BRETT HALLIDAY – The Corpse Came Calling. Mike Shayne #7. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1942. Reprinted many times in paperback, including Dell D401, January 1961. Cover art by Robert McGinnis. (See image to the right.)

   I’m not sure in which novel PI Michael Shayne first met Phyllis, his wife to be, but it shouldn’t difficult to pin it down. It was not the book immediately preceding this one, Tickets for Death (1941), reviewed here but it may have been Bodies Are Where You Find Them, the one before that. (The question may even have already been asked and answered on this blog. A lot of books, authors and characters have been talked about in the years it’s been going, some very thoroughly, especially in the comments.)

   In any case, Mike and Phyllis are quite happily married in this one, and in fact Phyllis is acting as Mike’s secretary as the book opens. The two of them are using the apartment directly under the one where they are living as his office, and one morning, while Phyllis is there alone, a man comes in and immediately dies in the open door, with three bullets in his chest.

   Mike is not that far away, however. As this is happening, he is upstairs with a client, decidedly female, who wants Mike to kill her husband, a convict who has just broken out of prison. Are the two cases connected? Only in the books and movies, and the answer is therefore Yes.The dead man is a PI Mike once knew several years ago, and he is also the PI who had advised Mike’s new would-be client that he is the one who could do the job she wants done.

   I haven’t yet mentioned the scrap of paper found in the dead man’s hand, and which Mike decides to not tell the police about. Nor have I mentioned that to get that scrap of paper back, some Nazi thugs kidnap Phyllis. Even worse, from my point of view, Mike is forced to slug Tim Rourke, newspaper reporter and his best friend, and tie and gag him up so he won’t interfere with getting Phyllis back.

   No wonder so few fictional PI’s have wives to interfere (as victims) in cases their husbands are working on.

   But as it so happens, that’s not exactly why Brett Halliday decided Phyllis had to go, dying as she did during childbirth between Blood on the Black Market (#8) and Murder Wears a Mummer’s Mask (#9).

   This has been covered on this blog, and once again, here’s the link where you’ll find Brett Halliday being quoted as saying:

      â€œI finally inquired as to the reason from Hollywood [about why they didn’t adapt Halliday’s own stories] and was told it was because Shayne and Phyllis were married and it was against their policy to use a married detective.

      â€œFaced with this fact of life, I decided to kill off Phyllis to leave Shayne a free man for succeeding movies.”

   In any case, getting back to the book at hand, I thought the case, which is extremely complicated, was held together by guesswork, duck tape and baling wire. My eyes glazed over shile reading the explanation as to how all the threads in the mystery tied together at the end, which I’m sure the did. But as always, your mileage may vary.