Fri 17 Jun 2016
BRETT HALLIDAY – Murder Is My Business. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1945. Dell #184, paperback, mapback edition, no date stated [1947]. Reprinted many times thereafter, including Hard Case Crime, paperback, 2010.
A post-war adventure for PI Michael Shayne, or if not, it takes very close to the end of the hostilities. It’s a complicated affair, involving possible enemy spying and/or the luring of American soldiers based in the area of El Paso, Texas, across the border into Mexico in order to pump them for secrets they may have picked up in passing. There’s also a silver mine involved, and competing claims of whether a vein has run out of not.
It also involves a gent that Shayne had run into before, not in a friendly fashion, who is now running for mayor, and a broken love affair involving that same gentleman’s daughter. The plot’s a mixed bag of false trails and two dead bodies, one stripped naked for reasons no man (nor Mike Shayne) can figure out why, plus a gun, a murder weapon, shot three times, although the aforementioned daughter claims she only fired it twice.
Everything ties together at the end, I believe, but as a plot for an otherwise smoothly written murder mystery, it’s all a bit too much. But take another glance at the words “smoothly written.” As a wordsmith, Brett Halliday in the 1940s was one of the best. Even though Shayne was far off his New Orleans stomping grounds at the time, this one goes down nice and easy.
June 17th, 2016 at 12:18 pm
For Michael Shayne fans there are several of the hour-long Shayne TV series with Richard Denning available at YouTube. Here is one to start…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Im3LK8sTY
I was very surprise to find a thirty-minute TV pilot with Mark Stevens on You Tube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcFrIn–g24
June 17th, 2016 at 8:51 pm
Michael
Mark Stevens as Mike Shayne? I don’t think I knew about that before. I’ll have to watch that YouTube video. Here’s some info about that particular pilot that I found online: “Man on a Raft (9/28/58) Pilot show starring Mark Stevens as Shayne. Produced in 1957, this rare show aired as an episode of “Decision,†and contains a pitch looking for a sponsor.”
I watched for a few minutes and couldn’t quite manage to see Stevens as Shayne. I’ve said this before, and probably on this blog, but whenever I read a Shayne novel, my mind’s eye sees Kenneth Tobey in the role.
June 17th, 2016 at 2:27 pm
Halliday always claimed Shayne was based on a private eye he met in El Paso on a case, and originally I read somewhere he considered basing Shayne in Dallas before choosing New Orleans and then Miami.
On the time line my impression of this was it was set during the war, though as fast as Halliday wrote he could have finished it after VE or even VJ day. Even then that would be a pretty quick turnover to get into print in 1945. Most likely the book was finished in 44 or the beginning of 45 when the war was still on.
Without knowing the exact publication date it is impossible to know, but just based on the usual publishing routine he almost had to have written it while the war was still going on. I don’t think even Halliday could have written it after August of 45 and had it in print before January in hardcover from a major house. He would have only had about six months to do it if he finished it after VE day, an awfully quick turnover for any manuscript.
In any case I recall this one well, and agree with both your caveats, and the smooth almost effortless writing of the period. Barzun and Taylor in a CATALOGUE OF CRIME largely agreed about Halliday and Shayne in general, only really complaining because in one book he drove a car through a garage door in an escape without breaking the headlights.
Halliday and Erle Stanley Gardner were among the few writers to use a believable Texas setting on occasion rather than the Dude Ranch cowboys and Indians version most other mystery writers of the era favored. Likely it was because both had personal experience there.
June 17th, 2016 at 9:01 pm
David
You’re quite right about Halliday-Dresser having written the book before the war was over. The book opens with a woman looking for her son who’s disappeared. He was working in Mexico and afraid to come back to the US because he’d failed to sign up for the draft. When he did he signed up under a false name, persuaded by someone that he’d be able to do some undercover work to help restore his name. When the woman never hears from him again, she calls on Shayne for help.
Other than that, though, there’s no real mention of the war going on.
It’s not a bad novel, but I didn’t think it was one of Shayne’s more interesting cases. I’m a little surprised that Hard Case Crime picked this particular book as one they thought worth reprinting.
June 17th, 2016 at 9:51 pm
I liked this one quite a bit because of the El Paso setting. I also think Kenneth Tobey would have been good casting for Shayne. Not quite the way I see him, but close.
June 18th, 2016 at 1:13 pm
According to the Catalog of Copyright Entries the hardcover was published on May 15, 1945.
June 18th, 2016 at 1:34 pm
And so the book was definitely written while the war was still on and the end in doubt. Thanks, Ken!
June 18th, 2016 at 4:03 pm
Being a literalist my choice for Shayne was the same as my choice for Denny Colt, the Spirit — Dennis O’Keefe. Still, for me, even though he didn’t fit the physical description, and only one of the books was adapted, my Shayne was Lloyd Nolan. It’s his voice I hear.
Kenneth Tobey does look like than Robert Stanley (later Robert McGinnis) cameo portrait of Shayne on the Dell Paperbacks though.
Re the war it is surprising how many mysteries on both sides of the pond skim over it. There is usually some mention of the hero being involved in intelligence if he is a series character (the Baron, always unusual, was a lowly sergeant who manned a telephone on an RAF base and I think Blackshirt also had a rather ordinary posting). There is often one spy case and perhaps a mention of rationing or the black market (the Toff even took them on when his Aunt Glory was poisoned) but generally the War is shuffled to one side. Once in a while a blackout will figure in the plot, less often an air raid.
There was a conscious decision that seemed to run through the genre that readers turned to genre fiction for escape and that they had more than enough war news in the daily paper, on radio, and through real life hardships and family members either in the service or war work. There seems to have been a real fear that someone would be offended by fictional heroics and melodrama when people were actually dying everyday. Also books were distributed to both American and British soldiers and there was an idea that they didn’t want to read about phony heroics, but to escape to pre war life as they remembered it.
As a result mystery fiction of the time seems to take place in a never never land where the war barely exists. Most cases happen while the hero is home on leave, or in unlikely settings — South America, Central America, and the Caribbean became popular spots to set mysteries just as Hollywood discovered Carmen Miranda and all those South American musicals and Maria Montez and Arabian Nights extravaganzas .
The Saint stays in the US. He battles saboteurs in places like Florida and Texas and acts as a semi official special agent, but he isn’t operating in England or Europe behind enemy lines. Similarly you would never know in many of Peter Cheyney’s Slim Callaghan novels that the war was going on other than the bad guys may turn out to be fifth columnists or some such. Even his spy novels are generally set in England and other than the occasional blackout the war itself and its hardships plays a small role other than a vague excuse for the bad guys. There is little about shortages or rationing or blackouts (odd because that and air raids seems a natural for mystery novels, but few use them)save a passing reference.
Doug Selby and Donald Lam both come home on leave to be involved in a case, but I don’t think the War gets more than a passing nod in Perry Mason country. Nero Wolfe tackles one case with Major Archie Goodwin and then Archie is assigned to him and their war work is off to one side, hinted at but not portrayed even though Stout was active in war work (even creating, with Alexander Woolcott of all people, the patriotic Fawcett comic book hero white trenchcoated Radar for the government).
Basil Willing has one war related adventure and then it is back to civies. Unless it is in a short story I don’t think Ellery Queen does anything more than mention the war in passing. Even Sir Henry Merivale, who is damn near head of the Secret Service, does damn little war work that we are shown, I don’t think it gets more than a vague nod in Dr. Fell’s world. Roderick Alleyn has one case in New Zealand and that’s about it, and Albert Campion one wartime adventure with his wife. Nigel Strangeways had a pre war spy adventure, or his wife did, but nothing in the war that is recorded though he has one Cold War spy case (and a good one). It’s mentioned more in the Miles Burton Desmond Merrion books than the John Rhode Dr. Priestly series, but neither pays a lot of attention to it.
That isn’t true of all characters. John Creasey’s Bruce Murdoch and Dr. Palfrey are intimately involved in spy work (a bit less so Patrick Dawlish his Bulldog Drummond wanna be who I think only has one war related adventure); Dennis Wheatley’s Gregory Sallust and Duc de Richlieu and many of his other books deal with the war, the Sallust books damn near history lessons about various wartime venues lightly sprinkled with heavy melodrama; Helen MacInnes wrote several with wartime backgrounds; Francis Beeding and Valentine Williams both wrote war related spy adventures as did Manning Coles; under Gerard Fairlie’s hand Bulldog Drummond even battles Irma Peterson with the help of an American OSS agent when she teams up with the Nazis(CAPTAIN BULLDOG DRUMMOND), but then Fairlie had just come back from Occupied France where the SOE had dropped him (literally as a parachuted in) at age 50 as part of a Jedburgh unit (SOE, OSS, FFI team) to teach the underground hand to hand combat and sabotage — but then, unlike other fictional heroes — Fairlie actually was Bulldog Drummond.
I vaguely recall Asey Mayo doing war work but off screen so to speak. The North’s take on one spy at least. I don’t think the war gets more than a nod in Craig Rice’s John J. Malone and Jake and Helene Justus stories or Stuart Palmer’s Hildegarde Withers books. I know Hastings is recalled to service and Poirot helps out, but again it doesn’t seem to be reported.
The same is true of most of the hero pulps. Doc Savage takes on the Nazi’s here and there, but while both the Shadow and the Spider are involved battling various threats related to the War they are pretty vague about what is actually going on. You would have thought they would have dropped the two of them in Berlin and decimated the Reichstag. Biggles was intimately involved, but then war was his forte. Mr. Moto pretty much ends as of Pearl Harbor as you might expect, but his last pre war adventure is directly related to the war. Fu Manchu manages to be a threat even while being anti Nazi in ISLAND OF FU MANCHU, but then he did the same thing in the Cold War with China. It’s actually a neat trick on Rohmer’s part to manage to pit him against the Nazi’s on one hand and still a threat to Western Civilization on the other.
Cleve Adams Rex McBride and Charles Leonard (M.V. Heberden)’s Paul Kilgerrin are intimately involved in battling fifth columnists but Kurt Steel’s Hank Heyer, Latimer’s Bill Crane, Mike Shayne as noted above, Philip Marlowe, and most others pretty much seem to exist outside the War even when it is mentioned or part of the plot as in the book above.
W, Vivian Butler wrote in THE DURABLE DESPERADOS how hard the war was on the concept of the gentleman adventurer and rogue hero. It’s not much better for the amateur detective or private eye. Official police get a little break because police work goes on whether there is a war or even an occupation as you would never know the war happened reading Maigret’s adventures, not surprisingly considering Simenon stayed in occupied France to protect a Jewish mistress and her family. Dornford Yates, like P.G. Wodehouse, refused to leave, and was interned in France for the war.
I can tell you that as often as not I have to look to the date of publication to figure out if a book was written during the war since so many barely mention it in passing. All things considered, the War seems to have had a curious effect on mystery fiction considering how much it dominates Post War. For the duration it might well have not been happening at all in most fiction despite the fact that it was a very real daily fact of American and British life in most places thanks to rationing, war work, paper and rubber drives, blackouts, Civil Defense, and loved ones serving.
In genre fiction written between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima it is often a phantom war.
June 18th, 2016 at 9:43 pm
Thanks for a long, solid and very useful comment, David. Besides citing so many individual authors and characters who fit into your thesis, the sentence that really caught my eye the most was this one:
“There was a conscious decision that seemed to run through the genre that readers turned to genre fiction for escape and that they had more than enough war news in the daily paper, on radio, and through real life hardships and family members either in the service or war work.”
I have always been convinced that this was the case, and the conscious decision, if that’s what it was, was a good one.
June 19th, 2016 at 11:53 am
Yet while books may have offered a world outside The War, film embraced it. CASABLANCA may have been a romantic drama but no piece of fiction I have ever seen or read did a better job of capturing the self-sacrifice of those living through WWII.
BIG SLEEP was finished before TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. But the studios wanted a War film so they shelved BIG SLEEP. It was a great decision. After seeing what was happening between Bogart and Bacall in TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, new scenes were added to BIG SLEEP (such as the discussion about horse racing).
Radio the entertainment of the masses did a little of both, but generally offered escapism between the news reports.
WWII offered a problem for superheroes such as Superman, The Shadow, Doc Savage, etc. Why didn’t they go beat-up Hitler. And reading about Superman catching bank robbers left a lot to be desire when “Dad” was risking his life overseas fighting Nazis.
David, how about Arab and Andy books by Richard Powell?
August 17th, 2016 at 11:55 am
I read it recently. A pleasant surprise: a solid, intriguing novel, with great rhythm. A good example of classic American noir. Argentinean edition: http://lasestrellassonoscuras.blogspot.com/2016/07/crimen-en-el-paso-de-brett-halliday-acme.html