Sex, violence and chewing gum - and millions of happy customers

Almost universally hated by the critics, Mickey Spillane's crime thrillers, laced with sex, sadism and violence, were devoured by a post-war America hungry for the exploits of hardboiled gumshoe Mike Hammer. The shoot-em- up detective was a hit from the moment he gatecrashed the public imagination in the 1946 novel, I, The Jury.

Twelve more Hammer novels were to follow, most notably The Killing Man, The Girl Hunters and One More Lonely Night. Sales topped 150 million.

By the 1980s Spillane could boast seven novels among the 15 best-selling American fiction titles of all time. 'I'm the most translated writer in the world,' he said. 'Behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne - and they're all dead.'

A straight-talker who bashed out his books on a manual Smith Corona typewriter and referred to his own novels as 'the chewing gum of American literature', Spillane died last Tuesday in his home town of Murrells Inlet in South Carolina, aged 88.

He described himself as a writer, not an author, making the distinction on the basis that he was in the business to make money: 'This is an income-generating job.' Spillane insisted that he never had any interest in fame, 'unless it afforded me a good livelihood'. And he didn't have fans, he said. 'You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends.'

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1918 to Irish-American Catholic bartender John Joseph Spillane and his Protestant wife, Catherine, Frank Morrison Spillane grew up in the rough neighbourhood of Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he read comic books, Alexandre Dumas and Anthony Hope.