Mickey Spillane: Keeping You in Suspense

Frank Morrison "Mickey" Spillane (1918-2006) was the author of 20+ suspense novels, many featuring his .45 -wielding hero Mike Hammer.

I was fortunate to chat with him in 1983 for Satellite Orbit magazine. Find out why he always started his novels--at the end.

by Hank Nuwer

Slippin' You a Mickey (Spillane stock photo)

NUWER: Characters such as Mike Hammer are larger than life. Does it help you to know larger than life people in real life to create characters like [him]?

SPILLANE: People aren't larger than life. People are life themselves. Everybody is a little bit different. I usually develop everything in my books around situations that I have been involved in, then I enlarge them. You don't need to use things right out of the mainstream. You have to build them up a little bit.

NUWER: Have you ever tired of Mike Hammer? Agatha Christie was almost sick to death of Hercule Poirot by the end.


SPILLANE: I can understand that. I know exactly how she felt, because that's why I laid off. You can start to over-characterize, and you get to know something to a point where it gets to be not a happy feeling when you're writing. When you're that close to a character, there's not much you can do with him.

NUWER: Have you ever been tempted to kill off Mike Hammer?

SPILLANE: Noooo! That's my bread-and-butter, man. (laughter)

NUWER: Mike Hammer is and was loved by so many people. Is a good part of his  appeal that many of us would like to take the law into our own hands, do you think?

SPILLANE: No. no. He's just a hero type. He doesn't take the law into his own hands. He does things--he did things, at least--in a different way. Don't forget, now, this is a fantasy character, not actual, although I've seen a lot of real people that are close to being like him. But it's just something that people read about; it's satisfying.

NUWER: If you had to rewrite the first Mike Hammer book, I the Jury, would it be the same?

SPILLANE: I can't write that way anymore. As you get older, you have more experiences, more knowledge, more background, and you change your style. When I was doing the first Mike Hammer, I was 28 years old. I'm a lot older now. Everything I do today would be different--a lot better, I'll tell you that.

NUWER: How do you come up with your titles?

SPILLANE: Usually they just pop up. They're there all of a sudden, the same way I write a story. I conceive of a story not piece by piece, but the entire thing in one shot.

NUWER: It doesn't develop? You have the whole thing outlined ahead of time?

SPILLANE: I get the ending first. When you get the ending, you've got the whole thing.

NUWER: Would it be a mistake for folks to assume there's a lot of your character evident in Mike Hammer's character?

SPILLANE: Writing is a fantasy situation, really, but people don't remember that. There's a lot of scenes, however, a lot of situations that are real, that really happened to me. Those are things that you take and elaborate on and build up the way you wish they had gone. You can shake hands with a beautiful girl, but that's not wrapping her in your arms and kissing her.

NUWER: Do women read your books?

SPILLANE: Oh, 50 percent of my readers are women. Publishers figure about 60 percent of [all] book buyers are women, because women have access to the bookstores more than men have.

NUWER: Is it true that John Wayne once gave you a Jaguar?

SPILLANE: Oh, yeah. That was a while ago. It was in 1956. I rewrote a movie [screenplay] called Ring of Fear for him. The Jaguar was like a big thank-you note. They didn't want to embarrass me by giving me more money, because I had even played in the picture. They knew I had been looking at these Jaguars out there, mainly because they were pretty little automobiles. I kept looking at them in the window. And then I woke one day, and there was a lovely car outside my door with a thank-you note tied to a big red ribbon. The note said, "Thanks, Duke."

NUWER: Do you like being with your sports heroes in those [Lite] commercials?

SPILLANE: We're all somebody's hero.