Primal Spillane: Early Stories 1941-1942

The Happiest Days of My Life Introduction by Max Allan Collins and Lynn F. Meyers, Jr.

The winter of 1940 was a rough time for twenty-two-year-old aspiring writer, Frank Morrison Spillane. After giving up college at the end of his second year due to money problems, Spillane went to work in a department store — the bargain basement, selling neckties. What was a guy to do? The Great Depression may have been winding down, but jobs were still hard to come by, and the front pages of newspapers shouted stories of the war in Europe, now in its second year. Spillane knew that most likely he, and all his buddies, would be in combat before long.

Till then, a guy had to eat.

But selling ties wasn’t Mickey Spillane’s preferred mode of turning a buck. Storytelling was his line, ever since he “scared the hell” out of other kids, around the campfire on the beach where he was a lifeguard.

Spillane had written professionally even before college; and he wanted to get back to that now — preferably as a staff writer with some publication or other, where he could develop his writing skills further. A pal of Spillane’s — Ray Gill — had already landed at Funnies Inc., a comic book “packager.” The company rounded up writers, artists, colorists, and letterers to feed the publishers of a new craze — comic books.

Early comic books had been strictly reprints of comic strips, but such early features as Superman and Batman uncovered a new market for original material, particularly adventure stories for boys.

Funnies Inc. did most of the work for Marvel and several independent publishers, and — because of the volume of work — the firm was always looking for experienced help. With characters like The Human Torch and Submariner, wild pulp-style heroes, Marvel was a perfect market for the future creator of Mike Hammer, and Funnies Inc. made an ideal home base.

Spillane, who had already sold stories under house names for both the pulps and slicks, was interviewed for the job of associate editor at Funnies, Inc. — and got it, rising overnight from the department store’s bargain basement to the new industry’s ground floor. For nearly the next two years, Spillane edited and wrote various comic books, including the aforementioned Human Torch and Submariner, as well as Blue Bolt and many others.

Part of his new job was to supply text fillers to appease a postal regulation that required comic publications to include text stories to qualify for a cheap mailing rate. During his editing tenure, Spillane knocked down at least fifty of these text stories, featuring a variety of protagonists — young boys, detectives, aviators, and naval officers — in many genres — adventure, science fiction, crime, humor, horror, and mystery.

Several stories prefigure his later books for juveniles. All reveal a young writer blessed with boundless imagination and a vivid way with language.

Many of these stories — written before the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 — involve Japanese and German villains. Comics were at the forefront of the home front propaganda campaign throughout the war, but Spillane got a jump on that effort in his comics work, many months before President Roosevelt and Congress officially signed the declaration of war. We present these patriotic yarns in their original, now politically incorrect form.

This collection includes the “fillers” where Spillane actually signed his name to these short and terse tales; we have not included others, even when stylistic earmarks indicated Spillane as the probable author. The byline was important to the young writer, who already had a healthy ego, and dreamed of seeing his name on book covers... and on fat royalty checks.

Most artists and writers at Funnies Inc. had to slip their signatures into buildings, and street signs on comic book pages; but the lucky writers who did text stories were often allowed to put a by-line on their work. It’s a small irony that talented artists and writers creating the comics that were the main attraction had to bear the brunt of anonymity, when the writers who did the “filler” text pages were allowed to get a credit.

“Who ever heard of Mickey Spillane, anyway?” Spillane asked sixty years after the fact.

Less than ten years after Mickey Spillane wrote his last comic book filler, he was a household name — the most recognizable American mystery writer of the twentieth century, and one of the best-known and highest-selling of all writers of popular fiction. Spillane — who outsold Ernest Hemingway and Erskine Caldwell, among many others — remained a comics writer, even in prose form... which was one of the secrets of his success. He knew how to write visually and viscerally, and could connect with a mainstream audience.

For his first novel, he adapted his unsold comic book character Mike Danger, changing Danger to Hammer, and wrote the yarn that launched a major career. I, the Jury is considered a classic of the form even by many Spillane detractors.

Here — collected in a new expanded edition — are the earliest short stories bylined Mickey Spillane... all written between 1941 and 1942. Spillane’s comic book career was interrupted by military service (Spillane signed up the day after Pearl Harbor), and after the war, when the fighter pilot returned to civilian life, he found Funnies Inc. gone, most artists and writers now sub-contracting work directly for the comic book publishers.

Reflecting back on those hectic times, Spillane said: “They were the happiest days of my life. I could walk anywhere and nobody knew who I was.”

Now you have the opportunity to watch a major mystery-fiction talent find his voice and develop his powerful storytelling skills, in a most unlikely venue — as “filler” material in comic books. The combined cost of the rare comic books in which these text pieces appeared today would be more than that of a new Cadillac; but these short tales provide their own memorable rides.

Meet Mickey Spillane, in some of his earliest published work. He was already a pro and a terrific storyteller. As Mickey would say, “Have fun!”

Max Allan Collins

Muscatine, Iowa

Lynn F. Myers, Jr.

Carlisle, Pennsylvania