Mickey Spillane? Hy Gardner? Frank Smikel? Apocryphal? Question for Quote Investigator: Popular writers endure a litany of complaints directed at their prose, e.g., mediocre, clumsy, crude, uninteresting, and undemanding. A bestselling writer once employed a clever analogy to explain this antagonism. The writer contended that literary darlings were trying to market caviar, whereas popular writers …