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Michael Shayne

kevinburtonsmith

Created By Brett Halliday
Pseudonym of Davis Dresser, who also wrote as Asa Baker, Mathew Blood, Kathryn Culver, Don Davis, Hal Debrett, Peter Field, Anthony Scott, Anderson Wayne
(1904-1977)

One of the most popular private detectives ever, red-haired Miami P.I. MICHAEL SHAYNE has had a long, successful, multi-media career. Shayne made his debut in the 1939 novel, Dividend on Death, by Brett Halliday (a pen name of Davis Dresser). Dresser went on to write fifty more Shayne novels as Halliday (with occasional help from ghostwriters such as Ryerson Johnson). Twenty-seven more were written by Robert Terrall and published as paperback originals by Dell, still under the pseudonym Brett Halliday, reaching a tally of 77 novels.

But that’s not counting the 300 or more short stories, a dozen films, radio and television shows, a few comic book appearances and even a play. And a beer.

Not bad for a series whose first novel was reportedly rejected by twenty-one publishers before finally being accepted by Henry Holt & Co. in 1939. The series went on to be highly successful, reprinted in many editions and translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, Japanese and Hebrew.

No wonder more than one wag has ventured to call Mike the “Generic Private Eye”. That, however,  may be missing the point. The “Everyman Detective” might be more apt.

According to author L.J. Washburn:

“Shayne may have ended up that way, but he certainly didn’t start out like that. The first half-dozen or so Shayne novels are unlike anything else in the genre I’ve read, a cross between hard-boiled private eye, screwball comedy, and fair-play detection. The screwball angle comes from Phyllis Shayne, Mike Shayne’s beautiful young wife, and their relationship is much like what would have happened if Sam Spade had married Pam North (for those of you who remember Pam and Jerry North).

I think L.J. may be overselling the “comedy” angle, but the books are generally very well plotted, and pleasantly (sometimes bewideringly) complex, if surprisingly traditional in the early entries, with Shayne gleefully running various cons on various suspects and even occasionally gathering all the suspects together in the end to explain the crime and name the murderer, just like Nero Wolfe or Ellery Queen.

However, Phyllis (née Brighton) was something of a limited character, so Dresser got her out of town (and off screen) in a couple of the books, then finally bumped her off when he sold the movie rights to the series — right about the time the series took a more hard-boiled turn.

But don’t think Shayne wasn’t hard-boiled from the start. It was the tricky, twisty plots themselves that couldn’t keep pace — Shayne was plenty hard; a big, hulking redhead with a taste for fisticuffs and brandy (ice water on the side) and an eye for a quick buck; an angle player more than willing to pit the cops and the crooks against each other — particularly if he could stick it to Peter Painter, the Miami Beach police chief. And if he had to fake evidence or cajole a witness, well… he could always count on Will Gentry, Miami Chief of Police, and Tim Rourke, ace reporter for the Miami Daily News, to help him smooth over the rough bits.

Having Phyllis killed off, ironically, led to what some consider the best (or at least darkest) book in the series, Blood on the Black Market (aka Heads You Lose), in which all the comedy angles and con games disappear and Shayne has to deal with Phyllis’s death. Shayne’s characterization in this book is a definite forerunner to such characters as Pronzini’s Nameless and Block’s Matt Scudder.

Once Phyllis was disposed of, Halliday introduced Lucy Hamilton, who served as Mike’s secretary, sometime romantic interest and occasional foil for most of the rest of the series. But Halliday had learned his lesson — despite their lengthy courtship, he never married Shayne off again.

“Of course, after that the Shayne novels do tend to become more standard private eye fare, but I think some of those early novels are very worth of rediscovery,” L.J. Washburn says.

One of those other early novels worth investigating is She Woke to Darkness (1954), wherein Shayne is hired to find an author who’s disappeared while attending a crime writer’s convention. Halliday being one of the founders of the Mystery Writers of America, it’s a great opportunity to lampoon (and occasionally pay tribute to) other mystery writers, both real and imagined, and one hell of a book-within-a-book burrow into the writing process. Plus, but it’s the first Shayne novel to be narrated in first person. Not by the detective, though, but by… Brett Halliday himself, who is of course attending the convention, and has been accused of murder. He’s also the author that Shayne’s looking for.

Washburn can certainly claim to know her stuff, having written, or co-written (with her husband, fellow crime writer James M. Reasoner) thirty-seven Mike Shayne stories under the pseudonym of Brett Halliday for Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine (later to be known as Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine) which had been introduced in 1956 by Renown Publications. It continued for almost three decades as one of the few digests to offer detective fiction of a noticeably harder type than was generally available. Each issue featured a Mike Shayne story by “Brett Halliday,” ranging from 7500 word short stories to 20,000 word novellas. Not that “Brett” limited himself to his own magazine–stories featuring Mike popped up in everything from other pulps and digests, such as Black Mask and Mammoth Mystery to “men’s” magazines such as Stag and Argosy.

By this time, however, “Brett Halliday” was not Davis Dresser–he had started to commission other writers, several of them quite accomplished detective writers themselves, to pen some of the Shayne books in 1958, and he stopped writing them completely after selling the series to Dell in 1964. These ghostwriters included Dennis Lynds (aka Michael Collins, the most prolific, with 88 stories), Sam Merwin Jr. (the magazine’s first editor), the previously mentioned Washburn and Reasoner, as well as Michael Avallone, Richard Deming, Robert Turner, Robert Arthur, Frank Belknap Long, Edward Y. Breese, Peter Germano, and the writing teams of Bill Pronzini & Jeff Wallman and Hal Blythe & Charlie Sweet (Hal Charles).

And so the books continued for almost twenty more years, while the short stories and novellas regularly appeared in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine well into the eighties. A big part of the serie’s longevity, it could be argued, was due to the formula Halliday had concocted back in 1939, and to which he had faithfully adhered during his tenure as Shayne’s writer: to imbue the stories with a certain a certain timeless quality.

FILMS

But no matter who was doing the writing, Michael Shayne proved to be a popular character, not only in print, but in film, radio and even television.

In 1940, Michael Shayne, Private Detective, the first of a what would turn out to be a long string of films, was released with Lloyd Nolan playing Shayne, now based in New York City, as a cocky, wise-cracking chucklehead. The comedic elements of the novels, such as they were, were definitely played up, with Shayne and Phyllis going at it in madcap screwball fashion, and Peter Painter along for the ride, as well.

The film was based primarily of the Halliday novel, The Private Practise of Michael Shayne (1940), but it would be the last time one of the Shayne novels would ever be used as source material. Instead, novels by other crime writers were used, including Chandler, Frederick Nebel and Richard Burke; shoehorned into the Shayne mantle, much to Halliday’s dismay.

As a result, neither Phyllis or Painter were never seen again in subsequent films, although assorted girlfriends and wrongheaded cops seemed to be always on hand to complicate Shayne’s life.

Lloyd appeared in seven films for 20th Century Fox, and in 1946, Hugh Beaumont (who would later star in television’s Leave It to Beaver) took over the role for PRC. The PRC films were a definite step down in quality (and budget), but they did bring back Chief Will Gentry and Tim Rourke, as well as Phyllis Hamilton, a composite of sorts of Phyllis and Lucy.

RADIO

A radio show featuring Mike debuted on the Don Lee Network in October 1944 with Wally Maher in the lead. Although mystery writer Brett Halliday got the credit for creating this detective and bringing him to radio, he never actually wrote any scripts — although he was happy enough to pick up the royalty checks. There were three separate versions of this show over the years, and most of them took liberties with the source material, particularly when it camer to tone and setting, with Shayne headquartered in Oakland, New Orleans and finally back in miami.

In October 1946 it went coast-to-coast, lasting until November 1947. It was resurrected on Mutual in July 1948, under the title of The New Adventures of Michael Shayne with Jeff Chandler in the lead, and ran for two years. The last version began in October 1952 on ABC, first with Donald Curtis playing Shayne, and later with Robert Sterling. This third and last series went off the air in July 1953.

In all versions, Shayne was “that reckless, red-headed Irishman” Halliday originally described, who used brain and brawn equally, though the writers tended to have Mike take the physical approach to solving most problems. Easier to write, I guess. His assistant, a lovely blonde named Phyl Knight, was not prominent in most of the episodes.

TELEVISION

In 1960, Michael Shayne having pretty much conquered almost every other medium, moved onto television, with Richard Denning, who had previously starred in Mr. and Mrs. North, stepping into the gumshoes of Shayne. Patricia Donahue played Lucy Hamilton, but was replaced by Margie Regan about halfway through the show’s first (and only) season.Lieutenant Will Gentry of the Miami Police Department and Tim Rourke of the Miami Tribune were also regulars, as was Dick Hamilton, Lucy’s kid brother, a character who was never in Halliday’s novels.

A few of the shows, however, were actually based on the books (or at least named for them), and a number of episodes were penned by William Link and Richard Levinson. The biggest problem for me? Nice guy Denning was simply too mild-mannered and soft to convincingly play the hard-boiled, conniving Shayne.

COMICS

Turns out there was one more field to conquer, after all. The television show proved popular enough to spin off a Dell comic book tie-in. Surprisingly, perhaps, at least some of the comic stories were actually based on Brett Halliday novels, and not merely adaptations of T.V. episodes. The first issue adapted The Private Practice of Michael Shayne; the second adapted Bodies Are Where You Find Them, wherein a woman ends up dead in Shayne’s bed amid speculation on what she was doing there in the first place (They always claimed “Dell Comics are GOOD comics.”); and the third issue featured Heads…You Lose, where Phyllis dies in childbirth. I’ve always wondered what made Dell choose to go this route. Those early Halliday novels contained material that wasn’t normally found in “good” comics — drugs abounded, adultery was rampant, and the shortages in America during World War II were noted. And having the hero’s wife die in childbirth? Not your typical comic book fare. Dell made similar decisions with Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct comics.

UNDER OATH

THE EVIDENCE

NOVELS

  

SHORT STORIES & NOVELLAS

COLLECTIONS

EDITED BY “MICHAEL SHAYNE”

FILMS

 
 

MOVIE COLLECTIONS

RADIO

PLAYS

TELEVISION

TELEVISION COLLECTIONS

Apparently the copyright holders never figured there was any reason to renew their hold on the 1960 television series, so there are countless, frill-free dirt cheap public domain copies out there, usually with only a few episodes each.

COMIC BOOKS

COMIC COLLECTIONS

BEER

FURTHER INVESTIGATIONS

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Radio information contributed by Jack French and The Digital Deli Too, and comic info was contributed by Don McGregor. Thanks for the “Gotcha!”‘s from J. Ken MacDonald, Brendan Riley, Adam Lounsbery and Jim Hatch.

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