey Spillane dies

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Spillane, a bearish man who wrote on an old manual Smith Corona, always claimed he didn’t care about reviews.

He was born Frank Morrison Spillane on March 9, 1918, in the New York borough of Brooklyn. He grew up in Elizabeth, N.J., and attended Fort Hays State College in Kansas, where he was a standout swimmer, before beginning his career writing for magazines.

He had always liked police stories — an uncle was a cop — and in his pre-Hammer days he created a comic book detective named Mike Danger. At the time, the early 1940s, he was writing for Batman, SubMariner and other comics.

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“I wanted to get away from the flying heroes and I had the prototype cop,” Spillane said.

Danger never saw print. World War II broke out and Spillane enlisted. When he came home, he needed $1,000 to buy some land and thought novels the best way to go. Within three weeks, he had completed “I, the Jury” and sent it to Dutton Books. The editors there doubted the writing, but not the market for it; a publishing franchise began. His books helped reveal the power of the paperback market and became so popular they were parodied in movies, including the Fred Astaire musical, “The Band Wagon.”

‘Quintessential’
He was a quintessential Cold War writer, an unconditional believer in good and evil. He was also a rare political conservative in the book world. Communists were villains in his work and liberals took some hits as well. He was not above using crude racial and sexual stereotypes.

Viewed by some as a precursor to Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, Spillane’s Hammer was a loner contemptuous of the “tedious process” of the jury system, choosing instead to enforce the law on his own murderous terms. His novels were attacked for their violence and vigilantism — one critic said “I, the Jury” belonged in “Gestapo training school” — but some defended them as the most shameless kind of pleasure.

While the Hammer books were set in New York, Spillane was a longtime resident of Murrells Inlet, a coastal community near Myrtle Beach. He moved to South Carolina in 1954 when the area, now jammed with motels and tourist attractions, was still predominantly tobacco and corn fields. Spillane said he fell in love with the long stretches of deserted beaches when he first saw the area from an airplane.

The writer, who became a Jehovah’s Witness in 1951 and helped build the group’s Kingdom Hall, spent his time boating and fishing when he wasn’t writing. In the 1950s, he also worked as a circus performer, allowing himself to be shot out of a cannon and appearing in the circus film “Ring of Fear.”

The house in which he lived for 35 years was destroyed by the 135-mph winds of Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

Married three times, Spillane was the father of four children.

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