I'm not sure I ever made it all the way through a Mickey Spillane novel. I liked his no-nonsense talk whenever I saw him interviewed and I admired the success of this one-time comic book writer. But I think I got to I, The Jury a couple of decades too late. By that point, he'd been imitated and parodied to the point where it all seemed hokey to me…and of course, what was titillating and shocking when the book was first published in 1947 was almost Disney fare by the late sixties. Still, it was easy to see why he'd sold umpteen zillion copies of it and subsequent novels and why he'd spawned a legion of mimics, striving to achieve the two-fisted reality that came so naturally to Spillane.
I don't have any personal anecdotes. Only met the man once — at a San Diego Comic-Con International — and the conversation was brief and unremarkable. I think I advised him on good places to eat around the convention center and told him it was an honor to meet him. Which it was. He was a giant in his genre and one of the most-imitated writers of his century. Here's a link to an obit.