Today would have been the 90th birthday of the creator of Mike Hammer, if he'd managed to hang on just a little bit beyond his recent passing in July of 2006. But we won't hold that against him, because Mickey Spillane’s over two dozen books have sold more than 225 million copies worldwide, and, as he himself once said (with tongue firmly in cheek), “I'm the most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne, and they're all dead.” Mike Hammer's fictional existence was born in 1947 when then-Army Air Corpsman and flight instructor Spillane published I, The Jury (written in 19 days, as the story goes), a novel based on a comic book character named Mike Danger who Spillane had created early in his career. It became an immediate bestseller, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Although Spillane’s novels went out of print, in 2001 the New American Library began reissuing them. More recent offerings of his works include a reissue of I, the Jury by Impress in 2006 and Dead Street from Hard Case Crime, one of a handful of novels Spillane was working on at the time of his death, prepared for publication by Hard Case veteran Max Allan Collins, and published in 2007.
He also wrote many short stories, a couple of children’s books, and other non-Spillane novels, such as a series featuring secret agent Tiger Mann, which was launched with Day of the Guns in 1964, although none of his other works reached the same level of success as Hammer.
Of the many dramatizations of Spillane’s novels, one of the most popular was the television series Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer which ran from 1984 to 1987 starring Stacy Keach, with 46 episodes, a Golden Globe nomination and several Edgar awards. In 1997-98, Stacy Keach reprised the role in a syndicated new series titled Mike Hammer Private Eye with 26 episodes (available in a complete DVD collection). Although a collection of the original series hasn't yet been released, in 2006 Sony Pictures did create a double-feature on DVD of two episodes, “More Than Murder” and “Murder Me, Murder You.”
Unfortunately, to the recollections of some folks (especially non-readers)—as was the case with Orson Welles and his Gallo chablis TV ads—Spillane may be remembered most vividly for the Miller Lite beer commercials in which he appeared in the 1980s (even though Spillane was reported not to have been a heavy drinker).
Spillane still makes many lists of “the most important crime fiction writers of all time,” as evidenced by this recent article from the British online newspaper Telegraph.
