Mass market

It's Mickey Spillane's birthday, and there's a great description of his career over on The Writer's Almanac. Spillane sounds like the James Patterson of his day: his books were written fast and critically panned, he apparently never featured a character who drank cognac or had a mustache (because he didn’t know how to spell those words), and he described his readers as "customers". I don't know if Patterson would describe his books as "the chewing gum of American literature", but I suspect he would approve of the basic sentiment.