How were Mickey Spillane's books viewed by America's mid-century intelligensia? Like a .45 slug in Decency's gut. Like a thick-fingered punk . . .

. . . unsnapping Literature's bra. Like Style's one-way ticket to hell. But the critics didn't know Mickey Spillane, and it turns out that Spillane knew a lot about how the public would react to his writings. In 1947, tough guy Mike Hammer put a .45 slug just below his naked lover's navel, a killing shot that also served as a starter's gun for American pulp fiction. Whatever literary social constraints that might have existed before disappeared as the paperback version of Mickey Spillane's sex- and violence-filled "I, the Jury" became a postwar publishing phenomenon.

It can be hard sometimes to look back and see the importance of little events before they echo, or to look at the creation of a cliché and recognize it as fresh in its moment. But that's what Spillane's debut novel was. A small book that barely sold as a hardcover, "I, the Jury" went on to shatter some norms, create others and transform the world of the paperback novel. And it added a core of darkness to literary perceptions of the American hero, with Spillane, who died Monday, establishing Hammer as what writer Robert Parker described this week as a "vigilante lone wolf."

"I don't know that [Spillane] did anything that hadn't been done already, but he did it pulpily, with a coarse bravado," said Parker, a former English professor and creator of Spenser, a sharp and hard-edged Boston private eye. "Mick was nothing if not pulpily garish. Vulgar, in the best sense of the word." (You can read the article by Scott Martelle in its entirety at www.latimes.com).