Wed 17 Jun 2020
A PI Mystery Review by Ray O’Leary: BRETT HALLIDAY – Blood on the Black Market.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[9] Comments
REVIEWED BY RAY O’LEARY:
BRETT HALLIDAY – Blood on the Black Market. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1943. Dell #64, paperback, 1944. Many other paperback edition exist. Revised edition: Heads You Lose. Torquil/Dodd, hardcover, 1958.
As I mentioned in my review of Death from a Top Hat, having watched the Mike Shayne movies, I decided to re-read one of the Shayne books in my vast, well-organized files. This one is the earliest of the five Shayne map-backs in my collection.
Mike Shayne, still grieving over the death of his wife, is woken from a sound sleep by a telephone call from Clem Wilson, a friend of his who owns a gas station. Before Clem can really tell him anything, Shayne hears a shot and the sound of a falling body. Telling the desk clerk of his hotel to call the police, Shayne rushes to Wilson’s filling station where his friend Chief Will Gentry is on the scene.
Shayne intimates to Gentry and a few others that Wilson has told him enough about a ring trying to get him to sell black market gas (during World War II) to make Shayne dangerous to them. Soon he finds himself a target for would-be assassins as well as being courted by the newly-fanned Motorists Protective Association and its pretty female lawyer Edna Taylor.
It’s a passable effort, with Shayne breaking the law at will and treating women in the time-honored way of the American tough-guy. I pretty much remembered who the killer was, or it was relatively easy to figure out. In a rather egregious implausibility, two different characters shoot someone down in cold blood in front of Shayne on the pretext that they thought those unarmed someones were dangerous. Once I could swallow with difficulty but twice is getting preposterous.
June 17th, 2020 at 10:46 pm
I did not realize that this book had a later revised edition until I posted this review of Ray’s earlier tonight. But it makes sense, I suppose. Halliday liked having his books in print, and there wouldn’t have been much demand for a mystery in 1958 about gas rationing coupons during World War II.
Assuming that to be the case, I wonder how many other changes were made.
June 18th, 2020 at 10:48 am
Does anyone know the title of the book in which Shayne’s wife dies?
June 18th, 2020 at 11:14 am
I believe, but am not 100% positive, that she died in childbirth between this one and the preceding one, Murder Wears a Mummer’s Mask.
June 18th, 2020 at 5:14 pm
Shayne’s wife dies offstage so to speak and Shayne is already grieving for her loss when this books starts, some time having past.
If I recall right this one was the basis for the first issue of the Dell Comic MICHAEL SHAYNE PRIVATE DETECTIVE (based on the rewrite)which opens with Shayne grieving his wife.
Shayne was one of a handful of eyes in the Sam Spade tradition who ran roughshod over the law, subborning witnesses, hiding evidence that threatened him or his clients (Marlowe does it, but in a much more limited manner), and generally behaving in an extra legal way. Adams Rex McBride and Steel’s Hank Heyer were both in the same mode as was Peter Cheyney’s Slim Callaghan. Only the early Perry Mason was slicker in that sense.
The plot here, the owner of a gas station killed by extortionists, is a good example of the somewhat blue collar approach to many of the Shayne novels throughout the series (even after Halliday no longer wrote them), which include things you would never imagine Archer or Marlowe doing like working as a watchman because one of his employees is sick and ending up involved with Cubans battling Castro.
It’s not that Shayne doesn’t have his list of high profile rich and powerful clients (with what he charges he would have to), but he often begins his cases more grounded in the kind of thing an actual private detective might investigate. That, and the fact he works cases out of New Orleans, Dallas, El Paso, and eventually Miami sets him apart from most of the LA, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York eyes of the period.
June 18th, 2020 at 6:46 pm
Thanks for the long overall perspective on Mike Shayne, David. If Michael Shayne wasn’t the best of his era, 1940-60s, he was certainly the longest lived, and for all the reasons you say.
June 18th, 2020 at 10:17 pm
Thanks to Steve and David for the information. I thought that was the case but I wasn’t sure.
June 19th, 2020 at 2:23 pm
Actually . . . at editor Chuck Fritch’s suggestion (because he wanted to do a “Crimes in Other Times” themed issue of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE), I wrote a Mike Shayne novella called “Mayhem in the Magic City”, which involves Shayne investigating a case of wartime espionage while Phyllis is in the hospital with childbirth pending. So Shayne has to run around Miami battling Nazis and such (with Clark Gable making a cameo appearance and giving him a hand) while worrying about Phyllis. And of course, we all know how that turns out. I don’t know if the story is considered canon or not, although I think you could make a case for it, seeing as how it fits neatly between MURDER WEARS A MUMMER’S MASK and BLOOD ON THE BLACK MARKET. Not that it really matters, 30 years down the road. (By the way, Davis Dresser himself makes a cameo in the story, if I’m remembering it right.)
June 19th, 2020 at 3:12 pm
Fascinating. Thanks for sharing all that information, James. That would been the October 1980 issue. I’m sure I have that one, but where? In any case, this is one I’ll definitely read as soon as I come across it. As to it’s being canonical, I’d say yes, definitely. I think all of the Mike Shayne stories are, no matter who wrote them, including the radio and TV shows too, but the ones in MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, especially so.
July 11th, 2020 at 3:07 pm
To Steve and Chuck, In the original 1943 book, “Blood On The Black Market”, there is only one sentence on the first page mentioning the death of Phyllis… ‘ where he had lived with Phyllis before her death.’
But, then, nine years later, 1956, the title of the book is changed to, “Heads You Lose” and Dresser writes a 13-page Author’s Foreward to explain that Phyllis did indeed died at the hospital, in childbirth (correct you are, Steve). Meanwhile, Dresser had published TWENTY new books! Finally, in 1956, he uses the word, childbirth, for the first time.
References to Phyllis and the past popped up frequently in those 20 novels. Her old friends were in trouble… and Shayne to the rescue. (“Blood on Biscayne Bay”, page 7, where we learn that college best friend, Christine had visited Phyllis in the fall of 1942, ‘just before she died’. And then, a re-confirmation that the baby had also died.