How I Met: Mickey Spillane

Location: Church Street Station, Orlando, Florida, USA

Summary: A casual Friday night at Hooters turned into an unexpected meeting with one of America’s most famous crime writers, Mickey Spillane, the creator of Mike Hammer. What began as a friendly chat over beers became a memorable encounter with a literary legend.

The Story

In 1998 I was living in Orlando, Florida. My friend Martin Rayney had recently taken redundancy from the Gas Board, as I had a few years earlier, and he came to stay with me for three months. We spent most weekends exploring the city and one of our regular stops was the Hooters restaurant at Church Street Station.

That Friday night was like many others. We had enjoyed a few beers around the entertainment complex, watched some of the shows and then made our way to Hooters where we sat at our usual table. By then most of the waitresses knew us by name and always looked after us well.

At the next table an older gentleman was getting far more attention than anyone else in the room. Two of the girls were sitting with him almost the entire time. Curious, I asked our waitress to buy him a beer and leaned over to ask him what his secret was.

He laughed and told us he lived in South Carolina but came to Orlando often and knew all the girls there. We started chatting and told him that Martin and I had once worked at the same place, that I had left a couple of years earlier and that Martin had recently left and was staying with me while visiting Orlando. He ordered a pitcher of beer for us and we spent the next hour talking about all sorts of things.

When he left the waitress brought over another pitcher and told us he had bought it for us before heading out. We asked who he was and she smiled and pointed to the wall beside us. There on the wall was a framed photo of the same man surrounded by the Hooters girls. Somehow we had never noticed it before.

Our new friend was Mickey Spillane, the bestselling author of the Mike Hammer detective novels and one of the most widely read crime writers of the twentieth century. It is funny how you can share a beer with someone, talk about ordinary things and only later realise you have spent the evening with a legend.