(1918-2006) Working name of US author Frank Morrison Spillane, whose career began with early-1940s work in Comics, writing scripts for Superhero characters including Batman and Sub-Mariner. His bestselling thrillers starring private eye Mike Hammer, beginning with I, the Jury (1946), notoriously featured much Sex and extreme (for that era) violence, often against women: Fritz Leiber responded with an acid Parody centred on the PI character "Slickie Millane" in "The Night He Cried" (in Star Science Fiction Stories, anth 1953, ed Frederick Pohl). Spillane's Hammer novel Kiss Me, Deadly (1952) was transformed into ultimately apocalyptic sf when filmed as Kiss Me Deadly (1955). The non-Hammer The Erection Set (1972) features a somewhat irrelevant Antigravity device. Spillane's one outright sf credit, the unremarkable novella "The Veiled Woman" (November/December 1952 Fantastic), was ghost-written by the magazine editor Howard Browne; he claimed that Spillane's own sf submission was unusable. [DRL]
Frank Morrison Spillane
born Brooklyn, New York: 9 March 1918
died Murrell's Inlet, South Carolina: 17 July 2006
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