Comic books
Spillane started as a writer for comic books. While working as a salesman in Gimbels department store basement in 1940, he met tie salesman Joe Gill, who later found a lifetime career in scripting for Charlton Comics. Gill told Spillane to meet his brother, Ray Gill, who wrote for Funnies, Inc., an outfit that packaged comic books for different publishers. Spillane soon began writing an eight-page story every day. He concocted adventures for major 1940s comic book characters, including Captain Marvel, Superman, Batman and Captain America. Two-page text stories, which he wrote in the mid-1940s for Timely Marvel, appeared under his name and were collected in
Primal Spillane (Gryphon Books, 2003).
Novels
Spillane joined the United States Army Air Forces 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 Newburgh, New York, 60 miles north of New York City, so Spillane decided to boost his bank account by writing a novel. In 19 days he wrote
I, the Jury. 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 six and a half million copies in the United States alone.
I, the Jury introduced Spillane's most famous character, hardboiled detective Mike Hammer. Although tame by current standards, his novels featured more sex than competing titles, and the violence was more overt than the usual detective story. An early version of Spillane's Mike Hammer character, called Mike Danger, was submitted in a script for a detective-themed comic book. " 'Mike Hammer originally started out to be a comic book. I was gonna have a Mike Danger comic book,' [Spillane] said in a 1984 interview." Two Mike Danger comic-book stories were published in 1954 without Spillane's knowledge, as well as one featuring Mike Lancer (1942), were published with other material in "Byline: Mickey Spillane," edited by Max Allan Collins and Lynn F. Myers, Jr. (Crippen & Landru publishers, 2004).
The Signet paperbacks displayed dramatic front cover illustrations. Lou Kimmel did the cover paintings for
My Gun Is Quick,
Vengeance Is Mine,
One Lonely Night and
The Long Wait. The cover art for
Kiss Me, Deadly was by James Meese.
All novels
- 1947 I, the Jury - Mike Hammer
- 1950 My Gun Is Quick - Mike Hammer
- 1950 Vengeance Is Mine! - Mike Hammer
- 1951 The Big Kill - Mike Hammer
- 1951 The Long Wait
- 1951 One Lonely Night - Mike Hammer
- 1952 Kiss Me, Deadly - Mike Hammer
- 1961 The Deep
- 1962 The Girl Hunters - Mike Hammer
- 1964 Day of the Guns - Tiger Mann
- 1964 The Snake - Mike Hammer
- 1965 Bloody Sunrise - Tiger Mann
- 1965 The Death Dealers - Tiger Mann
- 1966 The By-Pass Control - Tiger Mann
- 1966 The Twisted Thing - Mike Hammer
- 1967 The Body Lovers - Mike Hammer
- 1967 The Delta Factor
- 1970 Survival Zero - Mike Hammer
- 1972 The Erection Set - a Dogeron Kelly novel; in the Jaqueline Susanne mold
- 1973 The Last Cop Out - written in the third person
- 1982 The Ship That Never Was - young adult
- 1989 The Killing Man - Mike Hammer
- 1996 Black Alley - Mike Hammer
- 2003 Something Down There - featuring semi-retired spy Mako Hooker
- 2007 Dead Street
- 2008 The Goliath Bone - Mike Hammer; completed by Max Allan Collins