Brett Halliday Biography and List of Works

Prolific American writer, who published from 1939 to 1976 more than 60 mystery novels that featured the private detective Michael Shayne. Halliday wrote under several pseudonyms but his fame rests on the Mike Shayne novels, the man with his own codes, and the personification of one facet the American dream. Despite the enormous popularity, Shayne was typical two-fisted, tough-talking pulp hero.

Brett Halliday was born as Davis Dresser in Chicago, but he grew up in West Texas. He lost an eye to barbed wire as a boy, and was required to wear an eye-patch for the rest of his life. According to some biographical sources, he joined the United States Army Cavalry at the age of 14 and rode with Pershing chasing Pancho Villa. After army service Dresser returned to Texas to finish the high school. He graduated from Tri-State College in Civil Engineering. He worked for a time as an engineer and as a surveyor, and then started as writer in 1927. It took four years and twenty-two rejections before Halliday found a publisher for DIVIDENT ON DEATH (1939), the first Michael Shayne novel. In the novel Halliday himself becomes the chief suspect in the murder of a young woman. He summons his friend Mike Shayne to New York. Shayne finds the real killer, and repays his debt to his chronicler. From this book Halliday's stories began to gain commercial success.

In the timeless world of Halliday's fiction, Shayne survived well into the 1980s. The basic formula the author employed in 1939 remained intact, so that other writers have been able to slip easily into Halliday's role as chronicler of Shayne's activities. The Shayne series eventually numbered some seventy volumes, and the hero was seen between 1940 and 1947 in twelve films. On radio, Shayne appeared in a CBS series in 1949, with Jeff Chandler as the private eye. In the film Time to Kill, based on Raymond Chandler's novel The High Window, the crime solver was not Philip Marlowe but detective Mike Shayne. Fox paid Chandler $3,500 for screen rights, adapting it for Lloyd Nolan as Shayne, who delivered the scripted wisecracks. In the story Shayne's services were needed in a case that involved counterfeiters of rare coins.

From 1946 to 1961, Dresser was married to mystery writer Helen McCloy. They were also partners in a literary agency that bore their names, as well as in Toquil Publishing Company, which from 1953 to 1964 published the adventures of Michael Shayne. Dresser virtually retired from writing in the late 1950s, and used ghost-writers, among others Robert Terrall, to continue his work. Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine started to appear in 1956, until its cancellation in 1990.

Dresser was a founding member of the Mystery Writers of America, and in 1953 he was given an Edgar Award for his criticism. His Mike Shayne novels have been translated into seven languages, made into motion pictures, television series, and radio plays. Dresser died on February 4, 1977.

Michael Shayne: his background is vague, but prior going into business for himself, Shayne was an employee of a large detective agency in New York. Since moving to Miami, he established a reputation as the city's ace private eye. Shayne drinks Martell, but unlike William Crane, he seldom shows the effects of the drinking. In The Uncomplaining Corpse (1940) he marries a young woman named Phyllis Brighton, who dies later in the series. A new woman, Lucy Hamilton, takes place in the private detective's office in Michael Shayne's Long Change (1944). Other characters are the crime reporter Timothy Rourke, Will Gentry, chief of police of Miami and a bad cop, Peter Painter, chief of detectives across the bay in Miami Beach. - According to Halliday, Shayne's model was a real-life character, a tall redheaded American, whom he met in his youth in Tampico, at a bar. A fight broke out and the American dragged Halliday away from the fray. Four years later Halliday bumped into the same man at a bar in New Orleans. He sought then further information about the man, learning that he was a private detective. -
"He had a tall angular body that concealed a lot of solid weight, and his freckled cheeks were thin to gauntness. His rumpled hair was violent red, giving him a little-boy look curiously in contrast with the harshness of his features. When he smiled, the harshness went out his face and he didn't look at all a hard-boiled private detective who had come on the top the tough way."
(from Dividend on Death)

For further reading: Bodies Are Where You Find Them by Brett Halliday (1959); Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, ed. by Otto Penzler and Chris Steinbrunner (1976); Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, ed. by John M. Reilly (1985); The American Private Eye by David Geherin (1985); Encyclopdia Mysteriosa by William L. DeAndrea (1994)

Michael Shayne films:

MARDI GRASS MADNESS, (1934)
Michael Shayne, Private Detective, (1949)