BRETT HALLIDAY – Counterfeit Wife. ZiffDavis, hardcover, 1947. Reprinted in paperback a number of times.

   Mike Shayne, the durable private eye from Miami, has hung in there for an unusually long career (in part with the aid of ghost writers — see the next entry). The appeal of the character seems rooted in the straightforward approach originally laid out by Halliday (Davis Dresser). Shayne is a tough, direct character, not tricked out with gimmicks, not given to guilt complexes or excessive philosophizing.

   The stories are fairly complicated. with a fun complement of fights, shoot-outs, mobsters, and slinky dames. Add to that a loyal secretary (Lucy Hamilton), a wisecracking newshound (Tim Rourke), a sympathetic cop (Will Gentry), a nasty, stupid cop (Peter Painter), a lot of two-fisted drinking, and you have all the elements. Mike Shayne is the Generic Private Eye.

   This crackling adventure from Shayne’s middle period (after the death of his wife, while he was shuttling his home base between New Orleans and Miami) starts with the big redhead about to board a late plane to New Orleans when a nervous man, desperate to get on the flight, gives Shayne two hundred-dollar bills for his ticket. A woman claiming to be the man’s wife shows up a bit too late to catch him. Curious, Shayne follows her to a roadhouse and buys her a few drinks.

   The bar owner pulls a gun on Shayne, demanding to know where he got one of those big bills; he and the woman try to escape in her car, which is promptly wrecked. Tums out the money is counterfeit, there’s a dead kidnap victim in the trunk of the car, the cops want Shayne for the murder of the man who took his apartment … and the narrative barrels on from there.

   Dresser’s nuts-and-bolts style isn’t particularly elegant, but it gets the job done. There’s one terrific action sequence in which Shayne, naked, armed only with a liquor bottle, manages an escape from the counterfeiters, who were about to take him for a ride. One of the best of the Shaynes, helped considerably by the absence of simpering, kidnap-prone Lucy Hamilton.

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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.