Word: mikes
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...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...
...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...
...slick magazines, then 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...
...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...