Spillane was something of a media star himself himself, playing the part of Hammer in the 1963 film version of The Girl Hunters and appearing as a spokesman for Miller Lite beer TV ad for almost two decades. Spillane became, easily, the best selling private eye writer of his time and Hammer became a multi-media juggernaut, with Mike Hammer appearing on radio and in films, a daily newspaper comic strip and not one but two popular television series, as well as, of course, thirteen best-selling novels, stretching from I, the Jury in 1947 and wrapping up with Black Alley in 1996. The critics may have sneered at Spillane’s sex-and-violence-filled romps (and admittedly, sometimes it was difficult to tell where the sex ended and the violence began), and he may have been denounced in churches and at US Senate hearings, but the public ate up his books. The most popular of those books, of course, feature Spillane’s hard-boiled gumshoe/avenger Mike Hammer, the New York eye whose every case turned into a personal vendetta that - following a suitable number of trysts with beautiful and generally willing babes and raw scenes of brutality - inevitably ended with Hammer serving up his own kind of justice, usually out of the smoking barrel of a. He passed away Jat his home in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, leaving behind a wife, a couple of ex-wives, four children, possibly as many as 200 million copies of his books in print and plenty of satisfied customers, as he liked to call them.

“Anyone who doesn’t recognize Spillane’s importance is an idiot.”įRANK MORRISON SPILLANE was a Brooklyn kid, born on March 9, 1918, the only child of Catherine Anne and John Joseph Spillane, an Irish-American bartender who nicknamed him “Mickey.”

One lonely night by mickey spillane