Wed 14 Oct 2015
BRETT HALLIDAY – What Really Happened. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1952. Paperback reprints include: Dell #768, 1954; Dell D381, October 1960 (Robert McGinnis cover, seen to right). Dell 9458, July 1963.
I don’t usually read two books by the same author back to back, but I’d just finished Marked for Murder (reviewed here ), I’d enjoyed it, this was stored in the same box, and I was about to take a plane trip to Michigan, so why not?
This one was almost as good as as the earlier one (seven years earlier, from Mr. Halliday’s perspective) and in some ways better. In one way, a rather distinct one, I enjoyed Marked for Murder more.
Better — by which I mean more complicated, in a good way! — was the plot, not a better by a huge margin, but the puzzle aspect was what found fascinating. Private eye Mike Shayne (back in Miami) gets a call from a woman named Wanda Weatherby who’s in near hysterics. She asks him to come over at midnight, that she had sent him a letter that he would receive in the morning, but she’s afraid someone is about to kill her, and she needs his help now.
What’s interesting — you do know that when Shayne gets there, Wanda Weatherby is dead, don’t you? — is that one by one, Shayne meets several people who have been blackmailed by Wanda Weatherby have gotten letters telling them she is going to hire Shayne and that if she is murdered, Shayne should do his best to convict the recipient of the letter.
Question is, which one did do the killing? I don’t know, maybe this description of the basic story line sounds silly, but Halliday does a great job convincing the reader that it all makes sense. Once again both the plotting and the telling remind me of Erle Stanley Gardner and both his Perry Mason and Bertha Cool-Donald Lam stories (the latter as by A. A. Fair) in terms of the way Shayne manipulates the evidence and manufactures his own, all in the interest of his client, a good friend of newspaper reporter Tim Rourke, fully recovered from his bullet injuries in Marked for Murder.
That said, I’ve just realized that I can’t tell you what it was that I liked less about What Really Happened. In my review of Marked for Murder, I said “This one was fun to read, in a timeless sort of fashion…” and unfortunately this one’s definitely stuck in the 1950s. It isn’t a big deal, since I read many other books that are stuck in the 50s all the time. It’s only in comparison with Marked for Murder that I bring it up at all.
October 14th, 2015 at 9:23 pm
I agree in regards to this being clearly a fifties book, but it has a damn good plot and it is always fun to watch Shayne at work.
Shayne and other eyes of the Spade school are less punching bags than the heroes of the Chandler school. He is a tough guy, extremely tough, but he is above all ruthless, mercenary, smart, and fast thinking (something they retained in the Lloyd Nolan films if he was a bit more charming and less mercenary) and thinks and reasons as much as stumbles onto the truth.
I suspect that is where you are seeing the Gardner ties since he was another writer whose tecs tend to have brains above brawn and whose plots tend to be structured more along the lines of the classic detective story and not the looser plots of the Chandler school where character and incident sometimes outweigh plot.
I actually had all three editions of this shown, but I read the third cover edition. I would venture to make the claim that there aren’t any bad Shayne’s from this era, or many by Dresser (most of those written by others are good, but not as good for my money).
At a time when Spillane dominated the American paperback and the genre in terms of sales, the Shayne novels not only held their own, they rivaled him in sales (spread out over more books so no single books have sales approaching Spillane). I remain a Shayne fan because when I revisit the books I am always pleased with how well they move and hold together as both fast moving private eye fare and detective stories. Few in the genre managed that balance as consistently as Halliday.
October 14th, 2015 at 11:12 pm
Nearly all the early Shaynes I’ve read hold up just fine, and some of them I probably enjoyed even more on rereading than when I first read them 40 or 50 years ago. The only exception I’ve run into so far is WHEN DORINDA DANCES, which I started to reread a month or so ago. I wound up putting it back on the shelf, just couldn’t get interested in it. Quite possibly that was just me, though, not the book.
October 15th, 2015 at 12:17 pm
I may have commented on the other review that I have a lot of unread Shayne books, was trying to read them in order. They continue to sit, because it seems I need to be in the right mood, and lately it’s been Holmes and fantasy. But I’ll get there, and so, eventually, this one.
October 15th, 2015 at 3:36 pm
The quality the Shayne novels have is very much that smart B movie vibe the Nolan films had and the best of other B’s written by writers like Stuart Palmer, Richard Lockridge, Frank Gruber, Jonathan Latimer, and others from the pulps and mystery genre,
They move very much on those lines and tend to keep the puzzle element in balance with the tough guy stuff. There are no inky pools of blackness that Shayne falls through, in fact he is more likely to get hurt and have it effect him for the rest of the case when it happens.
He’s a good man, but a bit questionable as a Chandler style knight errant. He comes a bit closer to a gunfighter, even cleaning up a town in Dresser’s version of RED HARVEST, but notably Shayne does it without killing anyone and with the help of an old time Western lawman.
He is more of a character than Archer in that he is not a cypher, but most of what I know about him is second hand. I’m not sure I could hazard an accurate guess as to how or why he became an eye even though I’ve read the account of how Dresser claimed to meet him in EL Paso in a cantina. Like his so called inspiration he sort of springs full grown from Dresser’s forehead and goes on from there.
Though his wife dies he doesn’t drink himself to death or grieve inordinately and the chief change seems to be he develops a distaste for marrying again though he clearly spends some nights with Lucy Hamilton.
We know he is a loyal friend, that his flexible ethics are rigid enough to require him to protect clients even when they lie (like Perry Mason he expects his clients to lie to him until he has to have the truth to protect him though his clients aren’t always innocent).
He virtually gargles Remy Martin but seldom seems worse for wear, has good relations with the police but not the sheriff, has a long term affair with his secretary but his eye wanders, he likes deep sea fishing, smokes, he usually doesn’t carry a gun but has no problem using one and prefers a .38 Police Special when he does, and buys days of the week underwear for his secretary, but beyond that he is mostly a surface character. If he does anything on his time off other than fish, drink, and romance Lucy Hamilton I don’t remember it.
October 17th, 2015 at 2:38 pm
Been so long, soooo long. Reading your review and the comments has awakened a nostalgia I’d almost left completely behind. Now…to make up for lost time.
July 11th, 2020 at 3:27 pm
David… where did you read that Shayne, ‘buys days of the week underwear for his secretary’ ? I haven’t read that far yet?