I, The Badass

Mickey Spillane
Mar. 9, 1918 - Jul. 17, 2006
Yet another badass. I mean, look at that hat. That is one serious hat, and you don't wear something like that unless you mean business. Mickey Spillane was a serious tough guy who meant what he said. He didn't just write Mike Hammer...he was Mike Hammer.

He started his career by writing comic books. He wrote for Funnies, Inc., which was an outfit that packaged comics for different publishers. He ultimately wrote for every major superhero of the 1940s...Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, and Captain America. Kick ass. Remember that this was a time when Batman and Captain America would just as soon shoot you as bring you in. It was a wonderful time.

The day after the Asians attacked Pearl Harbor, Mickey Spillane joined the U.S. Army. He and his wife wanted to buy a house so he wrote the first Mike Hammer novel, I, The Jury, in 19 days. It sold over six million copies.

But when I said that Mickey Spillane was Mike Hammer, he literally was Mike Hammer, playing his own character in the 1963 film The Girl Hunters. He later appeared on an episode of Columbo but is more remembered these days for some Miller Lite commercials he made in the 1980s. This importance of this cannot be overstated. Miller Lite is rat's piss in a can. It's awful and undrinkable. But Mickey Spillane made it manly to drink, and the ad campaign was a huge success.

I'd love to write like Mickey Spillane, and a lot of people have imitated his no-nonsense, two-fisted hardboiled style. But there will never truly be another writer like him...probably because the politically correct crowd would shut him up these days. You can't call women dames or skirts any more because no one has any sense of humor these days. It makes me sad for our eroding culture, where there are no more real men.

It almost makes me want to have a Miller Lite. Almost.