About the Author
A bartender’s son, Mickey Spillane was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 9, 1918. An only child who swam and played football as a youth, Spillane got a taste for storytelling by scaring other kids around the campfire. After a truncated college career, Spillane—already selling stories to pulps and slicks under pseudonyms—became a writer in the burgeoning comic-book field, a career cut short by World War II. Spillane, who had learned to fly at airstrips as a boy, became an instructor of fighter pilots.
After the war, Spillane converted an unsold comic-book project—“Mike Danger, Private Eye”—into a hard-hitting, sexy novel. The thousand-dollar advance was just what the writer needed to buy materials for a house he wanted to build for himself and his young wife on a patch of land in New Jersey.
The 1948 Signet reprint of his 1947 E. P. Dutton hardcover novel I, the Jury sold in the millions, as did the six tough mysteries that soon followed; all but one featured hard-as-nails P.I. Mike Hammer. The Hammer thriller Kiss Me, Deadly (1952) was the first private eye novel to make the New York Times bestseller list.
Mike Hammer’s creator claimed to write only when he needed the money, and in periods of little or no publishing, Spillane occupied himselft with other pursuits: flying, traveling with the circus, appearing in motion pictures, and nearly twenty years spoofing himself and Hammer in a lucrative series of Miller Lite beer commercials.
The controversial Hammer has been the subject of a radio show, a comic strip, two television series, and numerous gritty movies, notably director Robert Aldrich’s seminal film noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and The Girl Hunters (1963), starring Spillane as his famous hero.
Spillane was honored by the Mystery Writers of America with the Grand Master Award, and with the Private Eye Writers of America “Eye” Lifetime Achievement Award; he was also a Shamus Award winner. The creator of Mike Hammer died in 2006. His wife, Jane, and his friend and collaborator Max Allan Collins are working together to bring Mickey Spillane’s unpublished (and at times unfinished) fiction to fruition.