Word: mickeys
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...then Mickey Spillane, who died this week at 88, was not your typical novelist. He had the burly look of a longshoreman; his face was meaty, like his prose style. And Mickey - that's a name to put in a cartoon, not on august hard covers. He also slipped a Mickey to the image of the serious fiction writer, showing a brisk contempt for the elevated anguish of creating literature. In just five years, between 1947 and 1952, he served up seven novels: I, the Jury; My Gun Is Quick; Vengeance Is Mine!; One Lonely Night; The Big Kill; Kiss...
...parody the comic's way of showing envy, then Spillane was a signal success. A Life cover line on Spillane read: "13,000,000 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...
...trouble of a trial by executing the villain himself." The jolt this character gave to literature, by being both so brutal and so popular, was immediate and lasting. "We were a very puritan nation right up through the 1950s," says novelist Loren Estleman. "I think it was people like Mickey Spillane, getting out there and effectively butting his head against the wall that made those walls collapse...
...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...
...pushes buttons for many people. It?s a show that made one think about the past in a certain way. Anyone who watched could see I was a fan of Howdy Doody and the Mickey Mouse Club. It was designed to be a show that kids could watch with their parents. Parents didn?t have to feel, ?Oy, I have to watch this horrible show.? It was gratifying over the years to hear parents say that they watched with their kids and loved...