Word: mike
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...just five years, between 1947 and 1952, he served up seven novels: I, the Jury; My Gun Is Quick; Vengeance Is Mine!; One Lonely Night; The Big Kill; Kiss Me, Deadly; and the non-Hammer story The Long Wait. (The six Hammers are collected in two volumes of The Mike Hammer Collection.) By the mid-50s, those seven titles were among the ten all-time best-sellers. When his critics deplored this stat, Spillane riposted, "Aaah, you're lucky I didn't write three more...
...fists: TIME in 1952 called his stuff "sexy drivel." But anyone could see that the man's books had socko starts and knockout endings. I, the Jury begins with Hammer finding his best war buddy, who had literally (everything's literal in Spillane) given his right arm to save Mike, dead on his apartment floor with a grapefruit-size hole in his gut. Hammer swears revenge. But first, for purposes of evidence or exercise or fun, he beats up a plethora of punks, the bouts described with a grisly precision and brio that still startle. ("I swung on him with...
...Mike Hammer was not your typical gumshoe - at least, not when he made his debut, in I, the Jury, in 1947. A hero with thug tendencies, or a sociopath who fancied himself a hero, Hammer beat up people who got in his way, consistently misled his protector on the police force and, rather than turn the murderer over to the authorities, killed first and asked questions never. He was the bane of civilized society, in books that described his trespasses in lurid detail and shocked nearly as many millions as savored them...
...Books of Sex and Slaughter." He didn't exactly invent the paperback market, but he certified their status as the main format for popular fiction. "Mickey Spillane's contribution is far beyond mystery or crime writing," crime-book editor Martin Greenberg says in the affectionate and impressive documentary Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane (available as part of the three-disc set Max Allan Collins' Black Box). "I think he's a phenomenon in regard to the whole explosion of the mass-market paperback, and was probably its first great star." Spillane's popularity spawned a generation of tough-guy, "paperback...
...Collins directed and co-authored One Lonely Knight, the only book-length study of Spillane. Collins credits Spillane with creating, in Hammer "the template for James Bond, Dirty Harry, Billy Jack, Rambo, John Shaft, and countless other fictional tough guys." (When TIME reviewed Casino Royale, it praised Bond as "Mike Hammer in gentleman's clothing...