This is the inside cover of one of our copies of I, The Jury.
A long range hello from one Hammer to another!
This is turning out to be
one hell of a shoot—
you should be on it!
Have a cold Lite Beer on me!
Mickey Spillane
Mickey Spillane was a reason we wrote in the first place. He didn’t get us to drink Miller Lite, though.
Of course the New York Times mentioned he was “scorned by many critics for his artless plots, his reliance on unlikely coincidence and a simplistic understanding of the law," but gave him due and noted that "as the books kept coming, some critics softened toward him. The Times Literary Supplement of London described his 1961 novel, “The Deep,” as “nasty” but nevertheless exhibiting “a genuine narrative grip.”
Mickey knew his audience (his "customers," as he called us) and he could always "dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar." His outrage at the inadequacies of the criminal justice system was decades ahead of its time. His knack for writing straight from, and shooting right to the gut, was a tabloid television cornerstone.
Long before we said it in just about the same words, Mickey told the pointy-heads: “I’m not writing for the critics. I’m writing for the public.”
We got to know Mickey back around 1990 when we were were working A Current Affair and sent hot dame Cindy Adams to spend a few days with him out by the ocean in South Carolina. That’s where he died.
"If Mickey Spillane wrote Nancy" (MAD magazine, 1959):
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