Although he is best known for his series fiction, primarily the Mike Hammer books but also the spy series with Tiger Mann, Mickey Spillane also has written a number of novellas and a couple of dozen short stories, which he collected in several volumes released both here and in the United Kingdom.

These non-series works provided a wider scope for Spillane's writing talent and the later novels, like The Erection Set and The Last Cop Out, exhibit that skill on a larger scale.

That he has not written more in this vein may be explained by his often quoted remarks about being a typewriter for hire. Like the famous English eighteenth-century writer, Samuel Johnson (who said, "No Man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money"), Spillane believes in writing for the cash, and since the Mike Hammer books scored such a spectacular success, he concentrated...