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A3C Michael Bell (Unit Historian)
to remember
Spillane, Frank Morrison, 1st Lt.
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Contact Info
Home Town Brooklyn, NY
Last Address Murrells Inlet, SC
Date of Passing Jul 17, 2006
Wall/Plot Coordinates Ashes scattered in a creek near his home in SC.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Spillane was the only child of his Irish bartender father, John Joseph Spillane, and his Scottish mother, Catherine Anne. Spillane attended Erasmus Hall High School, graduating in 1935. He started writing while in high school, briefly attended Fort Hays State College in Kansas and worked a variety of jobs, including summers as a life-guard at Breezy Point, Queens, and a period as a trampoline artist for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
During World War II Spillane enlisted in the Army Air Corps becoming a fighter pilot and a flight instructor. In 1951, Spillane became a Jehovah's Witness.
Mickey and Mary Ann Spillane had four children (Caroline, Kathy, Michael, Ward), and their marriage ended in 1962. In November 1965, he married his second wife, nightclub singer Sherri Malinou. After that marriage ended in divorce (and a lawsuit) in 1983, Spillane shared his waterfront house in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, with his third wife, Jane Rogers Johnson, whom he married in October 1983. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo ravaged his Murrells Inlet house to such a degree it had to be almost entirely reconstructed. A televisual interview showed Spillane standing in the ruins of his house. He received an Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award in 1995. Spillane's novels went out of print, but in 2001, the New American Library began reissuing them.
Spillane died July 17, 2006 at his home in Murrells Inlet, of pancreatic carcinoma. After his death, his friend and literary executor, Max Allan Collins, began the task of editing and completing Spillane's unpublished typescripts, beginning with a Mike Hammer novel, "The Goliath Bone" (2008).
Writing career
Comic books
Spillane started as a writer for comic books. While working as a salesman in Gimbel's 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).
Mike Hammer
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,' Hammer [sic] said in a 1984 interview." Two Mike Danger comic-book stories (1954, published 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)
Other Comments:
Greenwood Army Airfield, Greenwood
Eastern Flying Training Command
Army Air Forces Flying School (Basic)
7th Basic Flying Training Group
Reassigned to Air Transport Command (1945)
Selected bibliography
Date
Not Specified
Last Updated: Mar 17, 2013
Comments
Selected bibliography:
I, THE JURY, 1947 - film 1953, dir. by Harry Essex, starring Biff Elliot as Hammer; film 1982, dir. by Richard T. Heffron, starring Armand Assante
MY GUN IS QUICK, 1950- film 1957, dir. by Phil Victor, starring Robert Bray
VENGEANCE IS MINE, 1950
THE BIG KILL, 1951
THE LONG WAIT, 1951
ONE LONELY NIGHT, 1952
KISS ME, DEADLY, 1952 - film 1955, dir. by Robert Aldrich, starring Ralph Meeker. In the film version, Hammer is "just a punk, motivated only by a narcissistic opportunism. When his assistance is sought by the police, he can only reply, "What's in it for me?" He assaults everyone, caring little for age, gender, and nationality, and its significant that his abuse of the faithful Velda (Maxine Cooper), a caring, sensitive woman, parallels the abuse of Lily (Gaby Rogers) by Dr. Soberin (Allen Dekker)." (from Novels into Film by John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh, 1999)
THE DEEP, 1961
THE GIRL HUNTERS, 1962 - film 1963, dir. by Ray Rowland
ME, HOOD!, 1963
RETURN OF THE HOOD, 1964
THE FLIER, 1964
DAY OF THE GUNS, 1964
BLOODY SUNRISE, 1965
THE SNAKE, 1965 KILLER MINE, 1965 (novelettes)
THE TWISTED THING, 1966
THE DEATH DEALERS, 1966
THE DELTA FACTOR, 1967
THE BY-PASS CONTROL, 1967
THE BODY LOVERS, 1967 Mike Hammer
THE TOUGH GUYS, 1969
SURVIVAL... ZERO, 1970
THE ERECTION SET, 1972 - New York - New York
THE MICKEY SPILLANE OMNIBUS, 1973
THE LAST COP OUT, 1973
VINTAGE SPILLANE, 1974
THE DAY THE SEA ROLLED BACK, 1980 (juvenile)
THE SHIP THAT NEVER WAS, 1982 (juvenile)
MICKEY SPILLANE'S MIKE HAMMER: THE COMIC STRIP, 1982-84
TOMORROW I DIE, 1984
THE KILLING MAN, 1989 - Mike Hammer
ed.: MURDER IS MY BUSINESS, 1994 (with Max Allan Collins)
BLACK ALLEY, 1996
ed.: VENGEANCE IS HERS, 1997 (with Max Allan Collins)
ed.: GOLDEN AGE OF MARVEL COMICS, 1998
ed.: PRIVATE EYES, 1998 (with Max Allan Collins)
ed.: A CENTURY OF NOIR, 2002 (with Max Allan Collins)
SOMETHING'S DOWN THERE, 2003
BYLINE: MICKEY SPILLANE, 2005 (ed. by Max Allan Collins, Lynn F. Myers, Jr.)