"Mike Hammer" Mickey Spillane Signed 3X5 Color Photo COA

Description: Up for auction "Mike Hammer" Mickey Spillane Hand Signed 3X5 Color Photo. This item is authenticated By Todd Mueller Autographs and comes with their certificate of authenticity. ES-6817 Frank Morrison Spillane (/spɪˈleɪn/; March 9, 1918 – July 17, 2006), better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American crime novelist, whose stories often feature his signature detective character, Mike Hammer. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally. Spillane was also an occasional actor, once even playing Hammer himself. Frank Morrison Spillane was born March 9, 1918, in Brooklyn, New York City, 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 lifeguard 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. He was first stationed at the air base in Greenwood, Mississippi, where he met and married first wife Mary Ann Pearce in 1945.[7] He also met two younger writers, Earle Basinsky and Charlie Wells, who would become his protégés; each published two hardboiled-noir novels in the Spillane style in the early 1950s. Spillane joined the United States Army Air Corps 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 town of Newburgh, New York, 60 miles north of New York City, so Spillane decided to boost his bank account by writing a novel. He wrote I, the Jury in just 9 days. 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 6-1/2 million copies in the United States alone. I, the Jury introduced Spillane's most famous character, hardboiled detective Mike Hammer. Although tame by some standards, his novels featured more sex than competing titles, and the violence was more overt than the usual detective story. Covers tended to feature scantily-dressed women or women who appeared as if they were about to undress. In the beginning, Mike Hammer's chief nemesis consisted of gangsters, but by the early '50s, this broadened to communists and deviants. 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," Spillane said in a 1984 interview. Two Mike Danger comic-book stories were published in 1954 without Spillane's knowledge, as well as one featuring Mike Lancer (1942). These were published with other material in "Byline: Mickey Spillane," edited by Max Allan Collins and Lynn F. Myers, Jr. (Crippen & Landru publishers, 2004).[ The Mike Hammer series proved hugely successful during the 1950s–60s, but the books were excoriated by the literary establishment. Malcolm Cowley of The New Republic called Spillane "a dangerous paranoid, sadist, and masochist" and even his own editors sometimes found his novels distasteful. Spillane for his part was unmoved by critics, saying "You can sell a lot more peanuts than caviar" and "The literary world is made of second rate writers writing about other second rate writers". Attractively low prices (25 cents for a paperback copy, later raised to 50 cents) helped sales, and the 1956 informative guide Sixty Years of Best Sellers found that the six novels Spillane had written up to that point were among the top ten best selling American fiction titles of all time. The Signet paperbacks displayed dramatic front cover illustrations. Lou Kimmel created the cover paintings for My Gun Is Quick, Vengeance Is Mine, One Lonely Night and The Long Wait. The cover art for Kiss Me, Deadly was by James Meese.

Price: 69.99 USD

Location: Fort Lauderdale, Florida

End Time: 2024-11-30T21:34:14.000Z

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