[5] He started writing while in high school, briefly attended Fort Hays State College in Kansas and worked a variety of jobs, including summers as a lifeguard at Breezy Point, Queens, and a period as a trampoline artist for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

[6] During World War II, Spillane enlisted in the Army Air Corps, becoming a fighter pilot and a flight instructor.

[8] He also met two younger writers, Earle Basinsky and Charlie Wells, who would become his protégés; each published two hardboiled-noir novels in the Spillane style in the early 1950s.

At one point, Spillane estimated he wrote fifty of these "short-short stories," which were intended to fulfill a postal regulation requiring comic books to have at least two pages of text to qualify for a second-class mailing permit.

[citation needed] While most comic books writers toiled anonymously, Spillane's byline appeared on most of his prose "filler" stories.

A new, expanded edition of Primal Spillane was released by Bold Venture Press in 2018, the new volume contained an additional fifteen stories, including the previously unpublished "A Turn of the Tide".

[citation needed] Spillane joined the United States Army Air Corps on December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

[citation needed] With the combined total of the 1947 hardcover and the Signet paperback (December 1948), I, the Jury sold 6-1/2 million copies in the United States alone.

Although tame by some standards, his novels featured more sex than competing titles, and the violence was more overt than the usual detective story.

Malcolm Cowley of The New Republic called Spillane "a dangerous paranoid, sadist, and masochist" and even his own editors sometimes found his novels distasteful.

Lou Kimmel created the cover paintings for My Gun Is Quick, Vengeance Is Mine, One Lonely Night, and The Long Wait.

[citation needed] Spillane portrayed himself as a detective in Ring of Fear (1954), and rewrote the film without credit for John Wayne's and Robert Fellows's Wayne-Fellows Productions.

[19] In January 1974, he appeared with Jack Cassidy in the television series Columbo starring Peter Falk in the episode "Publish or Perish".

American comic book writer Frank Miller has mentioned Spillane as an influence for his own hardboiled style.

[citation needed] In 1983, Spillane received the lifetime achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America.

[26][27] Walt Kelly wrote two parodies of Hammer's work which satirized his spare, disjointed style, overblown first-person narration, and teetering, barely controlled paranoia: "The Bloody Drip" and "The Bloody Drip Writhes Again", both starring Albert the Alligator as the detective Meat Hamburg.

Do you think you are some kind of f**king writer?” In 1987, New York avant-garde jazz musician John Zorn published Spillane, an album composed of three "file-card pieces", as well as a work for voice, string quartet and turntables.

[31][32][33] After his death, his friend and literary executor, Max Allan Collins, began editing and completing Spillane's unpublished typescripts, beginning with a non-series novel, Dead Street (2007).

The proposal first passed the Georgetown County Council in 2006 while Spillane was still alive, but the South Carolina General Assembly rejected the plan.