Mike Hammer

Executive producer Jay Bernstein acquired the television rights to Mike Hammer from his close friend, novelist Mickey Spillane, for just one dollar.

The TV movie Murder Me, Murder You was originally conceived as a stand-alone film, but its positive reception with audiences turned it into a backdoor pilot for the series.

Stacy Keach deliberately softened the tough, insensitive character of Mike Hammer from the novels, adding humor, charm and vulnerability to make him more suitable for a television audience.

Mickey Spillane insisted that the series be shot in New York City, matching the setting of his novels.

Mickey Spillane also insisted that Stacy Keach carry a Colt Model 1911A1 .45 ACP pistol nicknamed 'Betsy,' since that was the weapon Mike Hammer used in all of Spillane's novels.

Production was interrupted in December 1984 when Stacy Keach was sentenced to nine months in Reading Prison after being arrested at Heathrow Airport for smuggling cocaine; with three episodes already filmed but unfinished, impersonator Rich Little was brought in to mimic Keach's narrative voiceover.

Because of Keach's imprisonment, eight episodes of the second season could not be filmed, and CBS and Columbia Pictures TV paid the rest of the cast for half of those unproduced episodes.

Producer Lew Gallo asked his golf partner, composer Earle Hagen, to use the Duke Ellington-inspired tune 'Harlem Nocturne' as the show's theme, despite some Columbia executives opposing a saxophone-led theme song; the arrangement by J. J. Johnson featuring Bud Shank on alto saxophone was ultimately used.