BRETT HALLIDAY – Nice Fillies Finish Last. Dell, paperback original, 1966. Reprinted several times.

   Around 1958, Davis Dresser cut back on his writing and the Halliday by-line was passed along to various ghosts. A number of mystery writers-including Dennis Lynds, Mike Avallone, and James Reasoner-have produced the Mike Shayne novelettes in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. As to the novels, Ryerson Johnson did a couple of them, and Robert Terrall wrote two dozen.

   Terrall is a fine writer, a more subtle and accomplished stylist than Dresser, and his Shayne novels deserve attention. He injected new life into a rather played-out series, and came up with fresh story material. Some of the books find Shayne mixed up in international intrigue; and several have interesting gambling and sports backgrounds — this one, for instance.

   Tim Rourke gets a tip from a rummy at the harness track that someone’s planning lo pull off a complicated multi-race betting coup. Rourke’s source turns up dead, apparently from accidentally swilling wood alcohol. He tries to investigate, but winds up in the hospital, courtesy of an angry jockey who didn’t appreciate Rourke’s questioning of the jockey’s hot-pants wife. Shayne has to come in and sort it out. There’s interesting development of sexual motivations and tensions among the characters. Terrall is exceptionally skilled in handling such material.

   Other noteworthy Shayne novels: Bodies Are Where You Find Them (1941), The Corpse Came Calling (1942), Blood on Biscayne Bay (1946), Framed in Blood (1951), Fit to Kill (1958-Terrall), At the Point of a .38 (1974-Terrall).

   Testimony to Shayne’s popularity in the Forties and Fifties is a series of seven B films starring Lloyd Nolan as Shayne, among them Sleepers West ( 194 l ), based on the novel Sleepers East by Frederick Nebel, and Time to Kill (1942), based on Chandler’s High Window; Hugh Beaumont (Beaver Cleaver’s father) also staffed as Shayne in five additional B’s in the late Forties.

   Shayne had his own show on the radio, on and off from 1944 to 1952, with Wally Maher, Jeff Chandler, and Robert Sterling playing the detective in three different incarnations. A Michael Shayne TV series featuring Richard Denning aired in 1960-61. And after twenty-nine years, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine ceased publication in 1985.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the
Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.