9 March: Mickey Spillane

Mickey Spillane, crime writer, was born on this date in 1918. 10 facts about him:

1. His real name was Frank Morrison Spillane. He was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was an only child and his father was a bartender.

2. Before finding success as a writer, he worked as a lifeguard and also as a trampoline artist and a human cannonball. He also worked briefly for the FBI, working undercover to crack a narcotics ring.

3. In the 1940s he was writing stories for comic books. He scripted stories about Superman, Batman and Captain America.

4. He joined the army soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor and became a flight instructor. It was during his time in the army that he met his first wife, Mary Ann Pearce. The couple married in 1945 and divorced in 1962. In 1965 he married a singer called Sherri Malinou (who first came to his attention when she was a model for one of his book covers). They divorced in 1983 and in the same year he married wife number three, Jane Rogers Johnson.

5. It was wanting to buy a nice country home to live in with Mary Ann that prompted him to write his first novel, I, the Jury which was completed in just 9 days. It was also the first novel to feature the detective Mike Hammer. It did well, selling over six million copies.

6. He was an actor, too. He played himself, as a detective, in a film called Ring of Fear in 1954, and also played his character, Mike Hammer, in The Girl Hunters in 1963. He also played a writer who was a murder victim on an episode of Columbo.

7. Although his hard boiled detective novels were known for their sex and violence, Spillane also wrote a couple of novels for children. The Day the Sea Rolled Back and The Ship That Never Was. He wrote the first because his publisher dared him to write something for kids, and when it won an award, he wrote the second.

8. He became a Jehovah’s Witness in the early 1950s and at that point took ten years off from writing as he was able to live off the royalties of his books so far. Until his 80s, he was going round knocking on doors and giving out copies of The Watchtower.

9. In 1983, Spillane received the lifetime achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and in 1995 he received an Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award.

10. He died of cancer in 2006 at the age of 88.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/