Date of birth: 19 March 1918
Date of death: 17 July 2006
Website:

Frank Morrison Spillane was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the only child of an Irish-American bartender and a Scottish mother. He started writing while in high school. He graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in 1935 and briefly attended Fort Hays State College in Kansas before working a variety of jobs, including as a lifeguard at Breezy Point, Queens, and as a trampoline artist for the Barnum and Bailey Circus. While working as a salesman in 1940, he met fellow salesman Joe Gill, who put him in touch with a writer for Funnies, Inc., a comic book repackaging company. Soon he was writing an eight-page story every day for major comic book characters such as Captain Marvel, Superman, Batman, and Captain America.

He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was stationed as a flight instructor in Greenwood, Mississippi, where he met and then married Mary Ann Pearce in 1945. Wanting to buy a house, he wrote his first novel, I, the Jury, which was published in 1947 and sold 6.5 million copies in the United States. In this first novel he introduced his most famous character, hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer.

In 1951, he became a Jehovah's Witness. He divorced his wife in 1962 and married his second wife, nightclub singer Sherri Malinou, in 1965. In 1969 he co-founded production company with Robert Fellows to produce his books, but Fellows died shortly after and only The Delta Factor was produced. He divorce his second wife in 1983, and married his third wife, Jane Rogers Johnson, also in 1983. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo destroy his house in Murrells Inlet, and he had it rebuilt. He received the Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award in 1995. Spillane's novels went out of print, but in 2001, the New American Library began reissuing them. He died July 17, 2006 of pancreatic carcinoma.

More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally. In 1980, Spillane was responsible for seven of the top 15 all-time bestselling fiction titles in America. Several of his Hammer novels were made into movies, including Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

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