This day in history: Crime novelist Mickey Spillane was born on this day in 1918. Spillane's stories often feature his signature detective character, Mike Hammer and more than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally.
Spillane joined the United States Army Air Corps on December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. 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 country house in the town of Newburgh, New York, 60 miles north of New York City, so Spillane decided to boost his bank account by writing a novel. He wrote I, the Jury in just 9 days. At the suggestion of Ray Gill, he sent it to E. P. Dutton.
With the combined total of the 1947 hardcover and the Signet paperback (December 1948), I, the Jury sold 6-1/2 million copies in the United States alone. I, the Jury introduced Spillane's most famous character, hardboiled detective Mike Hammer. Although tame by some standards, his novels featured more sex than competing titles, and the violence was more overt than the usual detective story. Covers tended to feature scantily dressed women or women who appeared as if they were about to undress. In the beginning, Mike Hammer's chief nemeses consisted of gangsters, but by the early '50s, this broadened to communists and deviants.
Critics were hard on his style of writing, but he gained a big fan in Ayn Rand. In fact, they became friends. She considered him an underrated if uneven stylist and found congenial the black-and-white morality of the Hammer stories. Spillane's thoroughly enjoyed Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Both authors were fervently anti-Communist.
Spillane became one of Jehovah's Witnesses in the 1950's and even became a Ministerial Servant. However, one wonders if his style of writing clashed with the Witnesses sense of morality, as he was disfellowshipped several times only to be reinstated later on.
