MICKEY SPILLANE

Mickey Spillane was one of the best-selling fiction authors ever, primarily with his series of gritty pulp fiction crime detective novels, many of them starring "Mike Hammer". He was a department store salesman in 1940 when he discovered he could sell stories for comic books, and he quickly wrote for all the major companies. After Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Air Force and became a fighter pilot. After the war, he wrote "I, the Jury" in 19 days, and it was published in 1947, and it sold 6.5 million copies in the U.S. alone. Its hero, Mike Hammer, a hard-boiled private eye, would appear in many more novels. Spillane would write for the movies, and he even played Mike Hammer in "The Girl Hunters" in 1963! Spillane passed away in 2006 at the age of 88.