This is It, Michael Shayne (1950) by Brett Halliday

This is It, Michael Shayne (1950) is the eighteenth novel in the Michael Shayne series by "Brett Halliday," penname of Davis Dresser, which attracted my attention for exactly the same reason as The Corpse That Never Was (1963) – promise of a tough nut (i.e. an impossible crime) to crack. Shayne is a hardboiled private eye who, every now and then, "solved classical locked room mysteries." This is It, Michael Shayne is cited as an example and The Corpse That Never Was is another often marked as one, but neither are locked room mysteries. Only legitimate locked room mystery in the series appears to be Murder and the Married Virgin (1944).

I wanted to get that out of the way first as the only locked room mystery discussed on this blog since Edmund Crispin's short story "The Name on the Window" (1951) is D.L. Marshall's 77 North (2023). That's simply shocking for this blog and something that will be remedied in the next post, but first let's take a look at This is It, Michael Shayne.

This is It, Michael Shayne begins with Shayne stepping from a deep-sea fishing boat, "luxuriously relaxed after a day of good-fellowship combined with moderate amounts of aged liquor" and "a fair day's catch," but upon returning to his office he finds an urgent message on his desk from his secretary, Lucy Hamilton – three messages in fact and a thick envelope. The three memos urge Shayne to immediately call Miss Sara Morton at the Tidehaven hotel when he's back. Shayne then opens the envelopes and finds three, small squares of paper with threatening messages, "YOU HAVE THREE DAYS TO GET OUT OF MIAMI ALIVE," "TWO MORE DAYS" and "ONE DAY LEFT," but even more perplexing is the half of a five-hundred dollar bill ("ripped across the middle"). A letter from Morton explaining she has "given up hope that you will contact me before it is too late" and enclosed "the notes which my secretary will explain to you, and one-half of a retainer which I trust you will earn by bringing my murderer to justice." Miss Morton does not answer his calls, but her secretary, Beatrice Lally, does and she's not alone. Timothy Rourke, a reporter from the Miami News, is also at the hotel. There he learns Morton has been in her hotel room awaiting his call, but the door is still locked and light can be seen through the transom without a sign of life. So they enter the room through an unlocked, connecting bathroom door and find Morton with "an ugly gash in her throat." So the problems begin as Sara Morton was not only a celebrity, but practically a legend in her profession.

Sara Morton is a roving reporter for a national syndicate, "feared by the underworld and criminals in high places," who "broke into the big time years ago by becoming the moll of one of Capone's original mob to get an exclusive." She came to Miami to get a story and has been pestering a local criminal, Leo Gannet, who runs the Green Barn and the Red House. And both places offer an opportunity to do some illegal gambling. She immediately jumped on Gannet and began dropping into those two places as soon as she arrived, "they have both closed their gambling-rooms since she started visiting them," which is always a dangerous game to play with hardened criminals. Nor was it perhaps a clever idea to turn down Gannet's $25,000 (more than $300,000 today!) to leave town immediately. There's also a potential personal angle to the case. Sara Morton intended to divorce her estranged husband, Ralph Morton, whom she pays half a grand a month to stay out of her hair. And she intends to marry a man, Edwin Paisly, several years her junior ("...all the earmarks of being more interested in her money than in her"). Will Gentry, Miami's chief of police, really wants to speak with Beatrice Lally, but Shayne whisked her away from the crime scene and stubbornly keeps her away from Gentry as long as possible. And not with reason. But it goes without saying this causes some friction between the two.

This all makes for a quick, fun and perfectly serviceable tough-guy private eye novel and Shayne always seems to act more as a detective than a pulp-style gunslinger, dodging bullets and catching fists, but the plot is pretty lousy – a transparent plot that needlessly tied itself into a knot. First of all, the murderer is so obvious, I kept dismissing it as a red herring. After all, why (SPOILER/ROT13) frghc gur zheqre nf n ybpxrq ebbz zlfgrel jura gur bayl crefba jub pbhyq unir qbar vg, rvgure orvat va gur nqwnprag ebbz be univat n xrl gb gung ebbz, unf qbar vg? Lbh qb gung gb ybnq fhfcvpvba ba na vaabprag punenpgre naq cerfragvat n ceboyrz gung arrqf fbyivat: svaqvat nabgure jnl vagb gur ybpxrq ebbz. Guvf vf whfg havafcverq naq qvfnccbvagvat, ohg, rira jbefr, vg znxrf Funlar ybbx yvxr ur unq whfg orra ehaavat nebhaq cbvagyrffyl gur ragver gvzr. Fbzrguvat rnfvyl svkrq unq gur pevzr fprar abg orra fb gvtugyl ybpxrq be Unyyvqnl unq whfg ena jvgu gur vzcbffvoyr pevzr, juvpu pbhyq unir orra rnfvyl nppbzcyvfurq ol tvivat gur xrl gb gur nqwnprag ebbz na nyvov ol unaqvat bire ng gur ubgry qrfx (gur gvzr-gevpx jbhyq unir gnxra pner bs gur erfg). So a fun enough read that long-time fans of the series will undoubtedly enjoy, but has nothing to recommend to most readers of this blog who come for the classical whodunits, unbreakable alibis, dying messages and miraculous murders.

However, I'm not going to give up on this series just yet. Only on trying to find one, or two, hidden locked room mysteries within the series. There are some and intriguing titles to be found the series with the meta-sounding She Work to Darkness (1955), Shayne crosses path with Brett Halliday at a mystery writer's convention, is likely going to be next stop.

The Corpse That Never Was (1963) by Brett Halliday

Davis Dresser was an American crime writer and creator of the well-known, Miami-based private eye, Mike Shayne, who enjoyed "a long, successful, multi-media career" covering nearly 80 novels, hundreds of short stories, movies, TV-and radio shows and comic books – all done under the name "Brett Halliday." There even was a crime digest, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, which ran from 1956 to 1985 and each issue featured "a novella about the eponymous detective." Dresser largely retired from writing in the late 1950s and heavily relayed on ghostwriters like Robert Arthur, Richard Deming, Dennis Lynds and Bill Pronzini. 

I called Brett Halliday a hardboiled counterpart to Ellery Queen and not merely on account of the multimedia franchise, employing ghostwriters and a long-running mystery magazine. Mike Shayne is not your average, dime rack detective who drinks, shoots and wisecracks his way through a case. While he's no stranger to fistfights, Shayne seldom uses a gun and prefers to rely on his brain to crack a tough nut. Sometimes, "Shayne solved classical locked room mysteries" as in Murder and the Married Virgin (1944) and This Is It, Michael Shayne (1950). That's how The Corpse That Never Was (1963) appeared on my radar as it's essentially a who-and howdunit without any of the hardboiled trappings and the promise of a locked room puzzle. But before delving into the story, the authorship of the book needs to be acknowledged. 

The Corpse That Never Was is listed in several places as having been ghostwritten by an unidentified house author, but, while reading, it struck me it might have been the work of Dennis Lynds – whose work as "William Arden" has been discussed on this blog in the past. So decided to play genre archaeologist and digging around the internet brought an archived post from May 4, 2005, to the surface in which Lynds was asked if he wrote The Corpse That Never Was. Lynds had an interesting answer, "when you ask if I wrote some of Dave's novels, you must remember that except for the last one, what I wrote was a 30,000 or 20,000 word novelette for MSMM for which I was paid 11/2 cent a word, which Dave then bought from me for about $500 and rewrote it into a 40,000-odd word novel in his own style." So "with that context, yes, I wrote The Corpse That Never Was" and "you can find it in MSMM probably under a different title." Lynds played the Frederic Dannay to Dresser's Manfred B. Lee. Now that's out of the way, let's take a closer look at the story itself. 

The Corpse That Never Was begins very homely with Mike Shayne, "completely and utterly relaxed as he had ever been in his life," enjoying a home cooked meal prepared by his devoted secretary, Lucy Hamilton. But the peaceful evening is shattered when they hear "the dull, muffled sound of an explosion" coming from inside the apartment house almost directly above them. Shayne rushes up the stairs where he finds residents of the building crowded around a locked front door halfway down "knocking on the door and rattling the knob and talking excitedly." So, as a man of action, Shayne drove his right shoulder with hundred and ninety pounds behind it against the door until it buckled. What he found inside the apartment were two bodies. The body of a once beautiful, expensively dressed woman lay in the middle of the sitting room with an overturned cocktail glass lying next to her on the rug. A few feet away, the body of a man was slumped in a deep, upholstered chair with a twelve gauge shotgun on the floor beside the chair and "the terrific force of exploding gases from the shotgun blast had literally blown the man's head from his shoulders."

Shayne discovered two suicide notes, signed Robert Lambert, which explains he and Elsa had decided to commit suicide, because his wife's religion makes it impossible for them to be together in life. So he has mixed two deadly drinks. 

The second note explains that the suicide pact had gone horribly wrong. Elsa had "tossed off boldly and happily" the poisoned drink, but Robert's drink fell to the floor and had to watch as Elsa died. This corresponds with a second cocktail glass and wet stain lying near the kitchen door. The second note ends with him telling that he has a shotgun in the closet and is going to finish the job without bungling it. Shayne remarked the next day, he had never seen "a more positively cut-and-dried double suicide set-up" than the one he crashed into last night. Only one problem. Elsa is the only daughter and sole heir of old Eli Armbruster, "one of the wealthiest men on the peninsula," who "wielded more behind-the-scenes influence on Dade County politics than any other single individual." Eli Armbruster refuses to buy the suicide pact theory and pays Shayne a ten thousand dollar retainer to find the truth with an additional fifty thousand dollars for evidence that will convict his son-in-law, Paul Nathan, of his daughter's murder.

Firstly, The Corpse That Never Was is not a locked room mystery. Yes, the front door to the apartment was locked and chain-bolted on the inside, but the bedroom window onto the fire escape was standing wide open. So no idea why some have called it a locked room mystery unless Lynds' original novelette can be counted as one. Even without the double murder having a locked room angle, it presents more than enough twists, turns and tricky questions to keep Shayne busy. Such as the mysterious identity of Robert Lambert, because nobody has any idea who he really was or how he could have "come out of nowhere" to "carry on a passionate liaison with one of the wealthiest women in Dade County" – nary a trace of who really was or where he came from. Or why Elsa had engaged the services of a shady private eye, named Max Wentworth, which eventually leads to the discovery of a third body. All throughout the story, Shayne acts as a cross between a private investigator and an official policeman as he pretty much gets a run of the place. Shayne even uses his client's money to pay the police department's forensic team to do a little overtime by going over the crime scene a second time. So he's pretty much occupied throughout the story with interviewing suspects or witnesses, gathering information and going over Max Wentworth's reports without any of the usual action or fights you come to expect from a hardboiled P.I. novel. Not even the obligatory blow to the back of the head, which these private eyes seem to take as regularly as a stiff drink. They really take more bumps than a professional wrestler. That's what really gave me the idea Lynds might have had a hand in it.

Some of you probably thought it was the vaguely promised locked room mystery and Lynds contributed a number of locked room mysteries to the genre (e.g. "The Bizarre Case Expert," 1970), but it could have just as easily been Richard Deming or someone else. The Corpse That Never Was discarded the usual hardboiled ingredients to present a much more conventional and cerebral detective problem, which also did in one of The Three Investigator novels he wrote as William Arden. The Mystery of the Headless Horse (1973) muted a lot of the usual adventurous and exciting elements normally obligatory in these juvenile mysteries as the three heroes have to dig through old archives, maps and yellowed letters to solve a 130-year-old family secret. Lynds obviously wanted to educate his young readers on the importance of proper research, critical reading and not to take everything on face value, but it brought the book to mind while reading The Corpse That Never Was. So it was nice surprise to discover my shot in the dark about the authorship hit home when I found that archived post.

But how well does The Corpse That Never Was stack up as a plot-driven detective story? I think most readers can probably make an educated guess about the main thrust of the plot as (ROT13) gur obbx-gvgyr naq n urnqyrff ivpgvz count as the least subtle nods and hints towards the solution in the book. The proper nods, hints and some genuine clues only confirm what you probably already suspect, but the plot, on a whole, is not bad. Admittedly, there are a few clever touches and details to the solution (ROT13/SPOILER: yvxr gur fubgtha oynfg boyvgrengvat obgu gur ivpgvz'f vqragvgl naq qrfgeblvat rivqrapr ur unq orra xabpxrq hapbafpvbhf). Just a little too much on the obvious side to be truly noteworthy. But it was fun to see an iconic gumshoe tackling a case as a normal detective who doesn't use his head to absorb blows and punches.

Sunken Secrets: "Death Dives Deep" (1959) by Robert Arthur (writing as "Brett Halliday")

Back in June, I read Murder and the Married Virgin (1944) by "Brett Halliday," a pseudonym of Davis Dresser, which came recommended to me as hard-paced locked room mystery and introduced to Halliday's private eye, Michael "Mike" Shayne – a hardboiled counterpart to Ellery Queen. A series with distinctively different periods and localities, a monthly short story magazine and eventually a who's who of ghostwriters. 

Murder and the Married Virgin was as solid as a punch to the face and invited further investigation, which added several impossible crimes and a potentially interesting-looking World War II mystery to the big pile. But what really caught my attention was a short story by one of Halliday's well-known ghostwriters. A beloved writer around these parts of the internet with a legacy of his own. 

Robert Arthur was a pulp and mystery writer who famously created a radio anthology series, The Mysterious Traveler, but most readers today will remember him as the creator and first author of The Three Investigator series – producing ten novels before passing away in 1969. But his dalliance with the juvenile mystery novel represents only a small portion of his output. Arthur mainly wrote short stories that were published in everything from Amazing Stories and Black Mask to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

During the late 1950s and early '60s, Arthur wrote two short Mike Shayne stories under the Halliday name. One of the stories sounded like it could belong with Allan R. Bosworth's Full Crash Dive (1942), Charles Forsythe's Diving Death (1962), Micki Browning's Adrift (2017) and Joseph Commings' short story "Bones for Davy Jones" (1953) to that rare subcategory of detective stories with submerged setting. So let's walk the plank and find out. 

"Death Dives Deep" was first published in the January, 1959, issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and collected in Mike Shayne's Torrid Twelve (1961).

Mike Shayne, "tough as raw leather" and "not afraid of cops or crooks," is asked by Sandra Ames to undertake a job where he has two employers and "must keep an eye on both" to "see that one doesn't try to double-cross the other" – something "umpires do it every day of the baseball season." So he has no particular objections and deduces that his second employer is Captain Tod Tolliver. Shayne received a package that afternoon with an old, worn Spanish gold coin minted in 1670 and a note telling that "there's more where this came from." Before he can meet his second employer and get to work, Shayne is knocked unconscious and Captain Tolliver is kidnapped from his office by two thugs.

This is where the narrative begins to twist and turn like the Queen of Hearts maze with body around every corner. Seven in total! So you're never quite sure what to expect or what kind of detective story you're actually reading. Early on in the story, I began to suspect "Death Dives Deep" was cleverly played con-game with a hidden, quasi-impossible crime, but it didn't turn out to be one of those hard-hitting, cerebral private eye stories. Just a very well written piece of hardboiled pulp fiction and enjoyed it very much.

I particularly liked the treasure hunt and what, exactly, lay hidden on the seabed. Is it an old Spanish ship with "a strong room full of treasure" collected from all over South America or something more recently? And while the entire story takes place on the surface, the diving expedition is aptly incorporated into the plot and briefly turned the story into survival thriller when Shayne is stuck on a raft in the open ocean. Another point of interest is that, early on in the story, Shayne has a beauty parlor girl, named Ireneabelle, who is linked to the kidnappers and he calls another woman with her own beauty shop – requesting her call all her friends in the business and ask them. If they don't know, she has to ask them each to call five friends and keep the ball rolling until she's located. This is the exact same "Ghost-to-Ghost Hookup" system Jupe, Pete and Bob would go on to employ in The Three Investigators series (e.g. Arthur's The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy, 1965).

So, all in all, "Death Dives Deep" is an engaging, hardboiled private eye story with some good action scenes (the helicopter!) and an excellently used backdrop, which once again made me understand why so many people are fascinated by the figure of the tough private eye figure. I remember someone compared the private eye to comic book superheroes who matured and lost their cape, but stubbornly continued to try to do something good in a hard, crime-ridden world where it's practically impossible to keep your hands entirely clean. Sometimes it seems pointless, but characters like Shayne continue to try to do right thing and restore some good to the world. No matter how many times they get knocked out or crack a knuckle. Arthur's "Death Dives Deep" is a good example where a lot of bad things have to happen before a little good can come out of it.

That being said, you expect something more traditional and plot-oriented in the next post. So stay tuned!

Murder and the Married Virgin (1944) by Brett Halliday

Last time, I reviewed a juvenile detective novel by Enid Blyton, The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat (1944), that confronted the Find-Outers with the apparently impossible theft of the titular, prize-winning Siamese cat and gave me the idea to pick the subject of today's review as my next read – as it's an interesting contrast to Blyton's children's detective fiction. A hardboiled, tough-guy 1944 locked room mystery obviously not intended to be read by 8-12 year old's. 

"Brett Halliday" was the pseudonym of an American writer, Davis Dresser, who was married to the well-known mystery novelist Helen McCloy and together they ran a literary agency called Halliday and McCloy. They also founded the Torquil Publishing Company, but Halliday is best-known as the creator and first writer of the Michael "Mike" Shayne series. A hardboiled counterpart to Ellery Queen complete with different series-periods (Miami and New Orleans), ghost writers and a short fiction magazine (Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine).

Mike Shayne is seen by knowledgeable, better informed readers as "one of the most popular private detectives ever," whose cases are "generally very well plotted and pleasantly complex," but the earlier books have been called "surprisingly traditional" in nature – something that doesn't really surprise me anymore. The tough-guy private eye school is supposed to be the antithesis to my beloved, plot-driven detective stories of ratiocination, which is not entirely untrue. But my experience is that a lot of them were excellent plotters and either tried their hands at the locked room mystery or even made it a specialty. Just look under the "Private Eyes" tag. 

Murder and the Married Virgin (1944) is the tenth novel in the Mike Shayne and Kate, of Cross Examining Crime, picked it as one of her recommendations to locked room enthusiasts based on the reviews in The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Reviews and Commentary, 1942-47 (2001-09). Anthony Boucher praised the "clever locked-room murder method" and "typical Halliday hard-paced action." So let's see what this series is all about. 

Murder and the Married Virgin takes place shortly after Shayne moved from Miami to New Orleans and setup shop in two-room suite, on the fourth floor of the International Building, with a brand new secretary, Lucy Hamilton – who apparently played a role in a previous novel. From what I gathered, Lucy is the Nikki Porter of the series, but with more character consistency. Anyway, Shayne gets two different cases on his desk that conveniently took place under the roof of the same household.

Firstly, a Mr. Teton, of Mutual Indemnity, hires Shayne to recover an emerald necklace that had been insured for $125000, but, in the present gem-market, "the necklace would easily bring two hundred thousand." The necklace, belonging to a Mrs. Lomax, was presumed stolen during a burglary and was supposed to be in the bedroom safe, which the burglar didn't touch. That's why nobody missed the necklace until the day their maid committed suicide in her locked, third-floor bedroom. Katrin Moe was a Norwegian immigrant engaged to be married to a young army lieutenant, Ted Drinkley, who, dazed and broken down, turns to Shayne. He wants to know why she committed suicide the day before their marriage. Or was she perhaps murdered? And how?

Shayne remarks that "Philo Vance might be able to sort out the truth from the lies, but I'll be damned if I can." However, he does a decent job in tangling with the locked room problem with no less than two false-solutions. Shayne spots the possibility of an old-dodge and pieces together a technical, but not uninspired, false-solution which accounts for both the locked door and why Katrin appeared to welcome death with "outflung arms and a smile." The actual locked room-trick achieves the same effect, but is a bit cruder in execution and not as fairly clued. Regardless, these locked room bits and pieces were, too me, the highlight of the story.

But in every other regard, Murder and the Married Virgin is a seedy, hardboiled private-eye novel and Shayne has to through the whole shebang to tie the stolen necklace to an impossible murder. There's the dysfunctional Lomax family made up of "an old man married to a wife with young ideas" with a stone-cold, perpetual bored daughter, a wannabee playboy son and a chauffeur with movie-star looks – not to mention a dead maid. He also has to tangle with a troublesome dame, a shady club owner and armed torpedoes, which comes with the customary whack to the back of the head and "a murder frame" around his neck.

Shayne has to do a lot of talking, thinking and downright dirty work to get himself out of a very tight spot. Such paying for "witnesses" to place a certain someone at the scene of a murder, which disgusts Lucy to the point where she's ready to walk out on Shayne ("...I thought you were decent"). Funnily enough, I picked Murder and the Married Virgin as a simple contrast to a children's (locked room) mystery novel from the same year, but both stories have their detectives seriously tampering with evidence. One of them was done out of mischievous, child-like innocence, while the other was the result of adult cynicism in a dog-eat-dog world ("scruples are something the boys write about in detective novels"). So incredibly different, and yet, I can't help but see a family resemblance.

My sole complaint is that the ending felt a little like fiddling with a combination lock, trying different combinations with the known numbers, but other than that, it's a solid, fast-paced private eye novel and a notable example of the hardboiled locked room mystery. So the other three Halliday novels on my big pile will be moved up a few places.