July 18, 2006

Mickey Spillane, 1918 - 2006.

Mickey Spillane
US crime writer Mickey Spillane, who created the tough private eye Mike Hammer, has died at the age of 88.

The BBC.

Many Hammer books were made into movies, including the classic film noir Kiss Me, Deadly and The Girl Hunters, in which Spillane himself starred.

[...]

As a stylist Spillane was no innovator; the prose was hard-boiled boilerplate. In a typical scene, from The Big Kill, Hammer slugs 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."

The AP's Bruce Smith.

See also: a Mike Hammer site; books and writers; the Wikipedia entry; and Michael Carlson's interview for Crime Time.

Updates, 7/19: The Telegraph: "The Bible apart, he was the world's fifth most extensively-translated author after Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorky and Jules Verne. 'And they,' he once noted with evident satisfaction, 'are all dead.'"

C Jerry Kutner recalls 3-D noirs at Bright Lights.



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Posted by dwhudson at July 18, 2006 3:06 AM

Comments

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: Private Joker!

Private Joker: Sir, yes, sir!

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: Forty-two twelve, basic military journalism. You gotta be shitting me! You think you're Mickey Spillane? You think you're some kind of fucking writer?

Private Joker: Sir, I wrote for my high-school newspaper, sir!

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: Jesus H. Christ, Joker! You're not a writer, you're a killer!

Private Joker: A killer, yes sir!

Stanley Kubrick loved Spillane.

When I was a kid my mom got all his books. She love him! I remember seeing a picture she had of him signing her book at Woolworths or Ben Franklin 5 and Dime and there being ONLY women in the crowd at the signing. I didn't understand it.

Posted by: Jerry Lentz at July 18, 2006 5:17 AM

I love how Spillane cheerfully acknowledged the awfulness of his writing, and how even his father called it garbage. Here's to knowing yourself.

Posted by: Chris Barsanti at July 18, 2006 12:05 PM

His novel The Deep is his masterpiece and as far as I know has never been filmed.

Posted by: D. K. Holm at July 18, 2006 10:14 PM

And don't forget he played Hammer himself once in a film...

Posted by: James Russell at July 19, 2006 5:46 AM

Almost every story I heard or read mentioned Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly as the best adaptation of his books. I never encountered anyone saying that the reason for this is that the film completely subverts the book. Hammer (Ralph Meeker) is practically a fascist. He's a big, dumb thug who enjoys beating people up and going after women. He's wrong about almost everything in the case he's pursuing and is the last to find out about important information. Oh, and it ends with him slowly dying with a bullet in the guts, while an atomic explosion takes place a few yards away.

Posted by: The Pop View at July 20, 2006 1:52 PM

Perhaps the fact that Kiss Me Deadly 'completely subverts the book' is partly what makes the film so fascinating. Betraying the source generally works better than being faithful to the original in another medium.

Posted by: ronald bergan at July 23, 2006 8:13 AM

Above all i gonna miss him and his novels a lot!

Posted by: Nick Wilson at July 24, 2006 12:29 AM