Word: hammerism
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...Crime writer Lawrence Block believes Spillane did more than spice up a genre; he created a format that bridged midcult and low art, print and picture. Block notes that Hammer "was originally intended as a comic-strip hero. The fast cuts, the in-your-face immediacy, and the clear-cut, no-shades-of-gray, good-versus-evil story lines of the Mike Hammer novels come straight out of the comic-book world. Mickey Spillane was writing something else - comic books for grown-ups." I, the Jury, then, can lay claim to being the first graphic novel, just without illustrations...
...pulps, though they contained some of the most vigorous writing around. Few critics defended Spillane, even to establish their contrarian credentials by going against the genteel grain. (Spillane's one cheerleader among serious novelists was Ayn Rand, a dogmatic right-winger. That didn't help sway the establishment.) Hammer, who dominated the mass book market in the early '50s as monopolistically as Harry Potter did a half-century later, couldn't be ignored and, dammit, wouldn't be praised. He was both unavoidable and indefensible...
...shifted to comics, composing the two-page prose fillers that were oddly required by law. During the war he spend four years teaching pilots how to fly and left a Captain, returning to New York. Before the war he had peddled a comic-book character named Mike Danger, the Hammer prototype. Now he updated it, fleshing it out with traits of a Marine friend, Jack Stang (whom he later proposed should star as Hammer, even directing a short film with Stang in the role, but it didn't take.) He also gave Hammer a contact in the police force, Captain...
...That gave him the makings, and suddenly he had a motive. "I had to get out of New York City," he says in Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane. "I couldn't stand that place." So he moved up to Newburgh and, when told a home he wanted to build would cost $1,000, speed-wrote I, the Jury. The hardback version, published by E.P. Dutton, sold OK, nothing special, about 20,000 copies. But when issued in paperback in late 1948, the book stoked a furor. (The year's other literary sensation that year was Spillane's polar opposite...
...snapped shut like a jackknife. I opened him up again with an openhanded slap that left a blush across his mouth that was going to stay for a while." Mike unholsters his .45 and "just for effect I stuck it up against his forehead and thumbed back the hammer. It made a sharp click in the silence...