MICKEY SPILLANE'S PULP SENSATION

With the 1947 introduction of Mike Hammer, his private-eye hero, Mickey Spillane sent America into a pulp-fiction frenzy. The critics savaged him. His work was deplored in the Senate. And the public couldn't get enough. CLIFF ROTHMAN tracks down the mystery man, who at 85 has two new books and the same hard-boiled attitude

Mickey Spillane, the World War II veteran who stunned literary America in 1947 with his first book, I, the Jury—written nights, he claimed, in less than three weeks in a tent by the light of a Coleman lamp—is back, with two new mystery novels. I, the Jury, together with his next five books, sold more than 13 million copies, and Spillane and his tough private-eye hero, Mike Hammer, established a whole new macho vocabulary in the detective genre: "I'm alone. I can slap someone in the puss and they can't do a damn thing.... Cops can't break a guy's arm to make him talk, and they can't shove his teeth in with the muzzle of a .45 to remind him that you aren't fooling."

Spillane is 85 this year, and one of the new books transports Mike Hammer to the post-9/11 high-tech age. The other, out this month from Simon & Schuster, is a mystery titled Something's Down There. Spillane, who has published 24 mysteries since 1947, still types with two fingers. His brush cut, unchanged since Eisenhower was president, is now white, but with his boxer's body and intense blue eyes he has a disconcerting sex appeal. His home is a palatial house at the end of a road in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, where he has lived on and off since the early 50s, currently with his third wife, Jane Rodgers Johnson, a former runner-up for Miss South Carolina.

"I DIDN'T CARE WHAT THE REVIEWERS SAID. IT NEVER BOTHERED ME. I THOUGHT, JUST WAIT."

Though he may have once been the moral scourge of American letters, today he is an active Jehovah's Witness. He doesn't drink or smoke any longer, and he teaches Bible classes and goes from door to door proselytizing. "I have one Bible student a week now," he says. "My other Bible student just got baptized." A reformed sinner, he tells me he didn't have sex with his wife until after they were married. "Sex on a first date? Stupid. You got a whore on your hands," he snaps.

Jane, a onetime actress who played Molly Brown in regional theater, walks into the study with the day's mail. "Someone's sent you a box of books," she says. Spillane gets stacks of mail from fans who cut across generations, from retired World War II servicemen who relish his books for nostalgia to the film noir buffs for whom Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich's 1955 black-and-white adaptation of the 1952 best-seller, is the holy grail.

No one has been more loyal than the mystery writer Max Allan Collins, who says he "never stopped bringing up" Spillane's name at meetings of the Mystery Writers of America. "I almost had a fistfight with someone over this once.... Mickey didn't share the critical blessing that Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and even James M. Cain had received. He was viewed as a hack and a vulgarian_Writers resented that he was a public figure and a celebrity," says Collins.

Spillane takes a perverse pleasure in the critical drubbing he received. "Do you know what I say to them? I say, Hee! Hee! Heel" He makes a high-pitched laughing sound and adds, "As long as they buy my books." He has read all the press about him, bad as well as good, and he can quote reviews from 50 years ago. "Anthony Boucher, the famous New York Times critic, finally took back all he said about me, after tearing me down for years. He said he could hardly wait for my next book to come out."

Spillane started out covering bootlegging scams and other bits of lowlife activity for the Elizabeth Daily Journal when he was in high school in New Jersey. "I'd make carbon copies of stories I was writing and turn one copy in as a school writing assignment."

His father was Irish Catholic and his mother Scottish Protestant. "u can imagine what a mixed-up situation that was," says Spillane, who was christened Frank Morrison Spillane. Joe Spillane tended bar and moved around from job to job, including one in a hardware store, where Mickey got his first glimpse of a typewriter. "I loved the sound it made. I used to type on it. I knew I was going to be a writer." He was eight or nine at the time.

One of his first jobs after high school was covering burlesque at the Apollo Theater in New York for an entertainment magazine. From there he moved on to comic books. In 1940 he was selling robes in Gimbels when a fellow salesman named Joe Gill introduced him to his brother, Ray, who worked for Funnies, Inc., one of the independent studios that churned out product for comic books. "My brother got him a job as an editor writing stories," says Joe Gill, who is still friends with Mickey 60 years later.

Before long Spillane was writing for some of the big-name features, including Captain Marvel, The Human Torch, and Bull's-Eye Bill. He produced stories in record time. "Soon after he came to work Spillane was turning out an eight-page comic story every day. Most writers needed three days to a week," Life magazine reported in the early 50s.

During World War II, Spillane enlisted in the air force and taught pilots in Greenwood, Mississippi, where he met his first wife, Mary Ann Pierce. "Every time I needed money during the war, I wrote something and sent it in," he says. The painter George Wilson remembers meeting Spillane as a 23-year-old fellow G.I.: "I thought he was a bullshitter, a Brooklyntype fast-talker. But I found out he was a pretty amiable guy." Wilson and Spillane eventually built a house together, and still spend time together every winter.

When the war was over, Spillane hooked up with Joe and Ray Gill, rented a store on Vandeveer Place in Brooklyn, and went into the comic-book business. With George Wilson he bought a hayfield in Newburgh, New York, in the foothills of the Catskills, and while they built a house on it they lived in a tent. "We didn't have an automobile, and we didn't have water, telephone, or electricity," Wlson recalls.

At night Spillane would sit in the tent, his typewriter perched on a wobbly table. He was determined to make the $1,000 they needed for materials for the house. He remembers the typewriter vividly, "an L.C. Smith with a backspace that didn't work and a couple of keys that were shot that I paid $ 15 for." He continues, "I was a guy on a definite mission. I needed the money. My buddy Joe Gill, I remember him picking up the pages. 'This is crappy writing. You think you're going to sell this?'" Spillane laughs. "I wanted to correct the errors," Gill remembers. "He says, 'You're not going to change a word of it.'"

CONTINUED ON PAGE 356

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 338

After several publishing houses turned the book down, Ray Gill gave it to an executive of a paper company who knew Roscoe Fawcett, one of the heads of Fawcett Publications. "Fawcett said it was great," says Spillane, "but they were not printing books, they were printing magazines. So Fawcett went to New American Library with a proposition: 'If you will print this book, I will distribute it.' But they said, 'We can't, because we don't have a hardcover book publisher.' So New American took my book to E. P. Dutton and told them, 'If you will print it, we will reprint.'"

The Dutton brass thought I, the Jury was terrible, says Spillane, but Nicholas Wreden, Dutton's editor in chief, said that even if it wasn't "in the best of taste" it would sell. To complicate matters, Spillane continued to refuse to let his work be edited. According to Gill, "He didn't want them to refine the guts out of the story." Spillane had his way, and I, the Jury went through as he wrote it.

The book came out and died. James Sandoe of the New York Herald Tribune called Spillane "an inept vulgarian." In The New Republic, Malcolm Cowley dismissed Mike Hammer as a dangerous paranoiac, a sadist, and a masochist. Spillane's lurid mystery, priced at $2.50, sold 7,000 copies. "I didn't care what the reviewers said," Spillane tells me. "It never bothered me. I thought, Just wait."

The tide turned when the paperback of I, the Jury was issued. On the cover was a seductive vixen unbuttoning her blouse, standing in front of a seated Mike Hammer, who was wearing a fedora. It cost 25 cents— later 35—and in one week, Spillane says, it sold a quarter of a million copies.

The style sometimes teetered into soft-edge porn: "Her dress was a tight-fitting blue silk jersey that clung to her like she was wet, concealing everything, yet revealing everything." The book also read in places like pure pulp: "I'm going to watch the killer's face. I'm going to plunk one right in his gut, and when he's dying on the floor I may kick his teeth out." The writing, however, was distilled through the jaded sensibility of a war veteran, which gave it a unique voice: "Go get them. Don't miss. If they try to run, kill the bastards. I don't care if I don't get them myself, so long as someone does. No glory. Justice."

The ending of the book broke all the rules. The killer turns out to be a woman, whom Mike Hammer loves, and he shoots her without mercy, looking right into her eyes, because she killed his buddy, and he has promised to avenge the murder.

"How c-could you?" she gasped.

I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.

"It was easy," I said.

"The more the critics ran me down," Spillane says, "the more the books sold."

He became the new sensation. Over the next four years he turned out six more books, all best-sellers: My Gun Is Quick and Vengeance Is Mine in 1950, The Big Kill, The Long Wait, and One Lonely Night in 1951, and Kiss Me, Deadly in 1952. He inscribed his parents' copy of the first edition of Vengeance Is Mine: "Dear Mom and Dad, Enough of these and we'll all have what we want—but I still say you aren't old enough to be reading this kind of literature. Your son, Mickey."

His style was rude and raw, on and off the page. He wore tight T-shirts and dungarees for photo sessions and was once likened to "a high-strung fox terrier." But you almost couldn't open a magazine or turn on your television without catching him. In June 1952, Life put his name on the cover. Then he played Hammer in a sketch on The Milton Berle Show, and he was one of the mystery guests on What's My Line? Spillane recalls, "One day a guy walks up to me and says, 'What a terrible commentary on the reading habits of the American public that you wrote 7 of the top 10 best-sellers.' I said, 'You're lucky I didn't write three more.' And then I did!"

About his new book, Something's Down There, Spillane is mum, but David Rosenthal, his publisher at Simon & Schuster, says it's about "a law-enforcement guy who has checked out of the service and is living in the Caribbean, where strange goings-on start to occur on a nearby island. It's both a whodunit and a what-done-it." When Philip Spitzer, Spillane's agent, first called him in the spring of 2002, Rosenthal says, he thought it might be a prank. "To be honest, I wasn't sure. But in that first conversation Phil assured me Mickey was alive." Rosenthal admits he "swooned at the possibility" of publishing a new work by Mickey Spillane.

Seven of Spillane's mysteries were among the 25 top-selling fiction titles of the 20th century. As Spillane puts it, "I was the fifth most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Jules Verne. And they're all dead."

Spillane's house, a big two-story affair, is a mix of dark wood-paneled walls, floral fabrics, and lots of Americana bric-a-brac. Every Christmas, Jane sets up an elaborate toy village, which she plans months in advance and which neighbors flock to see.

Spillane became an enemy of the left in the 50s, when an anti-Communist fervor increasingly crept into the Hammer series, but he has softened considerably. "I'm not a liberal or a conservative," he says. "Yeah, right," Jane says, correcting him. "He's as conservative as they come." Spillane regularly interrupts our conversation with pronouncements such as "I hate 'Doonesbury'—they always look like hippies, and I don't like hippies."

Jane is more political than Mickey. "If you come into this house and you're a Democrat, you're my wife's enemy," says Spillane. There's a Bush bumper sticker on Jane's S.U.V. "Katrina vanden Heuvel is a big socialist," she says of the editor of The Nation. "Was I a Reagan person? You bet. Did I like Clinton? No/"

Watching the couple, it's clear that Mickey is not the male supremacist he has often been accused of being. "He believes in the male heading up the household, but he believes in letting me do anything I want to," says Jane. "Someone in Beverly Hills walked up to me and said, 'How does it feel to be married to that male-chauvinist pig?' I said, 'I love every minute of it.'" She can easily hold her own against her spouse, who occasionally interjects sexist comments he knows are outrageous. "You remember when they'd send to Europe for a wife?" he asks me after she says something to irritate him.

Spillane doesn't censor himself in life any more than on the page. He and his daughter are having a rift during the period when I am in Murrells Inlet, where she also lives. He and his first wife, Mary Ann, according to their son Michael, "are on speaking terms—not great, but on speaking terms." She declines to be interviewed.

Spillane drives a Ford pickup. After dinner one night at a local landmark, a ramshackle waterfront seafood restaurant where Jane and Mickey had their wedding reception, we discover he left his lights on and his battery's dead. He gets the jumper cables and jumps it himself with a nearby car.

His books were ripe fodder for film, but, where Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett sought Tinseltown validation, Spillane wasn't looking for the Hollywood brass ring. "I got out of there as fast as I could," he says. "It was totally unreal-My ex-wife fit right in with all that stuff." Spillane is equally bitter about Hollywood and Sherri Malinou, his second wife, whom he married in 1964 and divorced acrimoniously in 1983.

The problem was that Spillane's pulpiness was anathema to major studios. Where Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe were interpreted by A-list actors—Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Robert Mitchum—Mike Hammer was relegated to such B actors as Biff Elliot, Ralph Meeker, and Spillane himself, who played the role in a British-produced version of The Girl Hunters in 1963.

I, the Jury and three more of Spillane's books were optioned by British producer Victor Saville. Spillane says sarcastically, "All he wanted to do was make enough money to make The Silver Chalice"—Paul Newman's film debut—"which was supposed to be the powerhouse."

"Mickey sold the rights to those first films and basically sold them in perpetuity and didn't really have any say with what happened," says producer Jay Bernstein, who later adapted Hammer for television. "He wasn't very happy with what happened. They were all B movies."

Spillane is still angry about how Saville mangled his books. "If he had made I, the Jury properly, he would have cleaned up. But they got everything wrong," he says. He imitates the director Harry Essex: "'I'm going to show Mickey Spillane how to write.' But he didn't know how to tell a story! He had this villain hitting Hammer over the head with a wooden coat hanger and knocking him out. It wouldn't even give Hammer a splinter. I squawked so long that Victor canned him. The picture stunk."

Spillane and Biff Elliot—who never played another leading role—were put up at the Chateau Marmont, where one of Spillane's favorite Hollywood moments occurred. "We're in the elevator. Biff has on white pants and a white shirt. Greta Garbo comes in the elevator, thinks he's a bellboy, and says, 'Would you mind getting my car?' She hands him her keys. Not missing a beat, Biff says, 'Yes, ma'am, right away.' She gives him a dollar and gets out of the elevator." Spillane laughs. "That's just what Mike Hammer would have done."

Spillane left Hollywood before production wrapped. He was not entirely immune to Hollywood glamour, however. He hobnobbed once, for instance, with Marlene Dietrich. "Yeah, it was exciting. I'm not a snob," he admits, almost sheepishly, then parodies himself: "'Whee, look who I just met!'" An evening out with Hedy Lamarr in Manhattan was the ultimate trophy date. "I took her to the Blue Ribbon, where Mike Hammer used to hang out. The place is frequented by cops and newspaper guys. And I walk in with Hedy Lamarr. The place turned upside down."

He also got along well with Hollywood's solid Republican contingent, especially John Wayne and James Stewart. Like Spillane, Stewart had served in the air force. "He was a flier, so was I. Nice guy." Lotharios such as Errol Flynn were of little interest to Spillane. "He wasn't my cup of tea. Errol Flynn was strange. I don't enjoy being with people like that. Actors. Everything is an act. It's stupid."

In the garage of Spillane's house is a classic 1956 white Jaguar convertible, a gift from John Wayne. In 1952, Wayne coproduced Ring of Fear, a circus picture about Clyde Beatty, the lion tamer and circus owner, in which Spillane was cast as himself in a featured role. When Wayne and Robert Fellows, the other producer, looked at the assembled footage, they panicked and called Spillane. "Duke and Bob said, 'We are going to lose all our money.' They didn't know what to do. I told them I knew where every mistake was on this picture." So they flew him back to Los Angeles.

"I got out there Thursday. They had put me up in the Beverly Hills Hotel, in a bungalow. I work Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I'm sitting in Duke's office, and Andy McLaglen, a big producer, walks in. 'How ya doing?' he says. 'Finished,' I say. He thinks I mean finished for the day. I mean, you don't write a movie in two and a half days. He says, 'When will you finish?' 'I told you. I'm finished.' So they go looking for a girl to retype the script. Somebody says to her, 'Honey, you want to make a hundred dollars fast?'" Spillane flips his hand in a sweeping arc. "It's true!"

He wouldn't accept money from Wayne for rewriting the script. "I'd already been paid to do the show," he says. "One day I'm sitting in my house in Newburgh. It's snowing, I look out the window, and there's a beautiful white Jaguar. He sent it to me. I used to look at the Jaguar in the window next to where we ate, at the Cock 'n Bull on Sunset. Wayne had it shipped on a boat from England, and he had a guy drive it to me. A white Jaguar XK140—$5,500, which was $1,000 more than the best Cadillac on the road."

Many writers resented Spillane because he wrote pulp unapologetically and left every other writer in the dust when it came to sales figures. Spillane has said that Hemingway boycotted a Florida restaurant after the owner put up a picture of Spillane. "He thought I was a lousy writer, and he didn't like the idea that I outsold him," Spillane recalls. After Hemingway wrote a negative piece about Spillane in Blue Book Magazine, he says, he knew just how to retaliate. "I was in Chicago doing a live TV show with a big audience, and I knew the host was going to bring it up. 'Did you see the article that Hemingway wrote about you?' he asked me. I said, 'Hemingway who?'" Spillane laughs gleefully.

Raymond Chandler was also appalled at Spillane's success. He wrote to a publicist in 1952, "Pulp writing at its worst was never as bad as this stuff. It isn't so very long since no decent publisher would have touched it. I suppose it won't be long until the Book of the Month Club selects a handsomely produced volume of French postcards as its contribution to the national culture. This Spillane stuff, so far as I can see, is nothing but a mixture of violence and outright pornography. He and his publishers have had the courage, if that is the correct word, to carry these a little further than anyone else without interference from the police."

Spillane found an unlikely champion in Ayn Rand, the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. They met at a dinner given by their mutual publisher and hit it off. "Ayn Rand used to tell me, 'There's no gray about you. You're all black and white,'" says Spillane. "We enjoyed each other's company. She had a thick Russian accent. We had many conversations, many lunches out. A lady saw us and said to her friend, 'That's Mickey Spillane and that's Ayn Rand.'" He grins, recalling the other woman's reaction: "'Oh, that cant be!'" Rand biographer Barbara Branden says that in a seminar Rand arranged she compared excerpts from three contemporary works: Atlas Shrugged, Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River, and I, the Jury.

Max Collins, who has co-edited several anthologies of mid-century detective fiction, believes that Spillane was the only mystery writer dealing with the scarred postwar psyche. "Hammett writes virtually nothing after World War II, and Chandler continues along on the same path that he established, also virtually untouched by the Second World War," says Collins. "So if you were to read, say, The Big Sleep and The Little Sister— one before the war, one after the war—the experience would be not radically different. Mickey is the guy who responds to World War II. He takes the private eye and the loss of innocence that America, and specifically the men who went to war, experienced, and enters popular culture."

Kiss Me Deadly, the film that was meant to expose Spillane as a crass sexist, is ironically the only famous Spillane film adaptation, and it has almost single-handedly kept his name alive for several generations of moviegoers who never read his books. The director, Robert Aldrich, a liberal who would later direct What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, was no fan of Spillane's. He took on Kiss Me Deadly principally to highlight Spillane's devious values as embodied in Mike Hammer, whom he called "cynical and fascistic." He told a reporter that he looked at Hammer with "utter contempt and loathing."

Aldrich was not alone. The French filmmaker Claude Chabrol damned Spillane even as he lauded Kiss Me Deadly in a 1955 essay in Cahiers du Cinema, saying that the film had created art "out of the worst material to be found, the most deplorable, the most nauseous product of a genre in a state of putrefaction: a Mickey Spillane story."

Spillane got it from all sides. To combat the rise of teenage crime in the 1950s, public hearings were held by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, and Spillane's name was mentioned as a culprit.

However, Aldrich's plan to discredit Spillane backfired. Kiss Me Deadly, while showing Hammer as malevolent and cruel, was a critical hit and the only film version of a Spillane book to be adapted by a cinematic artist. "That movie, which is ironically a left-wing take on Mickey Spillane, meant to put him down, has kept him talked about in circles where he might have been overlooked," says Collins. "It's a great movie. I put it very high, on the level of The Maltese Falcon and Chinatown."

In order to please Sherri, his second wife, Spillane rented a penthouse on East 57th Street in New York. "I hated that place. An agent found it. My wife wanted a career in show business." They didn't live there together for long. "She went out to California—good-bye."

Spillane remained in New York and hung out with Hy Gardner, the celebrity columnist for the New York Herald Tribune. One night they were at the Copacabana to catch the singer Julie London's act, and a local Mafia head joined them. "This Mafia guy sits through three sets. I sit through the three sets. Hy has gotten up to go to the bathroom. That same night someone is bumped off, and I become the alibi, because Hy left the table, so I'm the only one who was there the whole time."

Spillane says the police pressured him not to corroborate the Mafia chieftain's alibi. "They tell me they can nail him if I don't testify. 'He's scum,' they tell me. But I don't care if he's Adolf Hitler. He didn't leave the table."

A few weeks later, Spillane was in a restaurant, and a dark-haired man walked over. "He points to another table, and says"— Spillane assumes a thick Italian accent—'"He wants to talk to you.' Normally, I'd say, 'Tell him to come over here,' but I go."

"You're a good boy," Spillane says the Mafia don told him.

"First of all, don't call me boy."

The don ignored the impertinence. "You did a good thing. If ever you want anything done, just let me know."

Later, Spillane and Sherri's marriage ended for good. The day the divorce was final, she married the actor Michael Standing. Spillane was in Las Vegas, and a man walked up and whispered in his ear, "The boss is going to bump her off." Spillane panicked. "I say, 'No! No! Don't bump her off!"'

To this day, however, there's no love lost between the two. Three years after their divorce, Sherri sued unsuccessfully for part of his profits from the Mike Hammer works. When I tell Spillane I intend to interview Sherri in Los Angeles, he protests, but then relents, saying, "She should live to be a hundred—but right away." I call the agency where Sherri has represented minor celebrities for the past several years, but she cuts me off and hangs up. I phone her again and leave a message. Despite her description of Spillane, during the divorce proceedings, as "an alcoholic, a sexual pervert and a liar," I don't hear back from her.

Mickey Spillane's last burst of fame was the 1980s, when Miller Lite beer used his hard-boiled persona in a series of commercials, and Mike Hammer was resurrected for television by producer-manager Jay Bernstein.

Bernstein first got Spillane's attention by quoting a favorite line from Mike Hammer. "I met Mickey on an airplane," he remembers. "I was sitting next to him, and I said, 'She walked toward me, her hips waving a happy hello.' "

Spillane says he rolled his eyes. "Oh, Jesus, another fan, I thought. He's going to talk to me the whole time."

After a 20-minute silence, Bernstein tried again. "I said, 'Women stuck to Hammer like lint on a blue serge suit.' This time Mickey laughed. Then we started talking." Bernstein suggested that Hammer could work on television, but Spillane wasn't interested. "'Look, I have no interest in Hollywood. I don't like those people there,'" Bernstein says Spillane told him. But by the time they landed they had made a deal, which led to three Hammer series and six television movies.

Best-selling crime novelist Donald Westlake has witnessed firsthand the arc of Spillane's redemption within the Mystery Writers of America, from being a pariah for years to receiving the organization's Edgar Award in 1995. Though he credits Spillane with breathing life into one-dimensional detective heroes, he doubts that Spillane is ready for a major revival: "Mickey Spillane exists in his own time, and I don't think he's readable now. There's an awkwardness and fear of women that he clothes with tough-guy talk. But as time goes by, you say, 'It's awkwardness and fear. That's the bone that's been exposed.'"

Crime-fiction expert and Case Western Reserve University professor William Marling is even blunter. "I think of Spillane in the same mental take with Roy Lichtenstein and those cartoon blowups, where you see the dots. Spillane is that kind of a writer in that he takes what's already become a cultural cliche, emphasizes it, and puts it right in front of your eye.... That's the most useful way I have found of thinking of Spillane, other than saying that he's an anticommunist, paranoid wacko. He is so misogynistic, so gratuitously violent . . . that reading him is often unpleasant."

Michaela Hamilton, a former associate publisher at Dutton, Spillane's longtime publisher, disagrees. She admits to sneaking looks at her father's paperbacks years ago. For her, Spillane offered an alternative to the antiseptic female of the 50s and 60s. "When grown-ups asked me what I wanted to do, I'd say be a nightclub dancer, like the women in a Spillane novel_It was my first introduc-

tion to a world that I wasn't getting from my parents or The Ed Sullivan Show. "

In 2002 the Palm Springs Film Noir Festival flew Spillane from South Carolina for the screening of a 1954 movie based on his novel The Long Wait. At the openingnight gala, he emerged from a 1930s roadster wearing a porkpie hat and a vintage trench coat, and the crowd cheered. At the party later he was a magnet for twentysomething women. "He spent three hours having young, beautiful blondes on his knee, hugging and kissing him and having their photographs taken with him," says Mystery Bookstore owner Sheldon McArthur.

Spillane worries that he is slipping. "I can't remember names, dates," he admits, adding, "Don't forget how old I am. I had a stroke 10 years ago. I'd like to retire, except I don't know how to." He knows he is no longer controversial. "By today's standards, little old ladies write this stuff."

He's nevertheless upbeat as he talks about the new Hammer book. "It's going to be a big one. It'll be a big smash. It's one hell of an idea." He pauses and adds, "I'm at the end of my career unless I come up with something startling. I came in with a bang, and I don't want to go out with a whimper."