Legends of the Underwood #10: Mickey Spillane

According to legend, [Spillane] wrote his first novel I, the Jury (1947) in nine days, in order to get $1,000 for a piece of land. Once, he told the house painters, he had been taking a manuscript to the publisher and lost it. That must have been awful, said the painters. “No big deal,” said Spillane, “I just typed it out again.”

—from J. Madison Davis's essay on Spillane, "His 'Customers' Were the Jury," in World Literature Today.

(Tenth in a series. Image from the Life photo archive.)

Beer of the Unknown

Over at the Big Adios message board there's an interesting thread about Mickey Spillane, and Max Allan Collins popped up this past weekend to explain why Spillane left some manuscripts unfinished, and why there aren't more Spillane novels out there:

[Spillane] did not need money and tended to only write when he felt like refreshing the coffers... The Miller Lite campaign cost us many Spillane books -- they were paying him to be a pitchman, and very well, so why write?

Yeah, another goddamned reason to hate "lite" beer.