Mickey Spillane died yesterday at 88. Details about the cause have not yet been made public.

The master of the hardboiled mystery wrote 12 Mike Hammer novels that sold more than 100 million copies and were made into feature movies, TV movies and a TV series. He wrote another dozen books, some for children.

The AP (via CNN) offers a warm obit, which notes that when he came home from World War II, Spillane "needed $1,000 to buy some land and thought novels the best way to go. Within three weeks, he had completed I, the Jury and sent it to Dutton. The editors there doubted the writing, but not the market for it; a literary franchise began. His books helped reveal the power of the paperback market and became so popular they were parodied in movies, including the Fred Astaire musical The Band Wagon."

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Effective September 28 at its annual meeting, HMV, which is merging Ottakar's with its Waterstone's stores, has appointed Simon Fox CEO to replace Alan Giles, who earlier this year had announced he would be leaving the company. Fox has been CEO of Kesa, which Reuters described as an "electrical-goods retailer."

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Source Interlink, "the country's biggest distributor of magazines and a major middleman for DVDs and CDs," continues to be shopped around, and a management buyout is highly probably, according to today's Wall Street Journal. In addition to some 1,000 retail chains, including Target, Kroger and Walgreen, Barnes & Noble, Borders and Amazon.com are major customers.

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The New York Sun debates the merits of Hotel ABA being located in Brooklyn during next year's BEA. A Manhattan bookseller calls it "absurd," but ABA COO Oren Teicher reiterates that midtown hotels will be much more costly to booksellers than even two years ago.