Max Allan Collins on Mickey Spillane

COLLINS: Now prior to Mickey Spillane, private detectives were dicks and they knew it. Phillip Marlowe was embarrassingly chaste. Chandler badmouthed Spillane really terribly in the early '50s. He dismissed Spillane as a comic book writer; it was one of the worst things you could call anybody, right?
GOLD: Chandler said that?
COLLINS: Right. Spillane should have punched him in the mouth.
GOLD: Wonder how he felt about Hammett?
COLLINS: Chandler probably didn't know that Hammett had written comics.

[or that Spillane had not only written comics but that his entire original goal was to be a comic book writer, and that Mike Hammer was originally conceived as a comic book character. Far from punching Chandler in the mouth, I think Spillane would have taken it as a compliment]