So I kicked him again and he stopped bubbling.' He smashed into the door and lay there bubbling. and I took my own damn time about kicking him in the face. I pounded his teeth back into his mouth with the end of the barrel. In one typical passage from 'The Big Kill,' Hammer narrates: 'I snapped the side of the rod across his jaw and laid the flesh open to the bone. Spillane spun out six novels in the next five years, among them 'My Gun Is Quick,' 'The Big Kill,' 'One Lonely Night' and 'Kiss Me, Deadly.' Most concerned Hammer, his faithful sidekick, Velda, and the police homicide captain Pat Chambers, who acknowledges that Hammer's style of vigilante justice is often better suited than the law to dispatching criminals. The book, in which Hammer pursues a murderous narcotics ring led by a curvaceous female psychiatrist, went on to sell more than 1 million copies. Spillane's publisher, was skeptical of the book's literary merit but conceded it would probably be a smash with postwar readers looking for ready action. Spillane was a struggling comic book publisher when he wrote 'I, the Jury.' He initially envisioned it as a comic book called 'Mike Danger,' and when that did not go over, he took a week to reconfigure it as a novel.Įven the editor in chief of E.P.

Even his father, a Brooklyn bartender, called them 'crud.' Spillane sold hundreds of millions of books during his lifetime and garnered consistently scathing reviews. Starting with 'I, the Jury,' in 1947, Mr. It was once tallied that he offed 58 people in six novels. His writing style was characterized by short words, lightning transitions, gruff sex and violent endings. His specialty was tight-fisted, sadistic revenge stories, often featuring his alcoholic gumshoe Mike Hammer and a cast of evildoers who launder money or spout the Communist Party line. Mickey Spillane, 88, who died July 17 in Murrells Inlet, S.C., was one of the world's most popular mystery writers.

One lonely night by mickey spillane