21 Facts About Mickey Spillane

Frank Morrison Spillane, better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American crime novelist, whose stories often feature his signature detective character, Mike Hammer.

Mickey Spillane started writing while in high school, briefly attended Fort Hays State College in Kansas and worked a variety of jobs, including summers as a lifeguard at Breezy Point, Queens, and a period as a trampoline artist for the Ringling Bros.

Mickey Spillane was first stationed at the air base in Greenwood, Mississippi, where he met and married first wife Mary Ann Pearce in 1945.

Mickey Spillane met two younger writers, Earle Basinsky and Charlie Wells, who would become his proteges; each published two hardboiled-noir novels in the Spillane style in the early 1950s.

Gill told Mickey Spillane to meet his brother, Ray Gill, who wrote for Funnies Inc.

Mickey Spillane concocted adventures for major 1940s comic book characters, including Captain Marvel, Superman, Batman, and Captain America.

At one point, Mickey Spillane estimated he wrote fifty of these "short-short stories," which were intended to fulfill a postal regulation requiring comic books to have at least two pages of text to qualify for a second-class mailing permit.

Mickey Spillane joined the United States Army Air Corps on December 8,1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The couple wanted to buy a country house in the town of Newburgh, New York, 60 miles north of New York City, so Mickey Spillane decided to boost his bank account by writing a novel.

Mickey Spillane portrayed himself as a detective in Ring of Fear, and rewrote the film without credit for John Wayne's and Robert Fellows's Wayne-Fellows Productions.

Mickey Spillane was scheduled to film The Snake as a follow-up, but the film was never made.

On October 25,1956, Mickey Spillane appeared on The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, with interest on his Mike Hammer novels.

In 1969, Mickey Spillane formed a production company with Robert Fellows who had produced The Girl Hunters to produce many of his books, but Fellows died soon after and only The Delta Factor was produced.

Mickey Spillane considered him an underrated if uneven stylist and found congenial the black-and-white morality of the Hammer stories.

German painter Markus Lupertz claimed that Mickey Spillane's writing influenced his own work, saying that Mickey Spillane ranks as one of the major poets of the 20th century.

In 1983, Mickey Spillane received the lifetime achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America.

Mickey Spillane received an Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award in 1995.

Mickey Spillane shared his waterfront house in Murrells Inlet with his third wife, Jane Rogers Johnson, and her two daughters, Jennifer and Margaret Johnson.

Later in his life, Mickey Spillane became an active Jehovah's Witness.

Mickey Spillane died July 17,2006, at his home in Murrells Inlet, of pancreatic cancer.

The proposal first passed the Georgetown County Council in 2006 while Mickey Spillane was still alive, but the South Carolina General Assembly rejected the plan.