- 1947 I, the Jury – Mike Hammer
- 1950 My Gun Is Quick – Mike Hammer
- 1950 Vengeance Is Mine! – Mike Hammer
- 1951 One Lonely Night – Mike Hammer
- 1951 The Big Kill – Mike Hammer
- 1951 The Long Wait
- 1952 Kiss Me, Deadly – Mike Hammer
- 1961 The Deep
- 1962 The Girl Hunters – Mike Hammer
- 1963 Me, Hood
- 1964 Day of the Guns – Tiger Mann
- 1964 The Snake – Mike Hammer
- 1964 Return of the Hood
- 1964 The Flier
- 1965 Bloody Sunrise – Tiger Mann
- 1965 The Death Dealers – Tiger Mann
- 1965 Killer Mine
- 1965 Man Alone
- 1966 The By-Pass Control – Tiger Mann
- 1966 The Twisted Thing – Mike Hammer
- 1967 The Body Lovers – Mike Hammer
- 1967 The Delta Factor – Morgan the Raider
- 1970 Survival… Zero! – Mike Hammer
- 1972 The Erection Set – a Dogeron Kelly novel; in the Jacqueline Susann mold
- 1973 The Last Cop Out
- 1979 The Day The Sea Rolled Back – young adult
- 1982 The Ship That Never Was – young adult
- 1984 Tomorrow I Die – collection of short stories
- 1989 The Killing Man – Mike Hammer
- 1996 Black Alley – Mike Hammer
- 2001 Together We Kill: The Uncollected Stories of Mickey Spillane – collection of short stories
- 2003 Something’s Down There – featuring semi-retired spy Mako Hooker
- 2007 Dead Street – completed by Max Allan Collins
- 2008 The Goliath Bone – Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins
- 2009 I’ll Die Tomorrow – Mike Hammer (illustrated, limited edition of the short story)
- 2010 The Big Bang – Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins
- 2011 Kiss Her Goodbye – Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins
- 2011 The Consummata – Morgan the Raider; sequel to The Delta Factor; completed by Max Allan Collins
- 2012 Lady, Go Die! – Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins
- 2013 Complex 90 – Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins
- 2014 King of the Weeds – Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins
- 2015 Kill Me, Darling – Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins
- 2015 The Legend of Caleb York Novelization by Max Allan Collins (Based on an unproduced movie script by Mickey Spillane)
- 2016 Murder Never Knocks – Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins
- 2016 The Big Showdown – (A Caleb York Western – Book 2) completed by Max Allan Collins
- Coming in March 2017 The Will To Kill – Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins
Frank Morrison Spillane (March 9, 1918 – July 17, 2006), better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American crime novelist, whose stories often feature his signature detective character, Mike Hammer. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally. Spillane was also an occasional actor, once even playing Hammer himself.
Born in Brooklyn, New York City, and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Spillane was the only child of his Irish bartender father, John Joseph Spillane, and his Scottish mother, Catherine Anne. Spillane attended Erasmus Hall High School, 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 lifeguard at Breezy Point, Queens, and a period as a trampoline artist for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
During World War II Spillane enlisted in the Army Air Corps, becoming a fighter pilot and a flight instructor.While flying over Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, he said, “That is where I want to live.” Later, he would use his celebrity status to publicize the Grand Strand 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.”
He was an active Jehovah’s Witness. 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 the 1960s, Spillane became a friend of the novelist Ayn Rand. Despite their apparent differences, Rand admired Spillane’s literary style, and Spillane became, as he described it, a “fan” of Rand’s work.
In 1989, Hurricane Hugo 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 Award 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.[8][9][10] 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).
In July 2011, the town of Murrells Inlet named U.S 17 Business 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 Assembly rejected the plan then.
He is survived by his wife, Jane Spillane.
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 Gill, who later found a lifetime career in scripting for Charlton Comics. Gill told Spillane to meet his brother, Ray Gill, who wrote for 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 Marvel, Superman, Batman and Captain America. 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 Harbor. In the mid-1940s he was stationed as a flight instructor in Greenwood, Mississippi, where he met and married Mary Ann Pearce in 1945. The couple wanted to buy a country house in the town of Newburgh, New York, 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 Jury. At the suggestion of Ray Gill, he sent it to E. P. Dutton.
With the combined total of the 1947 hardcover and the Signet paperback (December 1948), I, the Jury sold 6 1/2 million copies in the United States alone. I, the Jury 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. 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). These 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 created 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.
REFERENCE:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Spillane
