Mike Hammer Creator, Mickey Spillane, Dies Aged 88

Mickey Spillane, the novelist who created the hardboiled detective Mike Hammer and who called his own books "the chewing-gum of American literature", has died at the age of 88.

Critics routinely despaired of his lurid, violent plots, but he sold 130m copies of what became 13 classic works of pulp fiction, including My Gun Is Quick, The Big Kill, Vengeance Is Mine and Kiss Me, Deadly, and inspired several film and television adaptations.

"Thanks, Mickey, for giving the world so much pleasure," Stacy Keach, who portrayed Hammer on television in the 1980s, said. "We shall miss you, but we are comforted by the knowledge that your work and Mike Hammer will live forever."

Spillane's protagonists were generally driven to vengeful rage by criminal wrongdoing but hardly above indulging in their own episodes of violence, rendered by the author in loving detail.

"I snapped the side of the rod across his jaw and laid the flesh open to the bone," Spillane's narrator relates in The Big Kill. "I pounded his teeth back into his mouth with the end of the barrel ... and I took my own damn time about kicking him in the face. He smashed into the door and lay there bubbling. So I kicked him again and he stopped bubbling."

Frank Morrison Spillane, nicknamed Mickey by his father, grew up in Brooklyn and New Jersey, gritty environments comparable to the settings of his fiction. But in the 1950s, with his career at its height, he opted for a quieter lifestyle on the South Carolina coast, where he lived until his death on Monday.

Critical disdain did not appear to ruffle him. "I'm not writing for the critics," he once told an interviewer. "I have no fans," he insisted. "You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends."