Mike and Phyllis Shayne, at it again
The title baffles me, to be honest. Uncomplaining corpses? I don't get it, but then, a lot of mysteries have eye-catching titles on the cover with little relevance to the story inside.
From 1940, this was the third book in the Mike Shayne series and, as usual, Davis Dresser (as "Brett Halliday") gives you your money's worth of hard-boiledness. On the opening pages, Miami's toughest private eye is returning from his honeymoon in Cuba with his new bride of three weeks. The beautiful and exuberant Phyllis is just twenty years old, compared to her husband's weathered thirty-five (way to go, Mike!) and she is the perfect counterpart to his sullen grim crustiness. As they settle into their apartment right above his old office (where he used to live), the newlyweds are giddy with happiness.
Then the avalanche. By the middle of the book, Mike Shayne is on the run with an arrest order on his head for conspiracy to commit murder and for punching out not just one officer but also the Miami Beach police chief and his P.I. license is going to be taken away. Not enough to worry about? Well, pretty little (but slightly naive) Phyllis disappears and is seen running around with a sleazy con man implicated in the murders. At one point, she has her own dragnet out on her and she gets thrown in jail with a murder charge on her head. Things get worse and worse and, to be honest, it's all Shayne's fault.
The trouble starts when our redheaded detective is approached by a wealthy realtor investor out to pull a fast one. He wants Shayne to fake a break-in, steal an empty jewel box and make a noisy getaway; then Thrip will claim his wife's necklace was stolen and collect plenty. But Mike Shayne is on a handsome annual retainer from an insurance company and he has no inclination to go along with this. Instead (here's where he goes wrong), he secretly hands the gig over to Joe Darnell, young ex-con with a pregnant girlfriend. The kid has tried to go straight but is having a rough time. Shayne tells him to go ahead and break into Thrip's house, take the thousand-dollar bill left as Shayne's intended payment and start life over. Thrip gets the shaft but he deserves it.
Meanwhile, Thrip's wife shows up with her own agenda. She comes right out and says she's a neglected trophy, and that Thrip is impotent (how blunt), and she had been running around with the same gigolo who is now romancing her daughter. Gack! Before Shayne can check up on this lowlife and decide what to do, the young guy he sent to pull the fraudulent burglary goes ahead with it and both he and Mrs Thrip are found dead on the scene. Joe has been shot and the woman strangled. And because it's quickly discovered that Shayne sent Joe out on this job, he's implicated.
After that, it's one disaster after another as the situation gets steadily worse. Shayne is on the move for more than twenty-four hours without stopping as he tries to avoid going to jail long enough to find out who really killed Joe and Mrs Thrip, as well as the third corpse who soon turns up. Phyllis takes it into her empty pretty little head to tag along with the gigolo in the case, playing a dangerous game of stringing him along for information without having to actually give up the goods he's hoping for. And then she's suspected of murder and flung into a cell. I don't intend to summarize all the abrupt twists and turns the plot takes, because anyone reading this series would appreciate going into THE UNCOMPLAINING CORPSES with no further spoilers but it's a hectic ride, to be sure.
There are two aspects I'd want to note for the archives. One is that I think the character Phyllis Shayne (nee Brighton) is terrific and exactly what the series needs. She's lively, affectionate and just a little bit silly. When she's placed in jeopardy, it gives the (let's face it) hard-hearted and selfish Mike Shayne something to agonize over as he genuinely worries about her - the only human being he cares about. Phyllis is not useless in a dangerous situation, either. When a woman suddenly levels a gun at Mike, the young brunette leaps into action ("Phyllis gasped and threw herself against the girl's legs as the automatic spurted flame. A bullet whizzed past past the detective's face and buried itself in the ceiling.") and wrestles the woman around to successfully get the gun away from her. Shayne watches with surprise and pride.
At the same time, Phyllis reminds us that 1940 was a different planet when she tells a distraught woman about her uncaring husband, "Why, it would be better if he beat you occasionally... I mean, if he were normal -- and all." There is also a poignant moment when she is indignant at the idea of adopting. "You listen to me, Michael Shayne, if we want a baby boy, we'll have one of our own." When he wrote those words, Dresser didn't know that an upcoming movie deal would lead him to knock Phyllis off inbetween books -- and we later find out she died in childbirth (much more common back then). The series suffered losing most of its screwball spark from losing her.
As for our hero himself, he screws up big time in this case. Aside from the initial error in judgement of sending Joe out on a fake burglary, he gets so agitated over Phyllis being missing in action, that he drinks too much. Yep, Shayne normally gulps down the cognac pretty quick but this time, he gets so drunk he has trouble functioning. He says the wrong things and alienates his few allies more than usual (his friendship with police chief Will Gentry is about as strained and traumatizing as Richard Wentworth's relationship with Commissioner Kirkpatrick). Unless he manages to finger the real killer at large, Shayne's best outlook is that he'll only lose his license and be blacklisted; the worst outcome will be sitting in that chair you don't get up from by yourself.
Again, it strikes me reading these early books just how crooked Mike Shayne is. He won't frame an innocent man but that's about it. He fakes blackmail notes, withholds or destroys evidence and misleads the police way beyond what most fictional detectives get away with. Usually, we're shown that the heroes have an undeserved reputation as shady operators because it helps them deal with the underworld but Shayne really is a master of deception and double-crossing.
When it seems he finally has everything tied up and is ready to solve the mystery (and get his wife out of jail, incidentally), he hesitates. There's no money coming out of this into his pocket. ("What was there in the case for him?... Hell! There had to be a cash angle if he could just see it.") The victim he intend to squeeze some thousands from is guilty of course and deserves no sympathy from us. Still, it's not hard to imagine Mike Shayne going really bad and crossing the line beyond forgiveness. Phyllis (and later Lucy Hamilton) might be just the anchor to right and wrong that he clearly needs.