Pete McGrath

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Created by Michael Brett
(1921-2000)

He’s a big, handsome lug of a guy with black hair and blue eyes. He’s appropriately cynical, and he has a habit of talking to himself. He likes Scotch, good cigars and Samantha Conners, a tour guide at the UN. He tools around town in a three-year old Chevy and has been known to use a bug or two. But he’s also been known to take a slightly more hands-on approach to cracking a case.

His name’s PETE McGRATH, a New York City eye with an office on 34th Street. He’s six foot three, with jet black hair and blue eyes, and when the going gets rough, he knows how to handle himself, , so don’t mess with him. He appeared in ten tight, hard and mostly forgotten paperback originals from the mid-to-late sixties. But if — given the decade — you were expecting these to be some sort of patchouli-scented peace-and-love swinging sixties books, you might be disappointed . Just check out some of the titles…

I mean, really, Death of a Hippie?

Lie a Little, Die a Little?

Slit My Throat Gently?

Truth is, though, for all the blood and thunder (and occasional splashes of what John Conquest tagged “near farce” in his Trouble is Their Business), McGrath was a tad generic, fitting in nicely with other popular series private eyes of the era, such as Johnny Liddell and  Carter Brown’s various detectives (Rick Holman, et al). John Conquest in his Trouble is My Business, tags them as “Veering between straight hard-boiled action and near farce,” and makes a case that they’ve aged well, while Juri Nummelin tags the McGraths as enjoyably “old school” on his Pulpetti blog, and  David Vineyard suggested they’re “good hamburger” when you’re craving hamburger, over on Mystery*File.

Still, someone must have enjoyed the Pete McGraths way back then — there were ten of them published after all, and they were translated and sold all over the world.

There was even a film made in 1971, Cry Uncle!, loosely based on Lie a Little, Die a Little, one of the McGrath novels — but so loosely based that it deserves its own entry.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Brett wrote ten McGrath novels in all, as well as a few standalone novels like Diamond Kill and Jungle. He also wrote short stories, appearing in such digests of the time as Alfred Hitchcock Magazine, Manhunt, Double-Action Detective, Mystery Stories and Guilty Detective Story Magazine, and co-wrote Toma, with police detective David Toma, a novelization of the fictionalized TV show about his career.

Brett is often confused with the British author, Miles Barton Tripp, who used “Michael Brett” as pseudonym, but these were entirely different men. A recent message I received from a Rory Brett settles the issue once and for all. Pete McGrath’s creator “is not British — he was born in Patterson, NJ and lived his entire life in NY. I ought to know — I’m his son.”

Rory also cleared up another matter: Michael Brett is also the Mike Brett who wrote two amusing novels featuring a private eye named Sam Dakkers, although Hubin’s lists the Mike Brett name as a pseudonym of Leslie Frederick Brett. But again, according to Rory:

“My dad wrote the Sam Dakkers books when I was growing up on an old Underwood electric typewriter that weighed about a ton in our back bedroom, and my mother retyped it on the dining room table on a Smith Corona typewriter… He smoked cigars while he wrote, and the smoke would be billowing out from under the door. I even remember the dozen books that he got from the publisher when it was released. I don’t know who Leslie Frederick Brett is, but he definitely wasn’t a relative.”

Rory continues:

“My dad actually started wrting on a bet. Scott Meredith, a friend of my father who was a literary agent recommended a book for him to read. My dad said this is terrible, I could write better than this. Scott said if you do I will try and get it published. So my dad wrote a short story and it was published in a magazine, I think it was called “Battle Cry.” The rest, as they say, was history.”

UNDER OATH

  • “I read several of these. Good hamburger when you want hamburger. The ultimate generic eye.”
    — David Vineyard (2015, Mystery*File)
  • “I read this old private eye mystery by Michael Brett in a day, which I quite enjoyed, having struggled through a much longer crime novel which took almost a week… I liked the book, though it’s nowhere near great. It’s a fast read, and everything flows quite smoothly. Brett makes McGrath a likable hero who can work his way out in the mean streets, but there are also bursts of sudden violence. Especially the scene in which McGrath cuts off an ear from a killer is gruesome. There’s also lots of old school male chauvinism in the book, but what can you expect?”
    — Juri Nummelin (January 2026, pulpetti)

NOVELS

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

  • Jake Masters (Cry Uncle!)
    Believe it or not, the 1968 Pete McGrath book, Lie a Little, Die a Little, was used as the basis for a trippy, trashy soft-core 1971 film Cry Uncle!
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. A special thank you to Rory Brett for his patience and understanding.

Published

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