It’s the birthday of Frank Morrison Spillane, better known as Mickey Spillane, writer of the Mike Hammer detective series and mid-life convert to (I am not making this up) the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Spillane was born in 1918 in Brooklyn, New York, and after high school worked at various jobs: lifeguarding, performing with a circus, and eventually writing comics for Funnies, Inc. He enlisted in the Air Force the day after Pearl Harbor to become a fighter pilot but instead was stationed stateside for most of the war, training other fighter pilots. After the war he began writing novels, beginning with I, the Jury (1947), which he wrote in two weeks. It was his first Mike Hammer book; the critics despised it, and the public bought millions of copies.

Spillane went on to write twelve more Mike Hammer novels and a total of around 40 books. But between 1952 and 1961, he didn’t write at all: he’d converted to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1951, and he spent a lot of his time going door to door spreading the word. (The imagination races.) While he eventually resumed writing, his conversion evidently stuck to the end of his life, and one journalist described getting the full Witness treatment when Spillane showed up at his hotel in a suit and tie bearing religious tracts (Peter Lennon, “The hardest Jehovah’s Witness in the world,” July 23, 1999, The Guardian).

Critics continued to excoriate him (mostly), and Spillane continued to not care, saying he wasn’t interested in reading reviews, just royalty checks. He is supposed to have said, “The literary world is made of second rate writers writing about other second rate writers.”

(Awkward pause.)

Spillane owned a ton of guns, wrote two successful and well-received children’s books (go fig), and once played Mike Hammer himself in the 1963 film version of his novel, The Girl Hunters. (What did Mickey Spillane look like? He looked like a hard-boiled detective. Google it.) Spillane married three times and had four children with his first wife, and when he died on July 17, 2006, at the age of 88, he was survived by his third wife, Jane, thirty years younger.

It’s also the birthday of Vita Sackville-West (1892 – 1962), British author of novels, biographies, poetry, and gardening books, model for the main character in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, and, I think it is safe to say, probably not a big reader of Mickey Spillane.

Have a weirdly sunny and mild Monday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.