Review: Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, January 1972

I recently got my hands on a number of issues of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE from the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. I read the magazine regularly from cover to cover when I was writing for it in the late Seventies and early Eighties, right up until it ended in 1985. (The publisher at that time still owed me $242.00 when the magazine folded, $242.00 that I never got paid, but I’m not still bitter about that $242.00 41 years later, oh, no, of course not.) Anyway, since then I’ve read the occasional old issue, but now I have this nice big stack of them, so I thought it might be good to pull one out at random and read it. The lucky issue was from January 1972. That’s my copy in the scan.

As was common for most of the magazine’s run, this issue leads off with a 20,000 word Mike Shayne novella. “Shadow of Fear” is something of an offbeat tale in which the big redheaded private detective isn’t hired on a case and has no murder to solve. Instead, it’s more of an action thriller in which a New York mobster comes to Miami and kidnaps a friend of Lucy Hamilton (Shayne’s secretary) as leverage in forcing Shayne to set up a meeting with a Cuban refugee who’s rumored to be building a secret army in order to return to Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro. The mystery is what business this mobster has with a Cuban revolutionary, and will Shayne be able to untangle everything in time to save the young woman who’s being held prisoner.

It’s a fast-moving, hardboiled, reasonably well-plotted tale that flows well. The author does a decent job of capturing Shayne’s character most of the time, with a few missteps. In the novels by Davis Dresser, Shayne is always two and sometimes three steps ahead of all the other characters in his thinking, and in this novella, he’s not that smart. Nor would Shayne, in my mind, ever wear bell bottoms and a flowerdy shirt. (Well, the guy in those terrible photo covers on the late Dell editions of the novels might, but that guy isn’t Mike Shayne.) Those complaints aside, this novella’s version of Shayne is at least recognizable as the big redhead we all know and some of us love. That’s not always true in these ghostwritten stories.

And speaking of ghostwriters, “Shadow of Fear” has been attributed to Max Van Derveer, who also wrote the goofy, Shell Scott-like novels about private eye Tokey Wedge under the name Jack Lynn. That’s possible. Van Derveer wrote quite a few stories for MSMM under his own name, and the editors always had a habit of recruiting the Shayne ghosts from the magazine’s regular contributors. But unlike the Tokey Wedge novels, this grim, dour story has not a trace of humor in it. Like I said, it’s certainly possible Van Derveer wrote it, but since all I’ve read by him in the past has been his lighter stories, I just don’t know for sure. Either way, “Shadow of Fear” is okay, definitely not a stand-out Shayne yarn but perfectly readable.

Next up is the short story “Sagittarius” by Gary Brandner, the third of five stories by Brandner about Hollywood private eye Adam Dukane. Two Dukane stories appeared in MSMM, two in ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, and one in ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE. In this one, Dukane is hired by an astrologer who counts among her clients movie stars and studio big-shots. Somebody is sending her threatening notes, and she wants Dukane to find out who and if it’s a serious threat. It is, of course, and Dukane solves the case (which, honestly, isn’t very difficult to do). Brandner is enough of an old pro to hold the reader’s interest and deliver an enjoyable story.

“Assignment—Murder” is an espionage novella by F.W. Nash. The narrator/protagonist, CIA agent Art Barrett, is sent to Beirut to investigate the suspicious death of an agent who happens to be an old friend of his. While he’s there, he has to set up the assassination of an enemy agent who’s causing a lot of trouble. Then there’s the matter of the beautiful blonde who, along with her brother, inherited some mining property in a fictional-but-real-sounding Middle Eastern nation. If you think that all these things might wind up being connected, well, there’s a good chance you’d be right. This story belongs in the same murky and dangerous realm of international intrigue as Matt Helm, Joe Gall, and Sam Durell, while not being as well-written as any of those series. Nor does it generate much unbearable suspense, as the cover claims. In fact, the middle section kind of plods along. However, the plot is interesting and the ending is pretty good and, yes, fairly suspenseful. Art Barrett is a good protagonist who probably could have carried a series. But this is his only appearance, and in fact, the only story listed in the Fictionmags Index by F.W. Nash.

Actually, as soon as I saw that name on the cover, I thought, “That’s a pseudonym.” Knowing from experience that the editors at MSMM had a habit of sticking a pen-name on a story without telling the author, I figured “F.W. Nash” was one of the other contributors to this issue. If “Assignment—Murder” was really by Max Van Derveer, they wouldn’t have needed to use a pseudonym since his other story is under the Brett Halliday house-name. Gary Brandner, maybe? Possible, but this story doesn’t read like Brandner’s work to me. Nobody else in the issue seems to be a likely suspect, either. Maybe it really is by F.W. Nash, who for some reason never sold another story. Stranger things have happened. Anyway, “Assignment—Murder” isn’t a great yarn, but I thought it was okay.

Several years before taking over the editorship of MSMM (and giving me my first steady writing job, I might add), Charles E. Fritch appears in this issue with the short story “Is There Wife After Death?”, a wry little tale that takes the premise of a famous Patricia Highsmith novel and Alfred Hitchcock film and gives it a different spin. It’s well-written, as Chuck’s work always was, and moves right along.

Miriam Allen deFord is best remembered for her science fiction and fantasy stories, but she wrote a lot of crime stories for the mystery digests, too. “The Incipient Corpse” in this issue is a lightweight tale about a professional burglar who unknowingly targets a house where a paranormal investigation is going on. This is a pretty good idea, but deFord does very little with it in a mildly amusing but very forgettable story.

M.G. Ogan was the pseudonym of husband and wife writing team Margaret and George Ogan. I seem to recall reading a few stories by them in the past and enjoying them. “The Truck-Snatchers” is the first in a short-lived series about Cole Stoddard, the owner of a security agency who specializes in cases related to the trucking industry. In this one, he’s trying to track down four highjacked trucks. With its straightforward prose and procedural elements, this reminds me a little of Joe Gores’ DKA novels and stories, although not as well-written. But it has some nice action and I enjoyed it.

The issue wraps up with a short-short by a forgotten author named Ed Dumonte, who turned out a couple dozen stories for the mystery digests. “Mrs. Becker’s Yarn” is about a little old lady who sits around various places in the city, knitting and observing life. But of course there’s more to it than that. This is a reasonably clever story.

Overall, I’d have to say this is a slightly below average issue of MSMM. None of the stories are terrible, but none of them rise above the level of okay, either. I’m going to keep working my way through the stack of them I have on hand, hopefully with better results.

Review: The Kissed Corpse - Asa Baker (Davis Dresser)

Davis Dresser was the kind of writer I really admire and have tried to be in my career, a guy who was willing and able to turn his hand to different kinds of fiction and do all of them well. In the late Thirties, he was writing Western novels, spicy romances, and of course mysteries. He’d already had some success with MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER, published under the pseudonym Asa Baker, set in El Paso, Texas, Dresser’s home town, and starring special police detective Jerry Burke. In 1939, he published his second Burke novel, THE KISSED CORPSE, which Carlyle House brought out in hardcover.

Asa Baker isn’t just the pseudonym Dresser used on these books. Baker is also a character in them, a Western and mystery novelist who’s pretty obviously a stand-in for Dresser himself. He tags along with his friend Jerry Burke and narrates the stories of Burke’s investigations. In THE KISSED CORPSE, though, it’s Baker who turns up a murder and gets Burke involved.

He’s staying at a friend’s cabin in a canyon just outside El Paso. Millionaire oilman Raymond Dwight has an estate in the same canyon. Also not far away is the bungalow where former soldier of fortune Leslie Young lives with his beautiful wife Myra. Baker discovers that the oil tycoon is a peeping tom, spying on a sunbathing Myra Young through a telescope. Unfortunately, Myra’s husband makes that same discovery, and not long after that, Baker discovers his body while walking through the canyon.

Since this is a Davis Dresser novel, things are nowhere near as simple as they appear to be starting out, though. It seems that the Mexican government has taken over Dwight’s oilfield properties below the border, and he’s trying to put together a shady deal to recoup the loss. There are mysterious notes and threats and a seedy hacienda below the Rio Grande where the beautiful leader of a Mexican nationalist group holds secret meetings. There’s a beautiful, ambitious female reporter poking around who may or may not have been romantically involved with the murdered man. The oilman has a hard-drinking, gorgeous teenage daughter. Throw in a little blackmail, too, and Jerry Burke will have his hands full untangling the whole mess.

With its dangerous nighttime visit to the mysterious hacienda below the border, THE KISSED CORPSE has a rather pulpish feel starting out, but for a long stretch, it settles down and becomes almost an English country house type of mystery, with a bunch of suspects at a fancy estate and the dogged detective interrogating them. It’s a millionaire’s mansion in the Franklin Mountains, but the idea is the same. There’s some moving around later on, but eventually all the suspects come together again so Burke can reveal the killer and explain everything.

Dresser was a master of this sort of blend between the traditional and hardboiled mysteries. I don’t think he has the plot nailed down quite as well in THE KISSED CORPSE as he would in the Mike Shayne novels he wrote over the next decade, but it works well enough. Jerry Burke is a good character, too: a former cowboy, Texas Ranger, intelligence operative during World War I, soldier of fortune, and cop. Asa Baker is a likable narrator. Dresser spins his yarn in fast-moving prose that mostly has a breezy feel to it, although things can get rough now and then.

The same year this novel came out, Dresser also published DIVIDEND ON DEATH, the first book in the Mike Shayne series, and although he worked on other things besides Shayne over the next couple of decades, he never went back to Jerry Burke. I think the Shaynes are much better overall, but I wouldn’t have minded a few more Jerry Burke novels, too. Both books featuring him are pretty entertaining. MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER was reprinted twice under the Brett Halliday name. THE KISSED CORPSE got a single digest paperback reprint under the Asa Baker pseudonym. It is, however, available these days in an e-book edition under the Halliday name, and if you’re a Mike Shayne fan, I think you’ll enjoy both of the Jerry Burke novels, too.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Mum's the Word for Murder - Brett Halliday (Davis Dresser)

Davis Dresser wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire as a writer when this book was published under the pseudonym Asa Baker in 1938. He was making a living writing romances and Westerns for lending library publishers, but it was a precarious one. Better things were on the horizon for him, though. The next year, 1939, Henry Holt would publish Dresser’s novel DIVIDEND ON DEATH under the pseudonym Brett Halliday, which introduced redheaded Miami private detective Michael Shayne, a character who would make Dresser a rich man (and put a few shekels in the pockets of numerous other authors, as well, present company included).

But what about MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER? It’s an important book because it’s a dry run for the introduction of Michael Shayne a year later. The detective, Jerry Burke, is a big, tough, smart Irishman like Shayne, and although he’s a cop in this book, he has a background as a private detective and shares the same sort of checkered history that Dresser was to give Shayne. The novel is narrated by Asa Baker (which was also the original byline), a struggling author of Western novels obviously patterned after Dresser himself. A number of years later, Dresser wrote himself (as Halliday) into one of the Shayne novels, SHE WOKE TO DARKNESS, in much the same way. The book is set in El Paso, Dresser’s hometown and the scene of one of the best Shayne novels, MURDER IS MY BUSINESS. Burke even has a nemesis, the local chief of detectives Jelcoe, who serves the same function as Miami Beach Chief of Detective Peter Painter in the Shayne novels.

As MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER opens, Asa Baker is struggling to find inspiration for a new novel, and he finds it in the person of his old friend Jerry Burke, who has been hired by the city as a special detective to clean up crime and corruption in El Paso. Burke tells Baker about a strange advertisement that appeared in that afternoon’s paper, warning that a murder will take place at exactly 11:41 that night and challenging Burke to do something about it. The ad is signed “Mum”.

Sure enough, a wealthy businessman is murdered at exactly 11:41, and Burke invites Baker along to observe the investigation and gather material for a novel based on the case. This is just the beginning of a clever cat-and-mouse game between Burke and the mysterious serial killer who calls himself Mum. There are several more murders, and each time it appears that the case is just about solved, Dresser throws in yet another twist. Burke has the same talent that Shayne possesses: he’s always one step ahead of everybody else in the book – and two steps ahead of the reader, finally coming up with an ingenious solution that predates another author’s more famous usage of the same gimmick.

The early Shayne novels are entertaining blends of hardboiled action, screwball comedy, and fair-play detection, many of them with plots that rival Erle Stanley Gardner for complexity. Dresser doesn’t quite have the mix down yet in this book – there’s not much comedy, for instance, and Dresser doesn’t strictly play fair, withholding a fairly important clue from the reader until late in the book – but MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER is still one of the most enjoyable novels I’ve read in a while. Dresser’s style is very smooth and keeps the pages turning easily. I had a hard time putting this one down.

By the Fifties, the Shayne novels were doing so well in paperback for Dell that Dresser pulled out this old novel, along with one he wrote under the pseudonym Hal Debrett, BEFORE I WAKE, and Dell reissued them under the Brett Halliday byline. MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER proved popular enough that it was reissued again in the Sixties, this time with a McGinnis cover that’s not a particularly good one, in my opinion. Unless that’s not actually McGinnis’s work. I don’t have that edition, so maybe somebody who does can check and correct me if I’m wrong.

There’s one more Jerry Burke novel under the Asa Baker name, THE KISSED CORPSE, which came out in 1939, the same year as DIVIDEND ON DEATH. After that, Dresser was either too busy to return to that Shayne-prototype (he was writing Westerns as Peter Field and Don Davis, in addition to carrying on the Shayne series), or maybe he just thought that Jerry Burke had served his purpose. Based on my reading of this book, I plan on trying to get hold of a copy of THE KISSED CORPSE. MUM’S THE WORD FOR MURDER is long out of print, of course, like most of Dresser’s work, but copies are fairly easy to come by on-line. I liked this one a lot and give it a high recommendation.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on April 2, 2010. In the comments on the original post, someone asked about the "ingenious solution" in this novel and the other author who used it later. I have absolutely no idea about any of that anymore. But another commenter confirmed that the second cover is indeed by Robert McGinnis. I have a copy of the other Jerry Burke novel, THE KISSED CORPSE. A friend sent it to me not long after this post first appeared. I'm ashamed to say that I still haven't read it. But I know where it is. Maybe time to get it out and finally read it. Also since 2010, MUM'S THE WORD FOR MURDER has been reprinted as a very inexpensive e-book, which you can get here if you want to check it out.)

A Rough Edges Rerun: Armed . . . Dangerous . . . Brett Halliday (Robert Terrall)

A while back I had an email conversation with an author friend of mine [probably Steve Mertz] about the relative merits of Robert Terrall’s Mike Shayne novels. When I was first reading the Shayne novels back in the Sixties and early Seventies, I didn’t know that Davis Dresser, the original Brett Halliday, had had so many ghost-writers contributing to the series. But I did know that as the Sixties went on, I began to like the novels less, and by the Seventies, I didn’t care for them at all. Later, of course, I found out that Robert Terrall was the author of the books I didn’t like.

However, a number of people whose opinions I respect do like Terrall’s Shayne novels, and since I hadn’t read one in close to forty years, I thought I ought to do so and see if my opinion of them has changed since then.

Well . . . it has and it hasn’t.

ARMED . . . DANGEROUS . . . , from 1966, is one of the books I never got around to reading back then. It’s got a nice McGinnis cover, at least on the first edition, and although Mike Shayne is nowhere to be seen, the opening section certainly has plenty of action and intrigue to recommend it. Early on, there’s a beautiful French blonde, a jewel heist, the brutal shooting of an off-duty cop, and a kidnapping. But there’s a twist coming, and I’ll admit, Terrall slipped it right past me for a good while, although I caught it before it was revealed. From that point on, there are a lot more twists, as the story takes on a much larger scale and becomes part caper novel/part thriller with international implications. It’s very well written, a little dated in some respects today but not all that much, and the pace is spectacular, leaving the reader whipping through the pages to see what’s going to happen. There’s even a bit of humor as Terrall name-checks another of his pseudonyms. This is a very entertaining novel. The problem is, it’s barely a Mike Shayne novel.

Oh, a character named Shayne plays a huge part in it, make no mistake about that, but he’s so lacking in personality that the protagonist could be almost anybody. There’s no sense that this is the same character who inhabits all the books in the series actually written by Davis Dresser. Terrall may have been a better wordsmith than Dresser was, I won’t argue that point, but Dresser’s Shayne is a fascinating character, no more honest than he has to be but with a decent core, and maybe one of the most intelligent characters in mystery fiction, who is always two steps ahead of the other people in the books and three steps ahead of the reader. I think most of the other authors who ghosted full-length Shayne novels were able to capture this to a certain extent, and Terrall did, too, at first, but as his stint on the series went on, I believe he lost his handle on the character. However, I could be wrong about this, and I plan to read more of his books to see what I think.

In the meantime, should you read ARMED . . . DANGEROUS . . .? Absolutely. It’s well-written and a lot of fun. If it had featured anybody but Mike Shayne, I’d give it an unqualified recommendation. But if you’ve never read a Shayne novel before, this is definitely not the place to start.

(This post originally appeared on July 10, 2009. And despite what I said in it, I haven't read any more of Terrall's Shayne novels since then. I'm sure this comes as no surprise to most of you, who know by now that I have the attention span of a six-week-old puppy.)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Fiction Weekly, January 13, 1940

I've mentioned before that the first actual pulp I ever owned was an issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, so I've always had a soft spot for that magazine despite reading very little from it. This issue from 1940 sports a good cover by Emmett Watson and a very solid line-up of authors including Cleve F. Adams with two stories, a novelette and an installment from a Rex McBride serial called "Homicide: Honolulu Bound". If this serial was published as a novel under some other title, maybe one of you out there can provide that information. Also on hand are Brett Halliday (Davis Dresser) with an installment in the Mike Shayne serial "Death Rides a Winner" (if I've read this, I don't remember it), Hugh B. Cave, John St. John (who was really Richard Sale) and a forgotten pulpster named John Randolph Phillips. Like ARGOSY, DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY is a frustrating pulp for people who just want to read the stories because of all the serials, but there's no doubt that a lot of great yarns were published in its pages.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Mystery Book Magazine, Summer 1948

This is a nice dramatic cover on this issue of MYSTERY BOOK MAGAZINE. I don't know the artist. When I spotted it while looking through the Fictionmags Index, I got excited for a minute because this issue features a Mike Shayne story I hadn't heard of, "Murder is a Habit". But a little investigation seems to indicate that it's actually a condensation of the novel BLOOD ON THE STARS. Any confirmation or other information will be much appreciated. Besides the Shayne story, this issue includes yarns by Judson P. Philips, Roy Vickers, Cyril Plunkett, O.B. Myers, Jules Archer, and house-name John L. Benton.

UPDATE: The cover artist is Rudolph Belarski. Thanks to Ed Hulse for that identification. The artwork was recycled for the cover of a Mike Shayne novel, fittingly enough, on BODIES ARE WHERE YOU FIND THEM, Popular Library #192.

Forgotten Books: The Complete Mike Shayne, Private Eye - Ken Fitch and Ed Ashe

A number of years ago, I posted about the Mike Shayne comic book series published by Dell in 1961 and ’62. Dell was publishing the Mike Shayne novels in paperback, very successfully, and I suppose someone there decided a comic book version of the character might work, too. That didn’t really pan out, since there were only three issues. I’d heard about them for years but never came across any copies. However, they’ve recently been reprinted in a nice trade paperback edition by some outfit called Gwandanaland Comics, so I picked up a copy and finally read them after all these years.

Each issue is based on one of the novels by Davis Dresser writing as Brett Halliday: THE PRIVATE PRACTICE OF MICHAEL SHAYNE, BODIES ARE WHERE YOU FIND THEM, and HEADS—YOU LOSE (originally published as BLOOD ON THE BLACK MARKET). By the way, nowhere in this reprint or the original comics is there any mention of Dresser or Halliday, and the copyright is by Dell Publishing Company. Any kid coming across these back in the Sixties who wasn’t familiar with the books would have thought Shayne had been created for the comics.

Each of the source novels has a pretty complicated plot, as was common in the Shayne series, and the comic book versions actually do a pretty solid, faithful job of adapting them. They’re toned down a little, but not much. You’ve still got murder, blackmail, adultery, and more murder. I can imagine a kid reading these and getting lost in all the twists and turns of the plots. Nor does the third issue pull any punches about Shayne’s wife Phyllis dying in childbirth, along with the baby, and leaving Shayne pretty much a broken man until a murder case pulls him out of that despair. Twelve-year-olds just aren’t the target audience for these yarns. (Well, unless you’re a weird twelve-year-old like I was, since I started reading the Shayne novels about that age . . .)

From what I’ve been able to find on-line, the first two issues were written by Ken Fitch, and the third one probably was, as well. The art in all three issues is by Ed Ashe. Both of those guys were journeyman comics pros with less than a hundred credits each, hardly top talent, but they did pretty good jobs, anyway. Fitch condenses the action down well, and there’s even a newspaper headline in the second issue that includes his name as an in-joke. Ashe’s Mike Shayne resembles the one on the Dell paperback covers, which also appears on the first two comic book covers. The worst glitch is the coloring in the first issue, which finds Mike Shayne with bright blond hair instead of red, while his reporter buddy Tim Rourke is the one with red hair. That’s switched around in the other two issues and looks a lot better. Each issue also includes a one-page text story and a four-page backup comics story, all of them minor stand-alone crime yarns.

There’s a reason these comic books are obscure. They probably sold poorly and not a lot of copies are still out there to be found. And while I certainly enjoyed them, there aren’t enough people interested in them to make them really collectable. Throw in the fact that Fitch and Ashe were no Lee and Kirby, and you can see why they haven’t been reprinted until now. (And now I’m visualizing a Kirby version of Mike Shayne. You know, that could have worked. Just think about how he drew Reed Richards and Johnny Storm in suits and hats in early issues of FANTASTIC FOUR . . .)

Forgotten Books: Ladies of Chance - Anthony Scott (Davis Dresser)

Davis Dresser was a busy author during the Thirties even before he created one of the iconic fictional private eyes in Mike Shayne in 1939, turning out a number of mysteries and romances under assorted names. LADIES OF CHANCE was written for the lending library publisher Godwin in 1936 under the pseudonym Anthony Scott, then reprinted in digest format in 1949 by Novel Library. The protagonist/narrator Ed Barlow is a hardboiled, two-fisted tabloid newspaper reporter who's come to Miami to bust wide open the story of a gambling ring that's using crooked games to force respectable women into prostitution by getting their IOUs for gambling losses and then blackmailing them. To get the scoop, Barlow has to get close to several of the women involved and insinuate himself into the gang, an effort that more than once finds him getting hot and bothered with some dame or in danger of losing his life to gangsters.

In some ways this novel is very much a dry run for the creation of Mike Shayne a few years later. There's the Miami setting, with a lot of mentions of Flagler Street and Biscayne Bay. Despite being a reporter, since he's undercover Ed Barlow functions very much like a hardboiled private eye, and like Shayne, he's usually two or three steps ahead of everyone else. He even has another reporter who helps him out, like Tim Rourke in the Shayne novels. There's no buddy on the police force like Will Gentry or an official nemesis like Peter Painter, but there is a beautiful young woman named Lucy.

There are certainly some differences, too, though. Barlow is much more of a heel than Shayne, who always followed a rough moral code. In some scenes, Barlow is almost as unsympathetic as the crooks he's after. LADIES OF CHANCE isn't as well plotted as the Shayne novels, either, and the big twist ending won't come as a surprise to anyone. Dresser's usual smooth, fast-paced prose is already on display, though. This book reads really fast and enjoyably. I liked it quite a bit, and if you're a Mike Shayne fan it's well worth reading to see an early prototype of the big redheaded shamus.

In fact, because of the Shayne connection, there's an ebook version of this novel available under the Brett Halliday pseudonym, although it was never published with that name on it until now. That doesn't change the fact that LADIES OF CHANCE is a nice piece of sleazy, hardboiled fun.

Somebody Out There Needs This

I've been contacted by a person who has a complete set of the Mike Shayne novels for sale, along with correspondence between Davis Dresser and his wife Mary. Anybody who might be interested, let me know and I'll put the seller in touch with you. I don't know what the price is going to be or any details about the books (edition, condition, etc.).

But it's a good reason to post a McGinnis cover, right?

Monday Morning Digest Magazine: Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine, September 1956

I'm trying in this series to concentrate on issues that have some personal meaning to me. In this case, MSMM was certainly important to me, although about twenty years later. But this is the first issue, and as it happens, I once had a copy of this one. Notice that it's called MICHAEL SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, rather than the tougher and more laconic MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE. The first six issues carried that title before it was shortened. Sam Merwin Jr., not that far removed from his pulp editing and writing days, was the editor, as he would be again years later when he started buying stories from me, and he also wrote the Shayne novelette in this issue under the Brett Halliday house-name. MSMM was a fine magazine, and I'm sure you'll be seeing more covers from it in this series.

Forgotten Books: This is It, Michael Shayne - Brett Halliday (Davis Dresser)

Numerous times I've mentioned the bookmobile that came out to our little town every Saturday from the public library in the county seat. One Saturday in 1963 or '64 (after the people who worked in the bookmobile stopped trying to steer me to the kids' books and let me check out whatever I wanted) I picked up a rather drab-looking gray hardback in the mystery section: THIS IS IT, MICHAEL SHAYNE. I'd never heard of the author Brett Halliday or the private eye character Michael Shayne, but I checked it out anyway, took it home, and read it.

Things, as they say, were never the same again.

The book must have made a big impression on me because I started seeking out more Mike Shayne novels and quickly became a big fan. Shayne was tough and smart, he had a beautiful secretary (who he was obviously sleeping with), and this was probably the coolest thing of all to me at ten or eleven years old: he had a phone in his car.

Well, many of you know how this story ends up. Fifteen years later I'm Brett Halliday and I write more than half a million words about Mike Shayne myself. I remain a big fan of the original novels and still read or reread one from time to time.

But until now I'd never reread the one that started it for me, so I decided it was time. In the nearly fifty years since then, I had forgotten nearly all of the plot, so it was almost like reading a book I'd never read before.

This one starts out with Shayne receiving a call for help from a crusading, crime-busting journalist who's visiting Miami. Before he can reach her, though, somebody murders her. Shayne figures he has a responsibility to track down her killer, and Shayne being who he is, he thinks maybe he can find a way to pick up a nice chunk of change for doing so.

All the action in THIS IS IT, MICHAEL SHAYNE takes place over a span of six or seven hours, and since the plot involves a gambling den, blackmail, an old murder charge, clashes with gangsters, a multitude of alibis, a secretary (not Lucy Hamilton) who turns out to be beautiful when she takes her glasses off, and another murder, you can guess it's pretty much of a whirlwind. As usual, Shayne stays two steps ahead of the cops (represented by Miami chief of police Will Gentry) and his reporter pal Tim Rourke, and he's at least three steps ahead of this reader, anyway. The plots concocted by Davis Dresser, the original Brett Halliday, rival those of Erle Stanley Gardner for complexity.

While THIS IS IT, MICHAEL SHAYNE was good enough to turn me into a life-long fan of the series, now that I've read a lot more Shayne novels I wouldn't put it in the top rank. The killer is maybe a little too easy to spot. However, it's a good solid entry and I really enjoyed reading it again. If you're a Shayne fan and haven't read it, it's well worth seeking out.

Now here's a couple of oddities. I said I didn't remember much about the book from reading it back in the Sixties, but a couple of scenes stuck with me. The problem is, they're not in the book, and I would have sworn they were. They must be in some other Shayne novel I read back then, and I'm just confused about where they appear. But I sure thought they were in this one.

The other thing has to do with the original hardcover from Dodd, Mead and the paperback reprint from Dell. I own copies of both and decided to read the paperback since it's got a cool McGinnis cover, as most of the Shayne paperbacks from that era do. But in comparing the two editions I immediately noticed that the paperback has chapter titles and the hardback doesn't. I wonder if Dresser added those for the paperback edition or if some editor at Dell was responsible for them. It doesn't really matter, of course, but things like that intrigue me.

Three Mike Shayne Stories

Over on his blog today, Win Scott Eckert mentions three Mike Shayne stories that I wrote for MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE: "Black Lotus" (January 1981), "Death From the Sky" (July 1981), and "Doomsday Island" (February 1982). If you want to know why Win's interested in them, you'll have to check out his blog, but I thought I'd post the covers here to stir up some nostalgia, as well as express my disbelief that I wrote these stories more than THIRTY FRICKIN' YEARS AGO! That's hard to believe. It seems like either last week or a millennium ago.

Forgotten Books: Call for Michael Shayne - Brett Halliday (Davis Dresser)

(This post originally appeared in somewhat different form on June 19, 2006.)

Some of you reading this may not know that in the early days of my writing career, more than twenty-five years ago, I was "Brett Halliday" for a while, penning more than three dozen short novels about Miami private eye Michael Shayne for MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE. And I do mean penning -- most of my first drafts in those days were written in spiral notebooks with a fountain pen. I'd been reading the full-length Shayne novels for years and read a lot more of them after MSMM's editor, Sam Merwin Jr., asked me to try my hand at writing a Shayne story. So I have a great fondness for the series and have always considered it somewhat underrated by the critics. These days, of course, Mike Shayne is mostly forgotten. But not by me. I still read (or sometimes reread) one of the novels now and then.

From 1949, CALL FOR MICHAEL SHAYNE is one of the books I hadn't read until now. It's by Davis Dresser, the creator of the series and the original Brett Halliday. It starts with a situation that's very familiar to readers of hardboiled mystery novels: Insurance executive Arthur Devlin wakes up in a seedy hotel room with no memory of where he's been or what he's done during the past two weeks. And oh, yeah, there's a dead body in the room, too, a weaselly-looking guy with his head bashed in by a blackjack. Instead of muddling through and finding out what's going on by himself, though, Devlin does the smart thing. He turns to Mike Shayne for help.

As always in a Shayne novel, there are plenty of twists and turns in the plot. Some of it is fairly easy to figure out, but there was one "D'oh!" moment near the end when I smacked my forehead and realized I should have made a certain connection a lot earlier. Dresser was a master at staying one or two or sometimes three jumps ahead of the reader.

There's no sign of Shayne's faithful secretary Lucy Hamilton in this one, or his reporter friend Tim Rourke, but Miami Chief of Police Will Gentry and Shayne's longtime adversary Peter Painter make appearances. The fact that all the action in the novel takes place in less than twenty-four hours just didn't leave room for Lucy or Rourke, I guess. The scenes where Shayne spars verbally with Painter are great fun, as usual.

CALL FOR MICHAEL SHAYNE belongs in the second or maybe even third tier of Shayne novels, but it's still very entertaining. The cover illustration above is from the Dell mapback edition and is probably by Robert Stanley. (I didn't look it up to be sure.) 

Forgotten Books: Tickets for Death - Brett Halliday (Davis Dresser)

I’m pretty sure I’ve told some of this story before, so those of you who have already heard it please bear with me. In the spring of 1978, I had been selling short stories to Sam Merwin Jr. at MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE for a little over a year. Sam and I corresponded frequently – no email in those days, of course – and in one letter I asked him who was currently writing the Mike Shayne stories that appeared in the magazine under the Brett Halliday by-line. Honestly, I wasn’t angling for work, I was just curious. I’d been reading the stories and wanted to know who wrote them, since I knew by then that the original Brett Halliday, Davis Dresser, didn’t write the magazine stories. (In fact, by 1978 Dresser had passed away.)


Sam replied that he had been writing most of the stories himself and named several recent entries that he’d done. Then he asked me if I would like to try my hand at one, since he liked the short stories I’d been writing for him. The Shayne yarns ran 20,000 words, he told me, and paid “a flat, lousy three hundred bucks”.

Well, to a 24-year-old freelancer struggling to build a writing career, the idea of writing a 20,000-word story seemed a little daunting, but $300 didn’t sound lousy at all. In fact, it sounded like a fortune. That would pay the rent for two months on the apartment where Livia and I were living, with some left over to buy groceries. Plus I had been a reader and fan of the Mike Shayne novels ever since I was ten years old and checked out a copy of THIS IS IT, MICHAEL SHAYNE from the bookmobile that came out to our little town every Saturday from the big library in the county seat.


So of course I wrote back immediately to Sam and told him I’d love to write a Shayne story. He was pleased and said he would send me a copy of the Mike Shayne “bible”. He also instructed me to “just get the story down” and not worry too much about making sure everything was consistent with what had come before. He could go through it and make it sound like a Shayne if he needed to, he said.


But I’d been reading the Shayne novels off and on for years and was confident that I knew the characters, the setting, and the right style for the series. This was the biggest opportunity I’d had so far in my career, though, so I wanted to make sure I got it right. In order to do that, I quickly rounded up the first ten or twelve novels in the Shayne series (I already owned some of them, and the others were still very easy to find back then) and read them one after the other, totally immersing myself in the world of Michael Shayne before I ever wrote a word of my first story, which was published in the December 1978 issue of MSMM under the title I had given it, “Death in Xanadu”. As far as I remember, Sam changed one word in the manuscript, so I think I did a pretty good job of making it sound like a Shayne yarn was supposed to sound.

This is why, with a few exceptions, my Mike Shayne stories read a lot like they were written in the Forties. Those first dozen or so novels by Davis Dresser were my model for all the ones I wrote. (One of my Shaynes was actually set in the Forties, but that’s a whole other story.)

All of which is my nostalgic, very long-winded explanation for why it’s been 32 years since I last read the 1941 Shayne novel TICKETS FOR DEATH. After all that time, it seemed new to me when I recently reread it.

Mike Shayne has been accused of being the generic hardboiled private eye, and in some of the later books that may have been the case, but the early books were something totally different. Those novels are a highly appealing blend of hardboiled action, screwball comedy, and fair-play detection. Imagine Sam Spade marrying Pam North and solving cases like Nero Wolfe with a gathering of suspects at the end and a detailed explanation of who the killer is, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what the early Shayne novels are like. Phyllis Shayne, Mike’s beautiful young wife, was killed off in the series in the mid-Forties, but she’s still around in this one and is, in fact, the reason Shayne gets mixed up in a case involving counterfeit tickets being cashed in at a greyhound racing track in a resort town north of Miami. When the two of them arrive in town, they’ve barely checked in at their hotel when a couple of gunmen working for a local mobster ambush Shayne and try to kill him. Naturally, they wind up dead for their trouble, although Shayne is wounded in the exchange of gunfire. It’s nothing that guzzling down a few glasses of cognac at every opportunity won’t cure, though.

From there, it’s not long until one of the people involved in the counterfeit ticket racket is murdered. Several more murders occur in fast and furious fashion, because this is one of those books where all the action occurs in the space of five or six hours. You’ll probably think you have things figured out – it seems pretty obvious what’s going on – but things are seldom as simple as they seem in Mike Shayne novels, and that’s certainly the case here. Dresser throws in twist after twist, and I’m reminded of the fact that the plots in these early Shayne novels often rival those of Erle Stanley Gardner’s for complexity. Shayne, of course, is two jumps ahead of everybody else (and three jumps ahead of the reader most of the time), and always figures out not only who the killer is but also how he can collect the biggest fee.

TICKETS FOR DEATH is one of the most entertaining books I’ve read this year, and if you’ve never sampled a Mike Shayne novel, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start, although the early ones probably are best read in order.

Hard Case Crime Update (with Mike Shayne News!)

MURDER IS MY BUSINESS
Brett Halliday
August 2010
ISBN: 0-8439-6328-X
Cover art by Robert McGinnis
Read A Sample Chapter

MURDER AT THE RIO GRANDE

Ten years ago, private eye Mike Shayne did a job for one of the richest men in El Paso, digging up dirt on a boy courting the tycoon’s daughter. Now the daughter’s back, all grown up and dangerous. And so’s Shayne—but this time it’s to investigate murder...

First publication in 20 years
One of the most popular detectives of all time, Mike Shayne starred in more than 70 novels, a dozen movies, a TV series, radio dramas, comic books, and the long-running Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine

Filmmaker SHANE BLACK,creator of Lethal Weapon and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,on the Work of BRETT HALLIDAY

"In this age of private eyes with cats, funny neighbors, and relationship woes—here’s to 40’s thriller writer Brett Halliday, whose baffling, bullet-paced capers have come to light again.

"Halliday’s books were marvels of misdirection. Red herrings, skewed motives, mistaken identities—he did everything but come to your house and bang cymbals.

"Halliday’s plots are byzantine gems. This is back when mystery writers were so much smarter than you and me. Want an engrossing read? Pick this one up.

"Never heard of this book? No matter. It’s been waiting patiently, poised to dazzle you with raw, ingenious storytelling. Halliday is the king of the baffler novel. Pure pleasure.

"How long can Halliday’s best-selling books remain dormant, undiscovered...? The answer: not a minute longer, thanks to Hard Case Crime."

(And to add my own opinion to that of Shane Black, MURDER IS MY BUSINESS is one of my absolute favorite Shayne novels. I've read it a couple of times and look forward to reading it again in the Hard Case Crime edition.)

Forgotten Books: Armed ... Dangerous ... - Brett Halliday (Robert Terrall)

A while back I had an email conversation with an author friend of mine about the relative merits of Robert Terrall’s Mike Shayne novels. When I was first reading the Shayne novels back in the Sixties and early Seventies, I didn’t know that Davis Dresser, the original Brett Halliday, had had so many ghost-writers contributing to the series. But I did know that as the Sixties went on, I began to like the novels less, and by the Seventies, I didn’t care for them at all. Later, of course, I found out that Robert Terrall was the author of the books I didn’t like.

However, a number of people whose opinions I respect do like Terrall’s Shayne novels, and since I hadn’t read one in close to forty years, I thought I ought to do so and see if my opinion of them has changed since then.

Well . . . it has and it hasn’t.

ARMED . . . DANGEROUS . . . , from 1966, is one of the books I never got around to reading back then. It’s got a nice McGinnis cover, at least on the first edition, and although Mike Shayne is nowhere to be seen, the opening section certainly has plenty of action and intrigue to recommend it. Early on, there’s a beautiful French blonde, a jewel heist, the brutal shooting of an off-duty cop, and a kidnapping. But there’s a twist coming, and I’ll admit, Terrall slipped it right past me for a good while, although I caught it before it was revealed. From that point on, there are a lot more twists, as the story takes on a much larger scale and becomes part caper novel/part thriller with international implications. It’s very well written, a little dated in some respects today but not all that much, and the pace is spectacular, leaving the reader whipping through the pages to see what’s going to happen. There’s even a bit of humor as Terrall name-checks another of his pseudonyms. This is a very entertaining novel. The problem is, it’s barely a Mike Shayne novel.

Oh, a character named Shayne plays a huge part in it, make no mistake about that, but he’s so lacking in personality that the protagonist could be almost anybody. There’s no sense that this is the same character who inhabits all the books in the series actually written by Davis Dresser. Terrall may have been a better wordsmith than Dresser was, I won’t argue that point, but Dresser’s Shayne is a fascinating character, no more honest than he has to be but with a decent core, and maybe one of the most intelligent characters in mystery fiction, who is always two steps ahead of the other people in the books and three steps ahead of the reader. I think most of the other authors who ghosted full-length Shayne novels were able to capture this to a certain extent, and Terrall did, too, at first, but as his stint on the series went on, I believe he lost his handle on the character. However, I could be wrong about this, and I plan to read more of his books to see what I think.

In the meantime, should you read ARMED . . . DANGEROUS . . .? Absolutely. It’s well-written and a lot of fun. If it had featured anybody but Mike Shayne, I’d give it an unqualified recommendation. But if you’ve never read a Shayne novel before, this is definitely not the place to start.

The Mike Shayne Comic Books

When I was a kid, I bought a lot of comic books published by Dell. Where I lived, they seemed to have the best distribution of all the comics publishers, because they were all over the place. Disney stuff, movie and TV tie-ins (two I remember distinctly are THE COMANCHEROS and 77 SUNSET STRIP), Tarzan, the Lone Ranger . . . Dell had great stuff for an eight- or nine-year-old.

What I didn't know then -- and probably wouldn't have been interested in if I had -- was that Dell also published three issues of a comic book based on the exploits of redheaded Miami shamus Mike Shayne. I found out about these years later but have never tried to get my hands on them. But the other day, my buddy Jim Doherty from the Rara-Avis list posted a link to the covers of the three issues, so I had to take a look. They're pretty good. This is the cover from the second issue, and you can see the other two here. I'm tempted to start searching the Internet for these. Maybe one of these days.