Born Frank Morrison Spillane in Brooklyn, New York in 1918, he started out as a writer for cheap, so-called pulp fiction magazines and comic strips. Spillane also performed in the circus for a period.
Spillane wrote his first Mike Hammer novel "I, the Jury" in nine days in 1947, and the graphic, sexy and violent story quickly became a best-seller, with millions of copies snapped up.
His Mike Hammer stories continued to top best-seller lists and several were turned into movies and later a 1980s television series.
Spillane played Hammer himself in the 1963 film "The Girl Hunters" and also took a role in a 1974 episode of the television detective series "Columbo".