Sun 3 Jan 2010
A Review by Ray O’Leary: BRETT HALLIDAY – Call for Michael Shayne.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
BRETT HALLIDAY – Call for Michael Shayne. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1949. Reprint paperbacks include: Dell 428, mapback edition, 1950, Robert Stanley cover art; Dell D269, Jan 1959, Robert McGinnis cover art; Dell 0952, Jan 1964, McGinnis cover.
The opening of this novel might have been written by Cornell Woolrich. Art Devlin, a rising young executive, wakes up in a room in a cheap boarding house. He’s wearing clothes he’s never seen before and has a lump on his head.
He also has some unwanted company, since there’s a dead man on the floor and a bloody blackjack beside him. All Devlin can remember is that some friends threw him a bon voyage party since he was going on a cruise for two weeks and he got pretty drunk.
Then he discovers that 12 days have passed since that party: days he can’t remember. He gets a phone call from a woman claiming to be his wife asking him if he’s killed Skid Munroe (the dead man) and if he got the money Skid was carrying.
Devlin takes a cab to his own apartment, but he has no money except for a roll of hundred-dollar bills, some of them bloodstained. He gets a couple of bucks for the cab fare from the desk clerk of his fancy apartment building and calls a doctor friend who finds his story hard to believe.
Fortunately, for Devlin, he lives in Miami and is acquainted with a certain red-headed PI named Mike Shayne, who is the next person he calls.
A fairly entertaining story, though I had no trouble spotting the killer almost from the get-go. As I said, the early part of the novel is very Woolrichian, with more than one reference to “a black curtain.” Of course, it differs when Mike Shayne enters the story because Woolrich’s characters don’t know PI’s like him.
January 3rd, 2010 at 10:08 pm
Unlike a lot of writers in the hard-boiled genre you could usually count on Halliday for an actual mystery plot and a bit of real sleuthing on Shayne’s part. We tend to forget, but Shayne’s paperback sales rivaled Spillane’s overall (if not for individual titles), and he was the backbone of the Dell line for nearly two decades.
I know it is popular to belittle Halliday and the Shayne books in some quarters, but considering how prolific he was (and the writers who worked under his by-line) the quality and entertainment level of the Shayne novels is high. And to be honest, while I might enjoy Marlowe, or Mac, or Archer, or even Shell Scott more, if I had to actually hire a fictional style private eye Shayne would be my first choice.
And those McGinnis covers defined what the hard-boiled mystery paperback looked like.
I know many paperback collectors seek out covers that were used more than once or for different books, and several of the Robert Stanley covers for the Shayne series were reused in the UK as covers for Desmond Cory’s Johnny Fedora paperbacks.
January 4th, 2010 at 9:14 pm
David
You’re quite right about the Mike Shayne stories being puzzle plots, and they were very good ones, too, especially the earlier ones from the 1940s. I haven’t read this particular one, or at least not recently, but Ray’s description of it makes me believe that I’ve missed something in not doing so, what with the Woolrichian overtones and all.
— Steve
January 4th, 2010 at 11:44 pm
[…] Speaking of Michael Shayne, there were several different series of his adventures that appeared on radio. The first of these […]