Sketch o’the Week: Stacy Keach!

Author Mickey Spillane‘s private eye character “Mike Hammer” debuted in the late 1940’s and became, along with Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, the epitome of the literary tough guy detective. The character brought fame and fortune to Spillane, selling over 200 million books and being featured in several radio programs and many films and TV shows. A lot of actors have portrayed Hammer over the years (including Spillane himself), but the most famous depiction might be that of Stacy Keach. Keach played Hammer in three different TV series and several TV movies in the 1980’s and 90’s. His version of Hammer was set in the 1980’s, although he looked like he’d just stepped out of 40’s.

Interestingly, Spillane was a comic book writer early in his career, doing stories for multiple publishers via a company called “Funnies, Inc.” in the 1940s. He wrote eight page adventures for the likes of Captain Marvel, Superman, Batman and others, as well as two page text only short stories that were syndicated to comic book publishers to satisfy a postal requirement for comics to contain a certain amount of text to qualify for second class delivery post. In fact Mike Hammer was originally pitched with Illustrator Mike Roy as a comic book character called “Mike Danger”. They couldn’t sell it to a publisher, so Spillane reworked the original story, changing the names of the lead and some secondary characters, and that became the  I, the Jury, the first Mike Hammer novel published in 1947.