Why is there no Mickey Spillane in print?
Can I reprint in England?
Who is on the cover of Mickey Spillane
book The Deep
Sadly, Mickey Spillane passed away today at the age of 88.
Mickey Spillane was born in Brooklyn, New York, as the son of a bartender. In his youth he read such writers as Alexandre Dumas and Anthony Hope, and was also fascinated by comic books. He attended briefly Fort Hays State College in Kansas, but dropped out, moved back to New York, and began his writing career in the mid-1930s. Spillane's first stories were published mostly in comic books and pulp magazines. He developed Mike Danger, a private detective, and wrote among others for Captain America, Captain Marvel, and The Human Torch. During WW II Spillane worked as a flying instructor for the U.S. Army Air Force. He met and married his first wife, Mary Ann Pearce, in 1945; they had four children. Achieving the rank of captain by the time, he left the service, and returned with his young wife in 1946 to New York.
I, the Jury was written in only nine days, but it became such success that Spillane quickly produced six more Hammer novels, five of them published between 1950 and 1952. THE LONG WAIT (1951) sold 3 million copies in a single week in 1952. "Crime novels are a good way to make money," Spillane once stated. The sixth, THE TWISTED THING, did not appear until 1966. The world of Mike Hammer includes his secretary Velda, a dark-haired beauty, who is the tough soul mate of Mike, and Captain Pat Chambers of the New York Police Department. In the first novel Hammer investigates the brutal murder of his best friend. In the end the beautiful but bad Charlotte Manning performs a strip tease in order to dissuade Hammer from killing her. When he shoots her, Manning asks, "How c-could you?" and he replies, "It was easy" - one of the most famous last lines in popular fiction.