American Public Media The Writer's Almanac for Wednesday,
March 9, 2005
It's the birthday of crime novelist Mickey Spillane, the pen
name of Frank Morrison, born in Brooklyn, New York (1918). He
spent his childhood defending himself as the only Irish boy
in a tough Polish neighborhood. His father worked in a
hardware store, and it was there that Spillane saw a
typewriter for the first time. He later said, "I would type
on it... I loved the sound it made... [and] I knew I was
going to be a writer."
As a high school student, he wrote for a local newspaper, and
he covered bootlegging scams and other criminal activity. He
would make carbon copies of the newspaper stories and turn
one copy in as a writing assignment for school and get paid
for the other. In 1940, he got a job as a scripter of comic
books for Funnies, Inc. Other writers required a week to
produce a Captain Marvel story while Spillane could write one
in a day.
After he served in World War II as a fighter pilot, Spillane
bought some land in the Catskill Mountains, where he lived in
a tent while building his own house. He kept a typewriter on
a wobbly table in that tent, and wrote at night by the light
of a Coleman lamp. It was there that he wrote his first novel
I, the Jury (1947), which introduced his famous detective
Mike Hammer. It begins, "I shook the rain from my hat and
walked into the room. Nobody said a word. They stepped back
politely and I could feel their eyes on me."
I, the Jury got terrible reviews when it came out in
hardcover. The critic for the New York Herald Tribune called
Spillane, "An inept vulgarian." The hardcover only sold 7,000
copies. But when the paperback came out, with one of the most
sexually explicit covers ever printed on a book at that time,
it sold a quarter of a million copies in one week, and it
went on to sell about 9 million.
Spillane published six more books in two years, all
best-sellers, including My Gun Is Quick (1950); The Big Kill
(1951), and Kiss Me, Deadly (1952). He was known for
including far more graphic sex and violence in his books than
any other writer at the time. His work helped spark the pulp
fiction craze of the 1950's, and he was one of the targets
for a U.S. Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile
Delinquency.
Spillane never got as much respect as other detective
novelists like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, but he
sold many more books than they did. Six of his books are now
among the 25 top-selling novels of the 20th century. It's
estimated that there are about 130 million copies of his
books in print.
Spillane was once asked why detective Mike Hammer is always
depicted drinking beer. He said, "Mike Hammer drinks beer,
not cognac, because I can't spell cognac."
And, "If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball
player loses his arm. [But] a writer gets more knowledge, and
if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes."
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 09 Mar 2005 EST