"Sex isn't like it used to be . . ."

Mickey Spillane, the writer who wrote unprecedented sex and violence into American popular fiction, died of cancer at age 88 on July 17th.

When I, the Jury appeared in print in July 1947, it appalled critics:

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Anthony Boucher deplored the book's "vicious . . . glorification of force, cruelty, and extra-legal methods." The Chicago Sun dismissed it as "shabby and rather nasty," while the Saturday Review of Literature critic . . . remarked on its "lurid action, lurid characters, lurid writing, lurid plot, lurid finish." --AmericanHeritage.com

Ironically, Spillane apparently was a kind-hearted, mild-spoken, generous, devout man--completely unlike his famously sadistic protagonist Mike Hammer. Spillane called himself a writer instead of an author, saying that he only wrote sex-and-violence because sex-and-violence paid the bills: "This is an income-generating job . . .. Fame was never anything to me unless it afforded me a good livelihood" (CNN.com).

A shrewd judge of audience, Spillane figured that all the GIs from World War II could stand a little sex and they'd certainly already seen the violence. He was right. According to a 1965 tally, Spillane had "seven of America's twenty best-selling fiction books of the twentieth century. In the crime-and-suspense category, he monopolized the top seven spots" (AmericanHeritage.com). by 1980, he still held "seven of the top 15 all-time bestselling fiction titles in America" (The Guardian). And when all the shouting was over, "his name appeared on seven of the 20th century's 25 bestselling fiction titles" (Telegraph.co.uk).

Nonetheless, the trend he started had moved beyond his expectations. When asked about the Hannibal Lecter books in a Crime Time interview, Spillane said, ". . . violence isn't like it used to be. Sex isn't like it used to be either . . .."

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