The Private Practice of Michael Shayne: Brett Halliday

This second book in the Michael Shayne series features a private investigator in Miami, Florida. His best friend, Larry Kincaid, gets involved with shady characters because he wants to make quick money. One of them, Harry Grange, is a blackmailer who ends up dead. In trying to protect his friend from suspicion, Shayne implicates himself in the murder and spends the rest of the story trying to undo that. Peter Painter, chief of the Miami Beach detective bureau, has a grudge against Shayne and would love to prove him guilty.

This is only the second Michael Shayne novel I have read, but both books have been fun and entertaining, the stories full of twists and turns. The first thirty novels in the series were written by Davis Dresser, using the pseudonym Brett Halliday. The remaining novels (there were over 70) were written by other authors, all using the same pseudonym. I don't know how the quality of the novels holds up throughout the long series, but I will be trying more of them.

Lloyd Nolan starred in seven films based on this series, starting in 1940, and the first one, Michael Shayne, Private Detective, was based on this book. Thus I sought out this paperback edition of the book so I could read it first.

Michael Shayne in the books is a tall tough red-headed Irishman. Lloyd Nolan does not exactly fit that description, but he still makes a fine Michael Shayne, charming and appealing but still tough. He is willing to bend the rules to save himself or a friend or client from arrest, and he has a humorous come-back for everything. The story in the film is switched around quite a bit, with additional characters, but basically it shares the same mystery plot as in the book. Other actors I enjoyed in this film were Marjorie Weaver as Phyllis Brighton (Shayne's love interest), Douglass Dumbrille as a crooked casino owner, Walter Abel as a crooked race horse owner, Elizabeth Patterson as Aunt Olivia, and Charles Coleman as Ponsy the butler. The film was very entertaining, much better overall than I expected it to be.

Included on the DVD was a very informative featurette titled The Detective Who Never Dies, including interviews with Otto Penzler, Barry T. Zeman, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, James Ursini, Alain Silver, Stuart Kaminsky, and Halliday's widow, Mary Dresser.

Both the cover of my paperback edition and the DVD cover shown here feature illustrations by Robert McGinnis.

My earlier posts related to this series are an overview of the series and a  review of Bodies Are Where You Find Them.

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Publisher:  Dell, 1958. Orig. pub. 1940.
Length:     190 pages
Format:     Paperback
Series:      Michael Shayne, #2
Setting:     Miami, Florida
Genre:      Mystery, private detective
Source:     I purchased my copy.

Bodies Are Where You Find Them: Brett Halliday

This novel is the fifth book in a series of over 70 novels about Mike Shayne, the tough and determined private investigator. The first thirty novels in the series were written by Davis Dresser, using the pseudonym Brett Halliday. The remaining novels were written by other authors, still using the same pseudonym.

There were two reasons that I read this as my first Mike Shayne novel. It was the earliest novel I had in the series, and I wanted to start close to the beginning. Also, this novel was inspiration for the film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and I wanted to see how much they resembled each other.

Mike Shayne is a hard-boiled, unsentimental private detective in Miami, Florida. The only thing he is sentimental about is his new wife, and she is not around for very much of this story. She is sent off to New York on a vacation that they were supposed to take together, but Mike must remain behind to work on a case related to a prominent politician who is running for Mayor.

While Shayne is getting ready to go on the trip with his wife, a young woman comes to his office with some information on the Mayoral candidate, Burt Stallings. She is very inebriated and passes out before she can tell Shayne her secret. He leaves her alone and when he returns she is dead, strangled with one of her stockings. Afraid that he will be arrested for her murder before he can prove his innocence, he sends his friend,  reporter Timothy Rourke, to get a car to move her. When they both return, the body has disappeared.

While all of this is going on, Stallings comes to Shayne and demands that he find his stepdaughter, who has been kidnapped. It seems obvious that the dead body in his bedroom must be the kidnapped stepdaughter, and Shayne has to figure out what is really going on.

After finishing the book, I moved on to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which we had viewed several times before. I hadn't expected there to be so many similarities between the book and the film. The main differences I noted were the setting (Miami vs Hollywood) and the time (1941 vs 2005).

In the book, the woman's body pops up when least expected. The subject is serious but the tone of the novel is light. Eventually some of the clues lead Shayne and Rourke to a sanitarium, and in the end the motive for the murder is money. These elements all exist in the movie also, just rearranged and updated to fit current times.

In the book, Mike Shayne is the detective and his sidekick is a reporter and friend. In the movie, Gay Perry (played by Val Kilmer) is the detective and Harry Lockhart (played by Robert Downey, Jr.) is his sidekick, pulled into the story first because he is getting experience for a role in a movie as a private detective, and then later because his childhood friend, Harmony (Michelle Monaghan), now an aspiring actress, is involved. The events in both the book and the movie are chaotic, confusing, and seemingly random but as with most private detective stories, the pieces all come together in the end.

I enjoyed both the book and the film. The actors in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang are wonderful, and the story is a lot of fun. There are thrills combined with comedy and romance, and allusions to Raymond Chandler's books. The chapter titles in the movie are all taken from Raymond Chandler novels or stories: "Trouble is My Business", "The Lady in the Lake", "The Little Sister", "The Simple Art of Murder", and the epilogue, "Farewell, My Lovely". And to top it off, it is set at Christmas.

The poster for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is from enigmabadger via Flickr.

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Publisher:  Dell, 1959. Orig. pub. 1941.
Length:     183 pages
Format:     Paperback
Series:      Mike Shayne, #5
Setting:     Miami, Florida
Genre:      Mystery, private detective
Source:     I purchased my copy.

The Mike Shayne series by Brett Halliday

When I was at the book sale this year I ran into a box full of vintage paperbacks. That has never happened in all the decades I have been attending the sale. There may be occasional boxes of paperbacks with one or two vintage paperbacks in them on the tables. This box was tucked away under a table. There were lots of Mike Shayne mysteries and a good number of Perry Mason or Bertha Lam / Donald Cool mysteries. Today I concentrate on the Mike Shayne series by Brett Halliday.

I could not have passed up these books because most of them had covers by Robert McGinnis. Luckily this was identified on the back cover of the books, because even though I have two books about McGinnis's book covers and art in general, I cannot identify them without help. He does have a distinctive style but there were other cover artists with similar styles. The books were not in great condition but the cover illustrations are still lovely and the text is readable which is a big plus.

I had no idea if I would want to read these books or just have them for my collection of vintage book covers. When I got home I started investigating and discovered that his books will be well worth reading, or at least sampling them to see what I think.

At Mysterious Press:

Miami-based Michael Shayne is at once a hardboiled private eye and a methodical, Nero Wolfe-esque classical detective. In the early books in the series, his tightly-plotted investigations are complemented by humorous episodes involving his wife, offering some relief as he tangles with all sorts of criminals, be they blackmailers (The Private Practice of Michael Shayne), scammy realtors (The Uncomplaining Corpses), or murderous politicians (Bodies Are Where You Find Them).

The first thirty novels in the series were written by Davis Dresser, using the pseudonym Brett Halliday. The remaining novels (there were over 70) were written by other authors. Many were written by Robert Terrall; Dennis Lynds (a Santa Barbara resident) and Ryerson Johnson also wrote a few. I will have more on Robert Terrall in a later post.

If you want to learn more about this series, see this post at Killer Covers:

The Corpse Came Calling, by Brett Halliday

There I learned that Davis Dresser was also a resident of Santa Barbara. I was also reminded that one of my favorite films, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, was based partly on Brett Halliday's novel Bodies Are Where You Find Them.

At this post by J. Kingston Pierce of the Rap Sheet, there are many links about Brett Halliday and the Mike Shayne series, plus illustrators of book covers for that series.

The Thrilling Detective website is a wonderful resource for fictional private eyes. See the page there for Mike Shayne.