Yes, that’s Mickey Spillane, who died yesterday at age 88. And yes, that’s Karen Black, ubiquitous ’70s film actress, now Scientologist. A quick imdb search indicates they never worked on the same movie, so I’m not sure what she’s doing on his lap. Your hypotheses are welcome in the comments.
Sure, Spillane was a major writer of crime fiction, but I don’t agree with Sarah at Galleycat that "Without him, amoral characters would not have become iconic archetypal heroes." His first book, I, The Jury, came out in 1947, 8 years after Chandler’s book The Big Sleep, in which detective Philip Marlowe may not be amoral, but he is both morally ambiguous and our hero. And back in 1931 The Public Enemy — in which James Cagney, the gangster, smashes a gradpefruit half in his wife’s face — was a wildly popular film with an amoral hero. Spillane was a tough, sloppy writer with an outsize ego and a sense of humor, but in my book, he wasn’t an innovator — he did what other people were doing, just more brutally. And he got lucky.
That said, Sarah’s got great, exhaustive coverage of Spillane across the web on her blog. And most people have higher opinions of Spillane than I do.
