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Frank Morrison Spillane ( March 9 1918 – July 17 2006 ), better known as '''Mickey Spillane''', was an American author of Crime Novels . He was known for the series of novels featuring his signature detective character, Mike Hammer , among other works. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold around the globe.1 By 1980, Spillane was responsible for seven of the top 15 all-time bestselling fiction titles in America. Born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey , Spillane was the only child of his Irish-American bartender father, John Joseph Spillane, and his Scottish mother, Catherine Anne. He started writing while in high school and briefly went to Fort Hays State College in Kansas. He worked a variety of jobs, including summers as a lifeguard and a period as a trampoline artist for the Barnum and Bailey circus. COMIC BOOKS Like another famed writer of crime fiction, Patricia Highsmith , Spillane started as a writer for comic books, While working as a salesman in Gimbel's 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 and concocted adventures for major 1940s comic book characters, including Captain Marvel , Superman , Batman and Captain America . MIKE HAMMER After the Pearl Harbor attack, Spillane joined the United States Army Air Corps the next day, December 8 , 1941 . 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 house in the country, 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 1947 hardcover and the Signet paperback (December 1948), ''I, the Jury'' sold six and a half million copies in the United States alone. ''I, the Jury'' introduced Spillane's tough 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," Hammer Sic '' said in a 1984 interview.' CBS News Obituary MARRIAGES Mickey and Mary Ann Spillane had four children (Caroline, Kathy, Michael, Ward), but their marriage ended in 1962. In November 1965 , he married his second wife, nightclub singer Sherri Malinou, who had posed nude for the cover of ''The Erection Set'' (1972), a novel dedicated to her. After that marriage ended in divorce (and a lawsuit over money) in 1983 , Spillane shared his waterfront house in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina with his third wife, Jane Rodgers Johnson, whom he married in October 1983 although his first wife, Mary Ann, and their four children lived only a short distance away. In 1989 , Hurricane Hugo ravaged his Murrells Inlet house to such a degree it had to be almost entirely reconstructed. A TV interview showed Spillane standing in the ruins of his house. FILMS Spillane portrayed himself as a detective in ''Ring of Fear'' ( 1954 ), directed by screenwriter James Edward Grant. Several of the Mike Hammer novels were made into movies, including the classic ''film noir'', '' Kiss Me Deadly '' (1955). In '' The Girl Hunters '' (1963) Spillane appeared as Mike Hammer, one of the few occasions in film history in which an author of a popular literary hero has portrayed his own character. In the TV series '' Columbo '' Spillane played a writer who is murdered. During the 1980s, he appeared in Miller Lite beer commercials. Spillane became a Jehovah's Witness in 1951 ( NPR Interview). He died July 17 2006 at his home in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina from Pancreatic Cancer . Spillane's novels went out of print, but in 2001, the New American Library began reissuing them. He received an Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award in 1995. CRITICAL REACTIONS Literary critics had a negative reaction to Spillane's writing, citing the high content of sex and violence. Spillane answered his critics with a few terse comments: "Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar... If the public likes you, you're good." However, Russian-American author Ayn Rand publicly praised Spillane's work at a time when critics were almost uniformly hostile. She considered him an underrated if uneven stylist and found congenial the black-and-white morality of the Hammer stories. She later publicly repudiated what she regarded as the amorality of Spillane's Tiger Mann stories. German painter Markus Lüpertz claimed that Spillane's writing influenced his own work. He certainly loves to shock his critics by saying that Spillane ranks as one of the major poets of the 20th Century. POPULAR CULTURE REFERENCES
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