Mickey Spillane - A Few Choice Words

Registration required to read the entire article, I think. Thanks to Jeff Meyerson for the link.

Mickey Spillane - Books - New York Times: "MICKEY SPILLANE, who died last week at 88, was recognized as a master of the postwar private-eye potboiler. Certainly he was among the most successful practitioners of the genre; he sold more than 200 million books, many of them featuring his signature detective, Mike Hammer.

The critics, however, were not kind to Mr. Spillane’s particular blend of sex, violence, and vigilante justice. Malcolm Cowley called him “a homicidal paranoiac”; even his father described his output as “crud.” But Mr. Spillane was unfazed. “I don’t give a hoot about reading reviews,” he once said. “What I want to read is the royalty checks.”

Here is a sampling of Mr. Spillane’s unmistakable prose."