MICKEY SPILLANE was both the most popular and the most vilified American crime writer of the postwar period. If the luridly described violence and sex which drew so many readers but repelled the critics and his fellow authors appear less exceptional now, this is partly because he had an influence on the craft of the thriller in much the same way that “spaghetti” Westerns affected the traditional Western. Although refreshingly unpretentious whenever he talked about his work, he remained in person a somewhat enigmatic figure with a curiously sporadic career.

Frank Morrison Spillane was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1918, the only child of a Scottish mother and an Irish father, who was a bartender. He grew up in a tough area at a tough time, but found that he could usually talk himself out of trouble. He began writing at high school, but with no great success, and briefly attended Fort Hays State College, Kansas. In the winter he did odd jobs, including a spell as a trampoline artist for the Barnum and Bailey circus, while in the summer he was a lifeguard.

In the autumn of 1940, while working as a salesman in Gimbel’s basement, he met another Brooklyn boy, Joe Gill, who was selling ties. Gill sent Spillane to see his brother, Ray, who ran Funnies Inc, a firm that produced comic books for various publishers. Spillane proved able to turn out an eight-page story in a day, whereas most writers needed the best part of a week.

Immediately after Pearl Harbor he joined the US Army Air Corps in which he became a flying instructor, ending the war with the rank of captain. He and the Gill brothers then set up what was, in effect, a comic book factory. It prospered but left Spillane unsatisfied. Needing money to buy a house in the country for his wife, Mary Ann, whom he had married in 1945, he decided to write a novel. It took him just 19 days to complete the first Mike Hammer book, I, the Jury. At Ray Gill’s suggestion, he sent it to an old-established Manhattan publishing company, E. P. Dutton, which accepted the book on the chief editor’s advice that “it isn’t in the best of taste but will sell”.

Never was an editorial prediction more fully justified. I, the Jury (1947) sold six and a half million copies in the United States alone, and Mickey Spillane was, for several years, the best-selling fiction writer in America. His enthusiastic fans ranged from servicemen all around the world to the upper-class girls of Radcliffe College.

In I, the Jury’s characteristic climax Mike Hammer discovers that the woman psychiatrist with whom he has been having an affair was the murderer of his best friend; so he shoots her through the naked belly. “Mike, how c-could you?” she wails. “It was easy,” he replies.

Other books, featuring Mike Hammer and an equally high body-count, followed in rapid succession: My Gun is Quick, Vengeance is Mine (both 1950), The Big Kill, The Long Wait, One Lonely Night (all 1951), and Kiss Me Deadly (1952).

Spillane’s average writing time was three weeks. The vengeance or vigilante theme running through many of the stories foreshadowed the kind of thrillers in which Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood were to star a generation later. An enraged Mike Hammer is apt to go, in his own words, “kill crazy”. He tells a police captain: “You’re a cop. You’re tied down by rules and regulations. I’m alone. Some day, before long, I’m going to have my rod in my mitt and the killer in front of me. I’m going to plunk one right in his gut, and when he’s dying on the floor I may kick his teeth out. You couldn’t do that. You have to follow the book.”

The critics did not admire this sort of thing. “No nastier fragment of psychopathy is likely to be published this year,” wrote one. “Daydreams for the frustrated and the sick,” said another. Spillane was not worried. He despised “longhairs” and expressed alarm when one of his books was quite well reviewed in The New York Times. Then, without explanation, he suddenly stopped writing, possibly — though probably not — because, in 1953, he had become a Jehovah’s Witness.

Imitators, some who wrote better, some who wrote worse, began to exploit the market he had opened up. No less mysteriously, between 1961 and 1967 he showed another burst of creative activity, writing four novels about Mike Hammer, beginning with The Girl Hunters (1962) and four, beginning with Day of the Guns (1964), about a character called Tiger Mann, whose violent behaviour was much the same but who, in a conscious attempt to cash in on the James Bond boom, fought subversion as well as gangsters.

Mann works for an organisation, “financed to such an extent that there was nothing we couldn’t bust and nobody we couldn’t outbid”, which tries to ensure that the United States is not “bitten and chewed to death by the heavy handed slobs on the other side of the fence”. He brushes aside opposition from “the striped pants boys” who frequently “flush with anger” at his activities. Spillane had small regard for politicians of any kind, but admitted to being “so far to the Right that I make Barry Goldwater look like a Red”.

Then came another pause, which was nevertheless followed by another flurry of output, which included The Erection Set (1972), a thriller with which he hoped to rival the success of Jacqueline Susann by producing, as he put it, “an even dirtier book than these women writers”. Except for a virtually unnoticed children’s story, called The Day the Sea Rolled Back (1981) he paused again for almost another 20 years.

Earlier he had toyed with acting; a couple of small parts — in an episode of Columbo, for example — but, most notably, playing Mike Hammer in his own production of The Girl Hunters (1963), which was filmed in Britain and proved just as bad as everyone expected. Arthouse met pulp fiction in Robert Aldrich’s version of Kiss Me Deadly (1955). The Mike Hammer television series, starring Stacey Keach, was more straightforward and more lucrative.

Mickey Spillane’s first marriage produced four children, two boys and two girls, but was dissolved in 1962. Three years later he married Sherri Malinou, a nightclub singer half his age. He had met her when she came to model the jacket for one of his books. “I told them to send a good-looking leggy blonde,” he used to say, “and I didn’t send her back.” Although she travelled with him and he liked to buy things for her and show her off, for much of the time she pursued her own career in New York while he settled into a waterfront house at Murrell’s Inlet, South Carolina. This marriage also ended in divorce and a highly publicised lawsuit in which Sherri claimed a share of the money from the television series.

Spillane’s third wife, Jane, was an old friend from South Carolina, content to settle in Murrell’s Inlet. His first wife, with whom he remained on friendly terms, and his four children lived not far away, and the years passed in a kind of backwoods idyll, interrupted only by Hurricane Hugo, which struck in 1989, after which his characteristically unpretentious house had to be rebuilt almost entirely.

For a long while his only professional activity consisted of appearing, costumed in trenchcoat and fedora, in television commercials for Miller Lite Beer. Eventually, however, he felt the urge to write again, and, in 1989, after four weeks bashing away at his portable typewriter, produced The Killing Man, another Mike Hammer story, violent, badly reviewed and profitable as ever. It was followed by Black Alley (1996).

To interviewers Spillane presented an easy-going, suitably tough, facade matching his Brooklyn accent. “Nobody in my books drinks cognac,” he told them, “because I can’t spell the word.” He considered himself “the mediumest guy I know”. His favourite novel was Anthony Hope’s Ruritanian adventure The Prisoner of Zenda.

Spillane’s religious convictions seem to have been sincere and lasting. He was fond of animals and would permit no hunting on his land. His books, which, as Life magazine said, “no one likes except the public”, are now judged to have more merit than contemporary critics allowed.

Mickey Spillane, writer, was born on March 9, 1918. He died on July 17, 2006, aged 88.