CHARLESTON, S.C. ? Mickey Spillane, the macho mystery writer who wowed millions of readers with the shoot-’em-up sex and violence of gumshoe Mike Hammer, died Monday. He was 88.

After starting out in comic books, Spillane wrote his first Mike Hammer novel, “I, the Jury,” in 1946. Twelve more followed, with sales topping 100 million. Notable titles included “The Killing Man,” “The Girl Hunters” and “One Lonely Night.”

Many of these books were made into movies, including the classic film noir “Kiss Me, Deadly” and “The Girl Hunters,” in which Spillane himself starred. Hammer stories were also featured on television in the series “Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer,” which starred Stacy Keach, and in made-for-TV movies. In the 1980s, Spillane appeared in a string of Miller Lite beer commercials.

Besides the Hammer novels, Spillane wrote a dozen other books, including some award-winning volumes for young people. Nonetheless, by the end of the 20th century, many of his novels were out of print or hard to find. In 2001, the New American Library began reissuing them.

As a stylist Spillane was no innovator; the prose was hard-boiled boilerplate. In a typical scene, from “The Big Kill,” Hammer slugs out a little punk with “pig eyes.”

“I snapped the side of the rod across his jaw and laid the flesh open to the bone,” Spillane wrote. “I pounded his teeth back into his mouth with the end of the barrel … and I took my own damn time about kicking him in the face. He smashed into the door and lay there bubbling. So I kicked him again and he stopped bubbling.”

Writer Mickey Spillane stands on the porch of his home in Murrell's Inlet, S.C., in this May 2001 file photo. Spillane, the macho mystery writer who created gumshoe Mike Hammer, died Monday. He was 88.

Mainstream critics had little use for Spillane, but he got his due in the mystery world, receiving lifetime achievement awards from the Mystery Writers of America and the Private Eye Writers of America.

Kansas education

Spillane was born Frank Morrison Spillane on March 9, 1918, in the New York borough of Brooklyn. He grew up in Elizabeth, N.J., and attended Fort Hays State College in Kansas where he was a standout swimmer before beginning his career writing for magazines.

He had always liked police stories – an uncle was a cop – and in his pre-Hammer days he created a comic book detective named Mike Danger. At the time, the early 1940s, he was scribing for Batman, SubMariner and other comics.

“I wanted to get away from the flying heroes and I had the prototype cop,” Spillane said.

Shameless pleasure

Danger never saw print. World War II broke out and Spillane enlisted. When he came home, he needed $1,000 to buy some land and thought novels the best way to go. Within three weeks, he had completed “I, the Jury” and sent it to Dutton. The editors there doubted the writing, but not the market for it; a literary franchise began.

His books helped reveal the power of the paperback market and became so popular they were parodied in movies, including the Fred Astaire musical “The Band Wagon.”

Viewed by some as a precursor to Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, Spillane’s Hammer was a loner contemptuous of the “tedious process” of the jury system, choosing instead to enforce the law on his own murderous terms. His novels were attacked for their violence and vigilantism- one critic said “I, the Jury” belonged in “Gestapo training school” – but some defended them as the most shameless kind of pleasure.

“Spillane is like eating takeout fried chicken: so much fun to consume, but you can feel those lowlife grease-induced zits rising before you’ve finished the first drumstick,” Sally Eckhoff wrote in the liberal weekly The Village Voice.