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When literary critics had a negative reaction to Spillane's writing, citing the high content of sex and violence, Spillane answered with a few terse comments: "Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar... If the public likes you, you're good."

Malcolm Cowley dismissed the Mike Hammer character as "a homicidal paranoiac", By contrast, Ayn Rand publicly praised Spillane's work at a time when critics were almost uniformly hostile. She considered him an underrated if uneven stylist and found congenial the black-and-white morality of the Hammer stories.

Mickey Spillane, the king of the pulp novelists in the post-WW II period, sold an estimated 200 million copies globally.

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