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Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs-2006
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Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs-2006 |
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Subject: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: Wesley S Date: 18 Jul 06 - 11:03 AM Perhaps this should be in the BS section. I'm fine if it gets moved. CNN reports : 'This is an income-generating job' Monday, July 17, 2006; Posted: 6:23 p.m. EDT (22:23 GMT) CHARLESTON, South Carolina (AP) -- Mickey Spillane, the macho mystery writer who wowed millions of readers with the shoot-'em-up sex and violence of gumshoe Mike Hammer, died Monday. He was 88. Spillane's death was confirmed by Brad Stephens of Goldfinch Funeral Home in his hometown of Murrells Inlet. Details about his death were not immediately available. After starting out in comic books Spillane wrote his first Mike Hammer novel, "I, the Jury," in 1946. Twelve more followed, with sales topping 100 million. Notable titles included "The Killing Man," "The Girl Hunters" and "One Lonely Night." Many of these books were made into movies, including the classic film noir "Kiss Me, Deadly" and "The Girl Hunters," in which Spillane himself starred. Hammer stories were also featured on television in the series "Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer" and in made-for-TV movies. In the 1980s, Spillane appeared in a string of Miller Lite beer commercials. Besides the Hammer novels, Spillane wrote a dozen other books, including some award-winning volumes for young people. Nonetheless, by the end of the 20th century, many of his novels were out of print or hard to find. In 2001, the New American Library began reissuing them. As a stylist Spillane was no innovator; the prose was hard-boiled boilerplate. In a typical scene, from "The Big Kill," Hammer slugs out a little punk with "pig eyes." "I snapped the side of the rod across his jaw and laid the flesh open to the bone," Spillane wrote. "I pounded his teeth back into his mouth with the end of the barrel ... and I took my own damn time about kicking him in the face. He smashed into the door and lay there bubbling. So I kicked him again and he stopped bubbling." Velda was a looker and burning for love Mainstream critics had little use for Spillane, but he got his due in the mystery world, receiving lifetime achievement awards from the Mystery Writers of America and the Private Eye Writers of America. Spillane, a bearish man who wrote on an old manual Smith Corona, always claimed he didn't care about reviews. He considered himself a "writer" as opposed to an "author," defining a writer as someone whose books sell. "This is an income-generating job," he told The Associated Press during a 2001 interview. "Fame was never anything to me unless it afforded me a good livelihood." Spillane was born Frank Morrison Spillane on March 9, 1918, in the New York borough of Brooklyn. He grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and attended Fort Hayes State College in Kansas where he was a standout swimmer before beginning his career writing for magazines. He had always liked police stories -- an uncle was a cop -- and in his pre-Hammer days he created a comic book detective named Mike Danger. At the time, the early 1940s, he was scribing for Batman, SubMariner and other comics. "I wanted to get away from the flying heroes and I had the prototype cop," Spillane said. Danger never saw print. World War II broke out and Spillane enlisted. When he came home, he needed $1,000 to buy some land and thought novels the best way to go. Within three weeks, he had completed "I, the Jury" and sent it to Dutton. The editors there doubted the writing, but not the market for it; a literary franchise began. His books helped reveal the power of the paperback market and became so popular they were parodied in movies, including the Fred Astaire musical "The Band Wagon." He was a quintessential Cold War writer, an unconditional believer in good and evil. He was also a rare political conservative in the book world. Communists were villains in his work and liberals took some hits as well. He was not above using crude racial and sexual stereotypes. Viewed by some as a precursor to Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry, Spillane's Hammer was a loner contemptuous of the "tedious process" of the jury system, choosing instead to enforce the law on his own murderous terms. His novels were attacked for their violence and vigilantism-- one critic said "I, the Jury" belonged in "Gestapo training school" -- but some defended them as the most shameless kind of pleasure. "Spillane is like eating takeout fried chicken: so much fun to consume, but you can feel those lowlife grease-induced zits rising before you've finished the first drumstick," Sally Eckhoff wrote in the liberal weekly The Village Voice. Became a Jehovah's Witness in 1951 The Hammer novels had a couple of recurring characters: Pat, the honest, but slow-moving cop, and Velda, Mike's faithful secretary. Like so many women in Hammer's life, Velda was a looker, and burning for love. "Velda was watching me with the tip of her tongue clenched between her teeth," Spillane wrote in "Vengeance is Mine!", an early Hammer novel. "There wasn't any kitten-softness about her now. She was big and she was lovely, with the kind of curves that made you want to turn around and have another look. The lush fullness of her lips had tightened into the faintest kind of snarl and her eyes were the carnivorous eyes you could expect to see in the jungle watching you from behind a clump of bushes." While the Hammer books were set in New York, Spillane was a longtime resident of Murrells Inlet, a coastal community near Myrtle Beach. He moved to South Carolina in 1954 when the area, now jammed with motels and tourist attractions, was still predominantly tobacco and corn fields. Spillane said he fell in love with the long stretches of deserted beaches when he first saw the area from an airplane. The writer, who became a Jehovah's Witness in 1951 and helped build the group's Kingdom Hall in Murrells Inlet, spent his time boating and fishing when he wasn't writing. In the 1950s, he also worked as a circus performer, allowing himself to be shot out of a cannon and appearing in the circus film "Ring of Fear." The home where he lived for 35 years was destroyed by the 135 mph winds of Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Married three times, Spillane was the father of four children. |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: Sorcha Date: 18 Jul 06 - 12:07 PM Awwww damn. |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: Leadfingers Date: 18 Jul 06 - 12:24 PM How many lads of my generation fancied themselves as a hard bitten gun toting cop of the Mickey Spillane school ?? |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: Rapparee Date: 18 Jul 06 - 01:25 PM Ya see, I knew that. I knew that he was bad news when he walked in. Six feet plus, hard as nails, and with a face like a gorilla. He looked like he ate forty-five bullets for a snack. And now he's gone. He did an okay job. We're gonna miss him. |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: katlaughing Date: 18 Jul 06 - 02:46 PM Well, sorry as I am to hear this...I think we've got our own Spillanes, right here on Mudcat...LeeJ, Spaw, JenEllen, PeterT. Just look at some of the old story threads. So, we've carried on the traditions, so to speak, imo. |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: frogprince Date: 18 Jul 06 - 03:23 PM Several, at least, of the all-time top selling authors would meet Spillane's own definition of "writer, not author". I'm thinking of those whose writing style stumbled and clunked along painfully, but who imagined and created one vivid, enduring character. Ian Fleming could be stunningly cliched. Edgar Rice Burroughs gave us an inconceivable version of a child developing isolated from all other humans. James Fenimore Cooper's writing style? Ouch. We have several mudcatters who can write circles around any of them; now if you can bring that one character to wide-spread attention.... |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: Wesley S Date: 18 Jul 06 - 03:55 PM I always prefered John D McDonald myself. |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: frogprince Date: 18 Jul 06 - 04:07 PM Uh, huh: I have one "set" of a complete paperback series; all of the Travis MacGee books. McDonald could plot and write circles around Spillane. MacGee could more than take care of himself, but he didn't take any pleasure in splattering blood all over the landscape. |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: Wesley S Date: 18 Jul 06 - 04:11 PM Travis would have kicked Mike Hammer's ass and then felt guilty about it afterward. At least until his next Boodles on ice. |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: frogprince Date: 18 Jul 06 - 04:29 PM I watched "The Girl Hunters", with Spillane as Hammer, on TV not long ago. It started with Hammer on skid row, hopelessly trashed for years in alcoholism because Velda was missing and presumed murdered. He learns she may be alive, and sobers up to go in pursuit. Within days, he is casually drinking a few beers with no ill effect. He then shows up driving a new Thunderbird in one scene, and a new Corvette in the next (If I remember the cars quite correctly). I think Spillane wrote the screenplay himself; it approached the artistry of Ed Wood. |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: GUEST,Chongo Chimp Date: 18 Jul 06 - 05:51 PM Spillane wrote some pretty good tough guy gumshoe fiction, but his stories were kinda vulgar at the same time. I don't go for that. Too much graphic sex stuff. Mike Hammer don't measure up to Philip Marlowe in my book. Still, he'd be a good guy to have there in a fistfight or a gunfight. But so would, Marlowe. Well, I guess I am gonna have to have a few drinks in Spillane's honor and burn a candle for him tonight. He wasn't the best, but he was good. - Chongo |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: GUEST Date: 18 Jul 06 - 05:54 PM Pedant alert: John D MacDonald |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: mack/misophist Date: 18 Jul 06 - 07:13 PM Who could match Philip Marlow? Any PI who sets up chess problems on a board in his living room has gotta be some kinda intellekshual. But I go with the majority. Travis McGee's better. |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: bobad Date: 18 Jul 06 - 08:49 PM I find it rather fitting that he grew up in New Jersey, not that there's anything wrong with that. |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: Donuel Date: 19 Jul 06 - 01:06 PM Mickey's nephew Danny Spillane was a good friend of mine. I bought many of his sketches. Danny struggled with shizophrenia begining his 2nd year of college coinciding with his Hiroshima outline portraits on campus sidewalks. He was a true genius in his original art music and prose. One was a melting elephant with a penis trunk with a thousand meticulouw details. Another showed a flying formation of hands that had a unique finger position that made them look like fantastic airplanes. His illness later left him prone to alcoholism and detached from serious artistic pursuits. I wonder if he is still in Rochester NY. |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: GUEST Date: 10 Nov 12 - 01:46 PM As far as I know, Danny Spillane still lives in Rochester. I heard that he had been a wonderful artist and had gone to Cornell University. He had been married and had a daughter. I saw Danny about a year ago walking down the street, very thin, but it was definitely Danny's walk. It's too bad he never got the help he needed for his mental illness. |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs From: Henry Krinkle Date: 10 Nov 12 - 02:15 PM Condolences to the family. =(:-( I) |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs-2006 From: Charley Noble Date: 10 Nov 12 - 03:01 PM I The Jury was certainly an eye-opener for me when I first got hold of a copy as a teenager. Wasn't there a movie as well? Charley Noble |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs-2006 From: Elmore Date: 10 Nov 12 - 07:46 PM I the Jury was a 1982 flick starring Armand Assante which got mixed reviews. |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs-2006 From: John on the Sunset Coast Date: 10 Nov 12 - 08:15 PM "I, The Jury" was first filmed in the early 1950s in 3D. It starred Biff Elliot(t), a journeyman actor, Peggy Castle as the femme fetale. Biff was the brother of Win Elliot(t) a TV/radio sports (mostly boxing) commentator during that period. It occasionally turns up on TV, but not in 3D. |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs-2006 From: Little Hawk Date: 10 Nov 12 - 10:15 PM Mike Hammer was pretty crude. If he and Chongo had ever met, one of them would have very soon ended up dead. Chongo can tolerate a lot of macho posturing, but he draws the line at outright crudity...specially regarding females. |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs-2006 From: Sandy Mc Lean Date: 10 Nov 12 - 11:39 PM I'm on vacation in Myrtle Beach and was in Murrells Inlet today and can confirm that Mike Hammer was not seen. :-} |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs-2006 From: MarkS Date: 11 Nov 12 - 07:15 PM I used to sneak the Mike Hammer books from my dads room. One hellofa way for and adolescent guy to learn about the world, but dated by todays standards. My favorite "Hammerisim" "The old guy took off like a herd of turtles." Mark ps: Dad was pissed but got over it. |
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Subject: RE: Obit: Micky Spillane sleeps with the fishs-2006 From: Charley Noble Date: 11 Nov 12 - 08:44 PM MarkS- I can identify with that. I don't think my parents were aware that I was avidly reading their erotic detective stories. Charley Noble |
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