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.

Dead Man's Quest

"And now, Jim, we're to go in for this here treasure-hunting, with sealed orders too, and I don't like it; and you and me must stick close, back to back like, and we'll save our necks in spite o' fate and fortune."

- Long John Silver (R.L. Stevenson's Treasure Island, 1883)

Dennis Lynds was an American author who wrote under a number of pseudonyms, such as "Mark Sadler" and "John Crowe," but his most well known penname was "Michael Collins," under which a series of novels was published about a one-armed private-eye – named Dan Fortune. One of the Fortune stories, "No One Likes to Be Played for a Sucker," is favorite locked room short of mine and was anthologized by Edward D. Hoch in All But Impossible! (1981).

So I was slightly astonished to learn Lynds, a writer of hardboiled private-eye stories, was the man behind the name of "William Arden," which appeared on the cover of more than twelve juvenile mysteries in The Three Investigator series.

Last year, I reviewed The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy (1965) and The Secret of Skeleton Island (1966). They were among the first half dozen entrants in the series and were penned by the creator of the three boy detectives, Robert Arthur, but for my next read I wanted to sample something by one of the authors who continued the series after his passing and Lynds had credentials as a bone-fide crime novelist – which helped settling down on my next read.

The Secret of Phantom Lake (1973) is a treasure hunt story in the tradition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Musgrave Ritual," from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893), which begins when Jupiter "Jupe" Jones, Peter Crenshaw and Bob Andrews are chartered by Jupe's aunt, Mathilda Jones, to help move a collection from a closed down roadside museum. The place had "specialized in relics from old seafaring days" and the small collection was bought for resale in The Jones Salvage Yard, which included "an ornate Oriental teakwood chest" that's "bound with heavily decorated brass." It's a chest with a long, storied history and holds many secrets: one of them being a hidden compartment with a spring-powered contraption that hurled a dagger at Jupe. A booby trap that had been sprung over a hundred years ago, but still worked like it was rigged up yesterday. That's some old-fashioned craftsmanship for you! 

However, even more important is the story surrounding the old sea-chest and the secret that was tucked away in the hidden compartment. But first...

There's a name stamped on the chest, Argyll Queen, which turns out to belong to a square-rigger that "sunk just off Rocky Beach about a hundred years ago." The ship wreck has always attracted whispered and hopeful rumors of possible treasure. Rumors that can be linked to another tragedy that seemed to be connected to the Argyll Queen: one of the survivors, "a Scottish sailor named Angus Gunn," settled not far from Rocky Beach, but was murdered there by four men in 1872 – all four of them were lynched before they could tell why they had done it.

A salient detail was that one of the men was the Captain of the Argyll Queen, which fueled the rumors he was after something Gunn had taken from the ship. There may be glimmer of truth behind these rumors, because what they found in the compartment was a long-lost journal that belonged to Angus Gunn and the seemingly mundane notations turn out to be hints to Angus' long sought after treasure. But they have some work to do and dangers to face down before they can lay their hands on their reward.

One of those dangers is an old, scar-faced sailors, named "Java Jim," who has an aura of the Old Sea Cook about him and appeared on the scene to claim ownership of the sea-chest the moment they laid eyes on it, but they refused to hand it over unless he could show proof of ownership – which did not sit well with the sailor ("there's danger in that chest, you hear?") and comes back on several occasional to attempt theft. But he's not the only one interested in the search for the treasure: a mysterious individual is following them around in a green car and is identified by the local historian, Professor Shay, as one of his former assistants who served a prison term for attempting "to sell valuable historical items from the Society's museum."

They also meet Mr. Rory McNab, a distant cousin of the direct descendants of Angus Gunn, which are respectively Mrs. Flora Gunn, a widow, and her young son, Cluny, who still life on the estate he left behind – which is called Phantom Lake. As the Gunn family explained, the valley where their castle-like home stands reminded Angus of his old home in the Scottish Highlands and therefore built a replication of Gunn Loch there. They certainly could use the money that a treasure brings with it for the uptake of the place, but Rory is perpetually skeptic of the entire operation and does not believe anyone could succeed to find the treasure after more than a century. If there ever was a treasure.

Well, these people seem to turn up wherever Jupe, Pete and Bob seem to go, which includes an abandoned mining town and a mist enshrouded island with phantom-shaped trees.

Of course, they find themselves in several tight or uncomfortable spots as someone, obviously, tries to slow them down, but the most eye-catching aspect of the plot is how a bunch of teenagers accurately reconstruct seemingly meaningless notes from over a hundred years ago. Simply notes about purchasing lumber, stone and other items. They even track down several stores that are still being run by descendants of the tradesman who sold Gunn those items in the 1800s and there are several references how some archives and records from "before 1900 were lost in an earthquake."

So I really liked that aspect of the plot and reminded me somewhat of Katsuhiko Takahashi's Sharaka satsujin jiken (The Case of the Sharaka Murders, 1983), in which an attempt is made to figure out the true identity of a famous woodblock printer from the late 1700s and the clues were equally old and nebulous.

In short: The Secret of Phantom Lake is not as filled with the kind of dangerous or exciting situations as the previous two books I read, but enjoyed the historical frame of the plot and appreciated the larger cast of characters that Arden played around with. The revelation of the culprit and how some of the characters were not what they seemed came straight out of the least-likely-suspect playbook, but somewhat dumb down to accommodate a younger reading audience. Still, it was fairly well down and liked the overall story. So that's really all for this lackluster review.

Finally, I want to draw your attention to the review I posted just only yesterday, which took a look at one of John Dickson Carr's most overlooked historical mysteries.