Mickey Spillane was one of the worlds most popular mystery writers. His specialty was tight-fisted, sadistic revenge stories, often featuring his alcoholic gumshoe Mike Hammer and a cast of evildoers who launder money or spout the Communist Party line.

His writing style was characterized by short words, lightning transitions, gruff sex and violent endings. It was once tallied that he offed 58 people in six novels.

Starting with I, the Jury, in 1947, Mr. Spillane sold hundreds of millions of books during his lifetime and garnered consistently scathing reviews. Even his father, a Brooklyn bartender, called them crud.

Mr. Spillane was a struggling comic book publisher when he wrote I, the Jury. He initially envisioned it as a comic book called Mike Danger, and when that did not go over, he took a week to reconfigure it as a novel.

Even the editor in chief of E.P. Dutton and Co., Mr. Spillanes publisher, was skeptical of the books literary merit but conceded it would probably be a smash with postwar readers looking for ready action. He was right. The book, in which Hammer pursues a murderous narcotics ring led by a curvaceous female psychiatrist, went on to sell more than 1 million copies.

Mr. Spillane spun out six novels in the next five years, among them My Gun Is Quick, The Big Kill, One Lonely Night and Kiss Me, Deadly. Most concerned Hammer, his faithful sidekick, Velda, and the police homicide captain Pat Chambers, who acknowledges that Hammers style of vigilante justice is often better suited than the law to dispatching criminals.

Mr. Spillanes success rankled other critics, who sometimes became very personal in their reviews. Malcolm Cowley called Mr. Spillane a homicidal paranoiac, going on to note what he called his misogyny and vigilante tendencies.

His books were translated into many languages, and he proved so popular as a writer that he was able to transfer his thick-necked, barrel-chested personality across