The obituaries ran the day after one of the most important writers in the history of mystery fiction died. Big, bold headlines announced the passing of Mickey Spillane at the age of 88. As expected, there were a lot of column inches, as befits the iconic status of the man who single-handedly kept alive the private eye novel in the 1940s and 1950s. As expected, too, the tone of those long obits was snotty.

If Mickey were still alive, he’d have been amused. After all, it’s what he got his whole career. Even in death, the critics couldn’t help themselves. They had to be patronizing, they had to be dismissive, and they had to remain blinded to the rare talent and skill he brought to his prose. They didn’t like him or his books and couldn’t wait to tell you so.

You see, Mickey wasn’t one of the boys. His politics made the critics uncomfortable. He wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t a liberal.

In his post-World War II novels, as the Cold War was settling in, he had the outright effrontery to portray the communists in his books as bad guys. Good grief! You must know how that went down with the boys at the New York Times (in which Anthony Boucher called “I, the Jury” a “spectacularly bad book”) and the literary journals of New York, which were already making excuses for Josef Stalin.

Mickey couldn’t have cared less. “I don’t write for the critics,” he always maintained. “I write for my customers,” which is how he described his readers.

He didn’t help his position. He denied he was an “author,” claiming to be just a “writer.” The difference? “A writer sells,” he said. He made himself out to be a simple, blue-collar guy who had dropped out of college. But he was a friend of Ayn Rand, one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century, who was not the kind of warm, cuddly lady who accommodated people with limited intellectual capacity.

In her nonpareil cultural analysis, “The Romantic Manifesto,” she lauded Spillane’s literary style, most famously as she compared identical scenes in a Spillane novel and one by the critics’ darling, Thomas Wolfe. Anyone with a thirdgrade reading level easily could distinguish between Wolfe’s bloated prose, describing a rainy night in New York, crawling on and on, page after page, with Spillane’s few brief paragraphs so crisp and clear, showing the drenched cityscape. You felt you needed a trench coat against the weather.

For many years, I served on the board of directors of the Mystery Writers of America. When nominations were made for the annual Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement, my advocacy of Mickey was repeatedly shouted down, meeting with rants about his lack of literary flair, while awards were given to such writers as Aaron Marc Stein, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Robert L. Fish, and Phyllis Whitney — none of whom, the last time I checked, are household names. Nor are they in print, for that matter.

When the organization finally gave it to Mickey, the board said I could make the call to let him know. He said, “No kidding? Does this mean I have to wear a tuxedo?” I told him yes, and he did — probably the first time in a decade he’d worn a tie. At the banquet, he hugged me so long that rumors began.

Some years before, a customer in my bookshop told a Spillane story. A great fan, he had read all the books in paperback while studying at Yale. After graduation, he bought them all in hardcover, packed them in a box, and sent them to Mickey with a letter asking him to sign them.

There is no way this gentlemen could have known it, but Mickey hated the hassle of having books sent to his home for signatures, repacking them, taking them to the post office, etc. So months went by with no response. The man sent a respectful letter asking about his books. A few days later, a bigger box than the one he had sent showed up at his door. Inside, unopened, was the box he had sent. It had been shot. Twice.

The often stated mantra is that Spillane’s books were filled with sex and violence. Even this paper parroted the line in the opening paragraph of its obituary. Here’s my guarantee. Read one of the great early books (“I, the Jury,””One Lonely Night,” “Vengeance Is Mine,” “Kiss Me, Deadly”) and try to find the sex. But be prepared to be disappointed. Like every other boy in my junior high school, I searched for the hot stuff. There are passionate kisses. Everything else occurs behind closed doors. Racier books have been written by nuns.

Mickey Spillane sold 100 million books in his lifetime. For fun, he appeared in a hundred Miller Lite commercials. How many of the lock-step vituperative critics who took their whacks at him are remembered today?

Goodbye, Mickey. You deserved to win, and you did.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.