Brett Halliday

• Born: July 31, 1904
• Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
• Died: February 4, 1977
• Place of death: Montecito, California

Type of Plot: Private investigator

Principal Series: Jerry Burke, 1938-1939; Mike Shayne, 1939-1977; Morgan Wayne, 1952-1954

Contribution

Some seventy Mike Shayne novels, more than three hundred issues of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine (always with a lead Shayne novella), and three annuals have appeared, all using the Brett Halliday pseudonym. It is impossible to determine how many of these stories Davis Dresser actually wrote, though it is believed that most books that appeared under the Halliday name after 1958 are the work of either Robert Terrall or Ryerson Johnson.

Brett Halliday broke from the hard-boiled cliché of the heavy-drinking, two-fisted, womanizing private investigator. Although Shayne consumes his share of cognac (usually Martell) and is not beyond violence (he “resolves” an early case by pushing the villain in front of a speeding car), the Miami-based private investigator more often than not uses his brainpower to solve the complicated, though fair-play plots that his creator fashioned. Moreover, Shayne becomes a family man (though his wife dies in childbirth). Halliday is better known for his popularity (some sixty-five million to seventy-five million copies of his novels alone have been sold) than his style, which is basically straightforward, “nuts-and-bolts prose.” Although the creator of one of the most recognizable and longest-running detectives, Halliday was never accorded the honors of some of his peers. He was, however, one of the founders of the Mystery Writers of America.

Biography

Brett Halliday was born Davis Dresser in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Justus Dresser and Mary Dresser. Growing up in Texas, he ran away from home at the age of fourteen and enlisted in the army. Two years later his true age was discovered, and he was discharged. Traveling throughout the Southwest, he worked variously in construction, on oil fields, digging graves, and other such jobs. During the 1920’s he attended college in Indiana, where he received a certificate in civil engineering. For a while he worked as an engineer and surveyor before finding himself down and out in Los Angeles—“hungry, jobless, and broke.”

In 1927 Halliday began to write, failing to win the Dodd, Mead Red Badge contest. Finding engineering work was difficult during the Depression, and he turned to the pulp magazines. Under various pseudonyms, he wrote romances, mysteries, and Westerns. For Mum’s the Word for Murder (1938), his first mystery, he used the pen name Asa Baker. In 1939, after having been rejected twenty-two times, Dividend on Death, the first Mike Shayne detective novel, appeared under the Brett Halliday pseudonym. Although Shayne was not originally conceived of as a series, when Bill Sloane, Halliday’s editor at Henry Holt, asked for a second book, Halliday turned out The Private Practice of Michael Shayne (1940), a book that later was sold to Hollywood.

Halliday was married three times. Interestingly, his wives—Helen McCloy, Kathleen Rollins, and Mary Savage—were also writers. Under the pseudonym Hal Debrett, he wrote two mystery novels with Rollins. Halliday had one child, Chloe. In addition to his writing, Halliday was the editor of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. He also owned a publishing firm, Torquil and Company, whose books were distributed by Dodd, Mead and Company.

Halliday’s travels through the Southwest formed the background for a distinguished group of crime tales that Ellery Queen called his “engineering stories.” In this group are “Human Interest Stuff,” which is frequently anthologized, and “Extradition,” which won for Halliday second prize in an Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine contest.

Halliday lived the latter part of his life in Santa Barbara, California. He died in Montecito, California, on February 4, 1977, at the age of seventy-two.

Analysis

The feature that most distinguishes the Mike Shayne series is the relationship between Brett Halliday and his creation. As one critic has stated, “the believability and durability of the Mike Shayne character is due in no small part to the incredibly dramatic circumstances surrounding his origins.” In two published essays (“Michael Shayne as I Know Him” and “Michael Shayne”), Halliday claims that his hero is based on a real-life person named Mike, with whom he had a personal relationship, and that the novels are patterned on actual cases from the detective’s files. Halliday asserts that his first meeting with “the rangy redhead” occurred on the Tampico waterfront during the writer’s oil field days. Four years later, Halliday again ran into Mike in a New Orleans bar.

There are, however, interesting discrepancies between the two accounts. In “Michael Shayne as I Know Him,” two thugs follow a woman into the bar, and Mike tells Halliday to “get out of town fast and forget [he’d] seen him.” In “Michael Shayne,” however, there is no woman, the two thugs are seemingly after the redhead, and Mike growls to Halliday, “Stay here.” Furthermore, in the latter account Halliday writes, “They disappeared into the French Quarter, and I’ve never seen him again.” In the former version, however, Mike suddenly appears at Halliday’s log cabin in Colorado years after the New Orleans encounter and discusses his “lucrative private detective practice in Miami.” They proceed to meet off and on for the next few years, with Halliday serving as the detective’s best man and comforting the redhead after the death of his wife.

What is fact and what is fiction? In some ways the answer does not matter, for, in either case, Halliday created a highly memorable character, one who has appeared in books, magazines, and films as well as on radio and television—even in comic books. In fact, Shayne has been called “the best and most enduring of the tough guy private eye school of mystery fiction.” The tough-guy school (the word “tough” appears more than a dozen times in Dividend on Death), prominent in the 1930’s and 1940’s, was an outgrowth of the hard-boiled style typified by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett; its distinctive characteristics include the use of the private investigator as the central character, the whodunit plot featuring more deduction than violence, and the lack of personal and sociological insights.

Shayne is the prototypical tough guy private investigator. At the core of his being, Halliday stresses, the detective “not only does not lie to anyone else; what is more important, he does not lie to himself.” His success is based on “his ability to drive straight forward to the heart of the matter without deviating one iota for obstacles or confusing side issues.” Although he lives in a violent world, Shayne relies on his thought process. A recurring scene in the series is the private investigator sitting up late into the night ruminating on a case, while alternately drinking cognac and ice water. He has, as Halliday writes, “an absolutely logical mind.” Even his sternest critics have noted that Shayne, unlike many of his mean-street contemporaries, has “an occasional brain wave” and performs “some legitimate detecting.”

Little is revealed about Shayne’s personal life. In fact, Halliday professes,

I know nothing whatever about Shayne’s backgound. . . . I don’t know where or when he was born, what sort of childhood and upbringing he had. It is my impression that he is not a college man, although he is well educated, has a good vocabulary, and is articulate on a variety of subjects.

For example, in Dividend on Death the only biographical information occurs when Shayne momentarily recalls “he was a freckled Irish lad kneeling by his mother’s side in a Catholic chapel.”

Appropriately, all ghostwriters for Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine were given a “bible” (a writer’s guide), “Mike Shayne of Miami,” that outlines the detective’s basic personality traits. It lists biographical data (starting only from the point of his wife’s death), his physical description (red hair, gray eyes, long legs), his mannerisms (rubbing the lobe of his left ear with his left thumb and forefinger, scraping his thumb across his stubble), his mentality (always truthful, fearless, sensitive, logical), his likes and dislikes (fighting and drinking cognac versus dirty fighting and drunks), his habits (wears pajamas, sits at rear tables in restaurants)—as well as his environment and friends. “Mike Shayne of Miami” concludes by suggesting that Shayne is “the supreme individualist, the Renaissance Man in a Rip-off Age.” In other words, ghostwriters in the 1980’s dealt with essentially the same character and milieu that Shayne’s creator inaugurated in 1939 with Dividend on Death.

Typical of the tough-guy school, Shayne’s reflections reveal very little of himself, his background, or his deep, personal thoughts. The narrator often explains that the detective is lost in ratiocination, but the audience is rarely privy to the actual content of those thoughts. In Dividend on Death, for example, the narrator says at various times that “there was nothing in his face to show what he was thinking” and “he puffed lazily, thinking about the sleeping girl in his bedroom.” Furthermore, as the detective pushes ahead relentlessly, readers do not know the details of what the redhead is pondering: “Things were evidently coming to a head, but the pattern as he saw it didn’t make any sense,” and “there’s only one piece lacking in the whole puzzle.”

Shayne, as a member of the tough-guy school, is not a social observer in the Raymond Chandler-Ross Macdonald tradition. He does, however, make the obvious comments for someone in his profession. At the end of A Taste for Violence (1949), the redhead, after having exposed a corrupt labor leader, hopes his discovery “causes a stink that spreads across the state and throws the white light of suspicion on every other double-crossing labor leader who may be doing the same thing.” In Dividend on Death, Shayne notes, “I learned a hell of a long time ago in this business not to believe anybody or anything—not even what I see with my own eyes.” When Phyllis Brighton tries to seduce him, he observes, “You can’t turn things like this on and off, you know—like an electric switch.” In the entirety of Dividend on Death the only time Shayne makes what could be loosely construed as a social statement comes when the readers are told that the detective “had no downtown office and no regular staff. That sort of phony front he left to the punks with whom Miami is infested during the season.”

Another dominant trait of Mike Shayne should be noted: his acting on behalf of his view of justice over law. In a world of incompetent “John Laws”—such as Peter Painter, chief of Miami Beach’s detective bureau—and immoral criminals preying on defenseless innocents, Shayne feels superior to legal technicalities. In the first Shayne novel, the detective destroys incriminating evidence. When he finds Phyllis Brighton (in a bloody nightgown) standing over her dead mother with a bloody knife in hand, he “knows” she has been set up. As a result, he takes the nightgown and knife from her and locks her in her room (leaving the key in the door) to provide her with an alibi. Later, Shayne finds Dr. Pedique, Phyllis’s physician, dead, and to help her he burns the doctor’s suicide note. His vigilante attitude is perhaps best shown in a scene in which Shayne, cooking sausage and eggs while cleaning the knife and nightgown, nonchalantly reflects “on the convenience of being able to destroy evidence while you prepared breakfast.” Moreover, Shayne thinks nothing of blackmailing—“call it anything you like”—Peter Painter into paying him double the reward to solve the Brighton case. Nor does his conscience suffer when he seduces an innocent nurse and hires a thief to steal a painting by Raphael—both misdeeds to save his client.

Nailing down Shayne’s motivation—and, hence, Halliday’s themes—is difficult. More often than not, readers are left with the suspicion that the Miami-based sleuth acts not out of friendship or for the public good but in his own best interest. When Shayne, having been retained for five thousand dollars, arrives in Kentucky in A Taste for Violence to discover that his client has been murdered, his first words to Lucy Hamilton, his confidante and secretary, are, “I cashed his check for five grand in Miami. I wonder if it had time to clear through his bank?” At the end of Dividend on Death, Shayne broods, but not over the eight corpses he has seen, the girl whom he has casually seduced, or the ramifications of humankind’s inhumanity. Instead, he contemplates the profit-and-loss sheet in his hand showing $24,200 on the plus side.

Another characteristic feature of the Shayne series is its fusion of classic detection with the violent story line of the hard-boiled tradition. Often borrowing motifs from the English cozy tradition, Halliday favors what one critic has called “a whodunit format with some honest-to-God detection going on.” No less a mystery critic than Anthony Boucher admired Halliday’s twists, puzzles, and labyrinthine plots. Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor noted “the plots are complicated but often adroitly worked out.” The New York Times praised one Halliday novel as an “agreeably old-fashioned whodunit of murder.” According to another critic, “The various switcheroos, who’s got which gun/body, whose side is he/she on gambits fly by so fast that one is almost forced to take notes to keep things straight.”

Dividend on Death

Dividend on Death sets the pace for the series. The plot centers on that gothic staple, the heiress framed for murder. Shayne discovers her in the familiar isolated family mansion complete with the usual cast of suspects—the phony doctor, the brutish chauffeur, the slim secretary, and the sexy nurse. Halliday even twists the locked-room convention when Shayne locks Phyllis Brighton, the innocent heiress, in her room to provide her with an alibi. Later, Shayne discovers the conventional buried chest, but this time it contains not treasure, but a body. The final solution involves several crimes all occurring in the same time frame and place: an attempt to buy a smuggled painting, a plan involving a man’s killing his brother and taking his place, and a mobster’s complex ploy to steal the valuable painting by substituting one of his minions for a nurse.

As with most whodunits, Dividend on Death is flawed by coincidences, withheld information, and improbabilities. During the course of the novel, on the basis of which The New York Times described Halliday as “an inexpert storyteller,” Shayne is hired by three separate clients for three seemingly separate cases. Unbeknown to the clients or to Shayne at first, the three cases are actually interrelated: All are tied to an attempt to grab the Brighton fortune. Moreover, throughout the novel the reader is told that Shayne talked to this character or that, but the reader never discovers the content of these conversations. Constantly, the narrator suggests that the detective has an idea or hunch but does not make the reader aware of the content. Shayne even makes some near-incredible leaps of intuition that help solve the crime. At one juncture he takes a quick look at a chauffeur and immediately realizes the man is a former convict and must have known one of the Brighton brothers, who was also in prison. Why does Shayne think all convicts are in the same prison?

Halliday, then, is a greater craftsman than artist, a writer remembered more for his voluminous output than for his innovations, more for the attractiveness of his central character than for the detective’s originality.

Principal Series Character:

• Mike Shayne , a semi-hard-boiled private investigator, operates out of a Miami office. Widowed, the thirty-five-year-old redhead never seems to age. He prefers his brain and his fists to a gun. Shayne is “an ordinary guy like the reader himself,” his creator claims, and “his most important attribute is absolute personal honesty.”

Bibliography

Barzun, Jacques, and Wendell Hertig Taylor. A Catalogue of Crime. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. List, with commentary, of the authors’ choices for the best or most influential examples of crime fiction. Halliday’s work is included and evaluated.

Breu, Christopher. Hard-Boiled Masculinities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Study of the representation of masculinity in hard-boiled detective fiction; sheds light on Halliday’s work.

“Davis Dresser (Brett Halliday).” In American Hard-Boiled Crime Writers, edited by George Parker Anderson and Julie B. Anderson. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Compares Halliday to other hard-boiled detective writers. Bibliographic references and index.

Halliday, Brett. “Mike Shayne.” In The Great Detectives, edited by Otto Penzler. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Halliday provides his own description of his most famous character in this book listing the greatest fictional detectives of all time.

Ruehlmann, William. Saint with a Gun: The Unlawful American Private Eye. New York: New York University Press, 1974. Scholarly study of American detective fiction in which private investigators are forced to break the law to achieve justice. Provides perspective on Halliday’s character.