Mickey Spillane dead at 88
I’ll be covering the legendary crime writer’s death in more detail at my main site, but his passing must be mentioned here too. As the creator of Mike Hammer, Spillane directly introduced multiple generations of crime writers. Without him, there would not have been pulp fiction as we know it. Without him, amoral characters would not have become iconic archetypal heroes. And while he wrote for his readers (and certainly kept posterity in mind) Spillane was famous for his business sense, for keeping his eye on the bottom line: making a good living at writing.
The Ace of Spades HQ blog links to an anecdote Lawrence Block once told about Spillane that best exemplifies Spillane’s economic philosophy. When both participated on a roundtable chat with other writers, and they were asked what spurs them to write, the others gave the typical answers, like “when I get inspired by an idea” or “when there’s just something inside of me that needs to get out.” After a few minutes of this Spillaine said (paraphrased), “When are we going to talk about money? Because I’ll tell you, I start getting the urge to write another book when my bank account gets down to zero.”
If that isn’t the pulp ethos, I don’t know what is.
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