“Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it’s a letdown, they won’t buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.” – Mickey Spillane
Writers map out a book like a journey, so that as you are moving along and your
characters are creating lives of their own and dragging you along with them,
you still know that eventually you are going to end up at the same place.
Born
on this date in 1918 as Frank Morrison Spillane, “Mickey” was a master of “getting
to the destination.” He created one of the
most memorable of characters, the hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer. At the height of his popularity in 1980,
Spillane, who died in 2006, was responsible for a remarkable 7 of the year’s 15
top-selling fiction books.
Like many great writers, he used
“life experiences” as background for his own work, starting during his high
school days in New Jersey. His jobs
included a time with the circus, lifeguarding, meatcutting, bartending and
flying – something that led to time in the Army Air Corps during World War II.
Frank “Mickey” Spillane
Spillane said he was “a writer not an author”
who also love to read, especially about history. “I think a lot of authors like history
because they want to be part of it,” he once said. And, of course, during the course of selling
well over 225 million copies of his books, he succeeded.
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