The Legend of Caleb York (With: Max Allan Collins)
2015
The Big Showdown (With: Max Allan Collins)
2016
The Bloody Spur (With: Max Allan Collins)
2018
Last Stage to Hell Junction (With: Max Allan Collins)
2019
Hot Lead, Cold Justice (With: Max Allan Collins)
2020
Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek (With: Max Allan Collins)
2021
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
The Long Wait
1951
The Deep
1961
The Erection Set
1972
The Last Cop Out
1973
Something’s Down There
2003
Dead Street (With: Max Allan Collins)
2007
The Last Stand
2018
The Menace (With: Max Allan Collins)
2022
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
Me, Hood!
1963
The Flier
1964
Return of the Hood
1964
Killer Mine
1965
Tomorrow I Die
1984
Together We Kill: The Uncollected Stories of Mickey Spillane
2001
Primal Spillane: Early Stories 1941-1942
2003
Byline: Mickey Spillane
2004
A Long Time Dead: A Mike Hammer Casebook (With: Max Allan Collins)
2016
Publication Order of Children’s Books
The Day the Sea Rolled Back
1979
The Ship That Never Was
1982
About Mickey Spillane
Mickey Spillane (born Frank Morrison Spillane in Brooklyn on 9 March 1918, died 17 July 2006) was an American crime novelist best known for the hardboiled private detective Mike Hammer, introduced in “I, the Jury” in 1947. Industry estimates put sales of his books at more than 200 million copies.
The only child of an Irish bartender and a Scottish mother, Spillane was raised mainly in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1936. In the early 1940s he wrote comic book scripts and two-page text stories for Funnies Inc., which packaged comics for other publishers. He joined the Army Air Corps the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor and served as a fighter pilot and flight instructor, stationed at Greenwood, Mississippi.
After the war he and his wife wanted to buy a house in Newburgh, New York, so he wrote “I, the Jury” in nine days to raise the money. The hardcover and the Signet paperback together sold six and a half million copies in the United States. The Hammer novels carried more sex and more overt violence than rival detective fiction, and critics were hostile, but a 1956 guide to bestsellers placed all six novels he had then written among the ten bestselling American fiction titles. After “Kiss Me, Deadly” (1952) there was no new Hammer novel until “The Girl Hunters” in 1962. Spillane also wrote four spy novels about Tiger Mann and two books for young adults.
Hammer reached the cinema in films including “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955), and Spillane played the detective himself in “The Girl Hunters” (1963). On television the part went to Darren McGavin from 1958 to 1960 and later to Stacy Keach. Spillane received the Private Eye Writers of America lifetime achievement award in 1983 and the Edgar Grand Master Award in 1995.
He died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. His friend and literary executor Max Allan Collins has since completed the manuscripts Spillane left unfinished, starting with “Dead Street” (2007). Collins finished fifteen Mike Hammer novels, from “The Goliath Bone” (2008) to “Baby, It’s Murder” (2025), which was billed as the final one, and turned an unproduced Spillane screenplay into “The Legend of Caleb York” (2015), the first of a series of westerns.
